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Uniting People

The Challenge

Ireland stands at the cusp of a remarkable moment in its history. The coming together of both communities to govern a peaceful Northern Ireland is the culmination of a long and painful journey. Citizens on both parts of this island shared an important part of that journey when they voted overwhelmingly to support the Good Friday Agreement. Theirs was the strongest mandate for a new departure in Irish politics, north and south of the border.

To appreciate how far we have come we should take stock of what we are leaving behind. More than 3,500 deaths on this island over the last 30 years were directly linked to the sectarian conflict in the North. Around 100 people a year on this small island were murdered every year since 1969, simply because of who they were, where they came from, who they voted for or what church they prayed in. And for every murder victim there were was an ever-increasing circle of the injured, the bereaved and the frightened.

Politicians calcified the bitterness, handing it on to their successors. Communities were brutally segregated. The politics of the last atrocity overshadowed the wider tragedy. The 'national question' dominated Irish life for decades when we could have been questioning what kind of social and economic future we wanted for ourselves and our children, whether those children lived in Dublin or Derry.

But that is the past. Today we have an opportunity to ask what kind of Ireland we want for all of its inhabitants, and the opportunity to create it. There is a new dispensation on the island of Ireland. We have the chance to make anew the relationship between the people of North and South and between previously divided communities in Northern Ireland.

Labour in government will continue working for peace. We are ambitious for a peace that is not simply the absence of aggression, but which results from a willing and easy sharing of space, a peace between people at ease with each other and working to assist each other.

However, despite all the signs of hope at political level, the scourge of sectarianism remains. While the long-awaited high-level engagement between political leaders is welcome, society in Northern Ireland is now more sustained in its divisions, such as where people live, where they socialise and where they send their children to school, than it was three decades ago.

Ironically, while the argument is often made that politicians in the North were out of step with the lives and relationships of ordinary people, the risk now is that politicians have shown an ability to share a communal life that has become entirely foreign to most of their constituents.

Ireland can do better It is time to put partition behind us, and to explore how cooperating on an all-island basis can benefit all of the people of Ireland and enrich our shared culture and traditions.

What Labour will do

• Labour fully supports the "Shared Future" initiative.All of us on this island need to invest in policies and frameworks that will deliver good relations and a shared future in Northern Ireland. We will put reconciliation and measures to improve relationships between the communities in Northern Ireland, and between the people North and South, at the top of our agenda in government.
• Following the re-establishment of the Assembly and Executive, Labour wants to see swift implementation of all outstanding elements of the Good Friday Agreement - an agreement that we continue to support wholeheartedly as the best way of achieving a fully peaceful, democratic and lawful Northern Ireland and island of Ireland.
• All parties with a democratic mandate must signal their support for the Police Service of Northern Ireland. They must take their seats on the Policing Board and the District Policing Partnerships, and demonstrate proactive participation in the policing and criminal justice structures in the North.
• The PSNI must be given all the support and resources necessary to tackle dissident republican and loyalist paramilitary organisations that continue to be involved in criminality.
• Labour in government will work to further develop North/South political, economic, cultural and social links.This must,in the first instance,be achieved through the immediate establishment of the North/South Parliamentary Forum, to allow better relationships and understanding develop between political representatives North and South.
• We will support all efforts to develop the Northern Ireland economy, improve cross border trade, implement an all-island spatial plan and further progress the North/South agenda as laid out in the National Development Plan.
• We welcome the major progress that has been made in implementing the Patten Report, ensuring a new beginning to policing in Northern Ireland. We will ensure increased structural co-operation and new relationships at every level, including the level of joint training, between the Garda Síochána and the PSNI. And we will prioritise the policing secondment and lateral entry provisions of the Patten Report to allow exchanges - either on a temporary or permanent basis - between members of each police service.

Centenary of the 1916 Rising

In the South, we have our own memories, some of them quite bitter. And we have our own task of reconciliation. This State was founded after a spontaneous insurrection, then a war of independence and, almost immediately after that, a civil war.

The civil war cost more lives than had died in the war of independence - all of them Irish. It also cost more lives - around 4,000 in just eleven months - than died during 30 years of troubles in Northern Ireland. Both sides carried out brutal acts. Senior figures, now prominent as icons of our political parties, died at the hands of the other side.And it left Irish society deeply divided for generations. Its influence in politics is still evident today.

It is time for us to recollect and to reconcile.

• We will put in train preparations for the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, in a manner that honours the contribution of the men and women of Easter Week, while also showing respect for all traditions on the island.
• Labour wil ensure that Connolly's socialist outlook and the place of Labour in Irish history are fully represented in these preparations.
• As part of the preparations for the centenary we will commission the preparation of a definitive list of all those who died in the conflict on our island in the period from Easter 1916 to the end of the civil war. The list will be inclusive. It will include northerners and southerners, British and Irish, combatants and non-combatants, and it will include a description of the circumstances of each of their deaths.