Politicians: 'Northern Ireland peace at risk' By Shaun Ley

Presenter, The World This Weekend Published duration 13 August 2015

image copyright PA image caption "If you don't deal with the past, the trauma continues," says Baroness O'Loan

Baroness Nuala O'Loan cannot be dismissed as a "bleeding heart liberal" when she attacks the political establishment in Stormont and Westminster for putting Northern Ireland's peace process at risk.

She has bled herself, when she was injured in an IRA attack on the Ulster Polytechnic in 1977.

Baroness O'Loan, a former police ombudsman, argues that it's only by confronting the past that people in Northern Ireland will drag themselves clear of it.

"If you don't deal with the past," she told me on The World This Weekend, "then the trauma, the disability, the pain, everything continues; and as that continues in society it leaves a sense of injustice.

"And if you leave a sense of injustice, you leave a gap into which paramilitarism of either kind, loyalist or republican, can move."

Marching season

Last weekend alone, 140 parades were held. It's the height of the marching season, when Unionists and Nationalists alike celebrate their heritage.

Historical events loom large, but at least one march commemorated a more recent controversy: Internment, or detention without trial, which existed for a few years in the 1970s.

The number of strategically parked police vans illustrated police fears that the situation might kick off.

The cost can be considerable. One dispute alone, in North Belfast, has cost £23m so far.

image copyright AFP image caption Police stopped an anti-internment march in north Belfast

Between the beginning of April 2014 and the end of March this year, three people died due to the deteriorating security situation.

There were 94 shootings by paramilitaries (48 loyalist, 46 republican) and 26 bomb attacks; 58 firearms were found as well as 23kg of explosives and nearly 5,000 rounds of ammunition.

"We cannot really claim to have peace," Baroness O'Loan says.

Scathing

The Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, George Hamilton, says failure to tackle the causes of sectarianism leaves his officers to pick up the pieces.

"It feels to me like broader society places all the responsibility, wrongly, at the police service's door," he told a public meeting last week. "I know we have a critical part to play, but the legislative framework and the budget allocation comes from another arena, called politics."

There might be less strain in the police budget if the £150m for measures to tackle the past, which was pledged by the British government had been delivered.

image copyright PA image caption George Hamilton: "Broader society places all the responsibility, wrongly, at the police service's door"

The Stormont House Agreement, signed by the political parties in Northern Ireland at the end of last year, said the government would provide the money only if local politicians agreed on welfare reform.

Baroness O'Loan is scathing: "It's immoral that they managed to tie up welfare reform with dealing with the past. They're two separate issues and they should be negotiated and dealt with separately."

For now, then, the mechanisms for tackling Northern Ireland's bloody past exist only on paper.

Susan Mackay, who has written extensively about Northern Ireland's politics, says the summer marching season suggests peace has not yet planted deep roots.

"What we see playing out in the streets is symptomatic of that absence of agreement; it's a way of saying that we don't agree with the Good Friday Agreement, we don't agree with the institutions at Stormont."