BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Northern Ireland politics, with its fussy codes and tribal grievances, is just the sort of dizzying foreign entanglement George Bush vowed to steer away from when he became president. To the Bush White House, the province's Good Friday peace agreement was Bill Clinton's signature issue, perfectly suited to a politician happiest conducting diplomacy by group hug.
Yet there was Bush, standing in an English government house in a pretty Northern Irish village, meeting local political leaders and urging "all the communities of Northern Ireland to seize this opportunity for peace."
He then signed a declaration that warned them "there can be no place in Northern Ireland for paramilitary activity and capability," adding the end to violence must be "complete and irrevocable."
With that, Bush nailed his presidential colors to the Northern Ireland issue for the first time. He had come to Hillsborough Castle, as the manor house 12 miles outside Belfast is known, to talk about Iraq with his staunchest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair. But Blair is also involved in a high-wire effort to revive the Good Friday agreement, which turns five years old today amid little celebration. Bush's meeting with local politicians was intended to add oxygen to that effort.
While the accord between Protestant and Catholic groups has defused the worst of the sectarian brutality that killed 3,300 people in 30 years, the numerous paramilitary groups it spawned still have a pulse in the province. That continuing low-level violence has soured many people, especially Protestants who want to keep their union with Britain and who complain that political concessions have not taken the gun out of politics.
Unionists, as they are known, are demanding the Irish Republican Army formally declare the war with Britain over and begin destroying its hidden arsenal. If it refuses, Unionists say they won't go back into a local power-sharing government with the mostly Catholic Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, which wants Northern Ireland to unite with the Irish Republic to the south.
That is the tangle Blair is trying to sort out. And it is why Blair asked Bush to weigh in with an appeal for parties to make the concessions necessary to drag themselves across the finish line to a lasting peace.
Bush complied, even if he was not about to venture much beyond generalities.
