Relative calm prevails

Politicians trooped back to the Assembly at Stormont last week, their mild partisan sabre-rattling little more than a ritual greeting after the summer break. In its two and a half years of existence, power-sharing has, against all expectations, provided a considerable degree of political harmony, even though gunmen and bombers have not entirely vanished from the scene.

Many predicted that this government of ancient foes, dominated by the loyalist Democratic Unionist Party and republican Sinn Fein, would produce a battle a day, yet the deal has so far proved surprisingly resilient. The funerals have practically stopped. Nearly all the guns and nearly all the paramilitary groups have gone. Most of the political action now takes place in the Assembly rather than on the streets.

Peace is overwhelmingly popular, for one thing, and the big republican and loyalist parties are working closely with each other, both determined to stay in power. But not everywhere is as harmonious as Stormont. The transformation in Northern Ireland is not yet a complete one, for there are still many problems to test the fledgling devolved government.

Terrorism, for example, has not disappeared. Though the IRA is effectively defunct and extreme Protestant groups have promised to junk their remaining weaponry within months, small but deadly splinters remain. Most notable are the republican micro-groups, which include some mainstream IRA veterans but are mostly composed of impressionable youths.

In January these dissidents attempted to attack an army base in County Down, abandoning a 300-pound bomb nearby. Two months later they caused a security and political crisis when they killed two soldiers in Antrim and a police officer in Armagh. In the past few weeks they tried to wipe out a police patrol with a 600-pound bomb near the south Armagh border, and planted devices at the homes of relatives of a police officer in Londonderry.

No one was injured in the most recent episodes and Catholics and Protestants united to condemn those in March. But the 1998 Omagh bomb, when the so-called Real IRA killed 29 people, is in the communal memory as an example of what even a small and relatively disorganised gang can do.

And terrorists with large explosive devices are not the only folk disturbing the peace, for at a less dramatic level there is much to suggest that this remains an unsettled society. Police statistics show that, in a region of around 1.8 million people, over 1,500 sectarian incidents and attacks were logged in the year through March, with more than 60 emergency evacuations since then. Many parts of Northern Ireland are as tranquil as any in Britain, but in others stone-throwing, street attacks and even petrol-bombing of Protestant and Catholic homes and buildings are not infrequent. Much of this violent vandalism is generated by bitter controversies over loyalist marches, which continue to cause problems in out-of-the-way villages such as Rasharkin in County Antrim.

Such incidents rarely result in deaths, though in May Kevin McDaid, a Catholic father of four, perished after street clashes over the display of flags in the normally peaceful town of Coleraine, County Londonderry. And to these sectarian confrontations must be added a further 1,000 or so racist incidents of the type which in June caused scores of Romanians to flee from Belfast. Though rising immigration has provoked tensions elsewhere in Britain too, that episode demonstrated that the troubles have left behind in Northern Ireland an inarticulate underclass that all too readily resorts to violence. In that instance it was young loyalists who were so balefully xenophobic. Undereducated and generally unemployed, they have seen no peace dividend and feel little identification with the political process or its participants.

The Stormont administration condemns both sectarian and racist violence but has done little to combat the divisions that produce them. Instead it has concentrated on making devolution work and learning to run the public services.

Though many issues remain unresolved, and the emotions from decades of conflict are still raw for many, power-sharing has so far proved flame-proof against all challenges. Belfast politics used to resemble trench warfare; in the new dispensation the main protagonists have ended up in the same trench.