Pressure on Northern Ireland's political leaders from the grassroots to focus on bread and butter issues
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Community workers Liam Maskey, left, and Jackie McDonald survey the debris after rioting in North Belfast. Photograph: Helen Grady/BBC
As my feet crunched on broken glass strewn across a North Belfast side street earlier this month, little appeared to have changed since I left Northern Ireland in 1997.
The glass served as a reminder that North Belfast, which bore the brunt of the violence during the Troubles, witnessed renewed sectarian clashes at the height of the loyalist marching season last month. It all had a familiar feel from my time in Northern Ireland as the Times correspondent in the final days of the Troubles.
The gloomy outlook did not last long. Shortly after arriving in the Duncairn Gardens area of the city, two community workers from either side of Northern Ireland's sectarian divide turned up. Jackie McDonald, a leader of the loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Defence Association, and Liam Maskey, a republican community worker, told me how closely they work together to help young people.
I was speaking to McDonald and Maskey for a documentary I have made for the BBC Radio 4 programme, Beyond Westminster, which is being broadcast at 11.00am on Saturday. In the programme I ask whether Northern Ireland is ready to move beyond traditional orange and green politics to a climate in which the sole focus of the assembly would be on bread and butter issues such as health and education. This seemed a good question to ask now that the assembly is firmly established at Stormont after completing its first uninterrupted four year term this year.
If McDonald and Maskey had their way, Northern Ireland would be on a rapid journey away from its divided past. Maskey, who comes from a republican family, told me:
It's very evident through our working together that the peace has been cemented in the working class areas. That's where the hunger for the peace came from and I personally would have more in common with Jackie than I would with people from my own religion.
McDonald, a spokesman for the UDA's political advisory body the Ulster Political Research Group who was sentenced to ten years for extortion in 1989, had similar thoughts:
If I was born where Liam was born, I'd have been in the IRA and vice versa – he would have been in the loyalist paramilitaries if he'd been born in my area. And we're getting to know each other as personalities and as people, not as initials or colours or anything else. We would meet in the City Hall, we would meet at Sandy Row [a loyalist area of South Belfast], we could meet anywhere and we'll have the same sort of conversation, we'll have a bit of craic. He's not green, white and gold and I'm not red, white and blue.
Maskey and McDonald are realistic enough to understand that 800 years of divided history are not about to disappear overnight. This is what Maskey said:
Will Jackie and I be in the same party? I don't know, but we will be at parties.
But Northern Ireland has shown tentative signs of change. A significant moment came when Naomi Long, of the non-sectarian Alliance Party, won the party's first Westminster seat at last year's general election. But Long is careful not to attribute her victory in East Belfast to any revolution. She politely told me that local factors had a played a role in her win – a delicate way of referring to the marital difficulties of the Northern Ireland first minister and DUP leader Peter Robinson who had held the seat since 1979.
Long acknowledged that people in Northern Ireland still generally vote along sectarian lines. In the recent election to the assembly, held in May, 82.4% of voters gave their first preference vote to one of the four main parties which represent the two blocs РDUP and UUP (Unionist) and Sinn F̩in and SDLP (nationalist).
Mike Nesbitt, a UUP member of the Northern Ireland assembly, pictured outside Stormont Photograph: Helen Grady/BBC The once mighty Ulster Unionist Party, which governed Northern Ireland until the introduction of Direct Rule at the height of the Troubles in 1972, is embracing new ideas as it seeks to revive its fortunes. Mike Nesbitt, a former television presenter who was elected as a UUP member of the assembly in May, told me his party believes the time has come to create an official opposition at Stormont. This would mark a major change to the political settlement which has, at its heart, a mandatory coalition involving all the main parties to reassure Sinn Féin that republicans will not be excluded by Unionists. This is what Nesbitt said:
The problem with the current system is that nobody is exercising the sort of challenge function that you would expect of an official opposition...We would be better with an official opposition who could unapologetically and consistently use the challenge function against the parties of government.
Ordinary voters had succinct explanations about the big question of the programme. This is what a pharmacist on the nationalist Falls Road in West Belfast told me when I asked whether he thought about bread and butter issues or the need to have a nationalist voice when he makes up his mind about voting:
Tribal politics. And I think anybody who tells you otherwise is lying.
Across the road an SDLP voter, who casts a tactical vote for Sinn Féin since it became the largest nationalist party, echoed this view. When I asked her whether she could ever vote for a non-nationalist party, if she agreed with it on bread and butter issues, the woman said:
It probably will come, but it'll be a long time in coming.
If that time ever does come, Northern Ireland's political leaders would do well to travel to the loyalist Shankill area of Belfast where a post-Troubles mural shows a yearning for Stormont to focus on jobs and education.
Political geographer Pete Shirlow stands in front of a new post-Troubles mural in Belfast Photograph: Helen Grady/BBC Dr Pete Shirlow, a political geographer at Queen's University Belfast who took me to the mural during a tour of Belfast, said it is up to the political leaders to decide whether they want to respond to the spirit of a series of new murals. This is what Shirlow said when I said that Stormont had to live up to this spirit:
It can live up to it or it can deny it.
As we looked at one of the murals in the loyalist Shankill area of Belfast on a rare warm summer's day, two teenage girls nonchalantly strolled by in their dressing gowns. That would have been unthinkable in my first days reporting from Belfast after the IRA Shankill Road bombing in October 1993 took Northern Ireland back briefly to the dark days of the 1970s.
Teenagers walk past a mural in Belfast Photograph: Helen Grady/BBC A lengthy debate is obviously under way about building a future in Northern Ireland where arguments about schools and hospitals trump sectarian issues. But Northern Ireland has come a long way since the days when no teenager would have dared saunter past a mural in a dressing gown.
• Special thanks to Helen Grady, the programme's producer who took the photos for this blog, and to Pippa Simm, the programme's researcher.