In West Belfast, you can walk right into the most concentratedly Republican quarter -- Beechmount, off the Falls Road, for example -- and see the flags and the martyrs celebrated on every gable-end and tenement wall. But this is not South Armagh. Some of the slogans -- "A Real Peace Demands Real Negotiations," "Use Your Brain -- Vote Sinn Fein" -- are frankly compromising compared to the old days. Rejectionist daubs ("Let the Fight Go On!") are quickly blotted out. In an anonymous interview given to a recent issue of the Ulster magazine Fortnight, a CAC spokesman admitted that "Belfast would be bitterly opposed to us." The time may not be far distant when Adams is asked, in a further "risk for peace," to help physically put down "the men of violence." Noncooperation could spell the end of those meetings with American stars and fat cats, and no more photo ops in Downing Street or on the White House lawn.

In his most recent collection of writings, Adams describes the massive urban renewal that has cut great swaths through the former Catholic ghetto of West Belfast. He isn't quite sure whether to welcome it or not. "Television coverage of riots, curfews and pogroms has made its small streets known to many who never had the privilege of experiencing them, their back entries, yard walls and the hospitality of their people. Now, only that hospitality and the people's resistance remain." Among the streets that no longer exist is Bombay Street, burned out by loyalist mobs, with police protection, in the hot autumn of 1969. Nobody mentions this moment -- it's too shameful to recall -- but it gave birth to the Provisionals and is the chief reason why the current talks on "decommissioning" Republican arms dumps are so guarded. As the historian G.M. Young once phrased it: "What the English can never remember, the Irish can never forget."

The Gaelic words "Sinn Fein" are conventionally translated by and for the English as meaning "Ourselves Alone." But in the magisterial "Field Day Anthology" of Irish writing, Seamus Deane employs a poem by Louis MacNeice to issue a correction. The true translation, he argues, is "We Ourselves." Much turns on this nuance. One usage is provincial, intransigent, isolationist and (alas) tragically heroic. The second is pragmatic, conciliatory, even inclusive. In approximate contemporary application, there are not many Protestants in South Armagh, but there are many well-organized and resilient ones in Belfast. Adams and his supporters have come arduously to recognize the latter fact. Will that recognition be mutual?
SALON | Dec. 8, 1997

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. His last piece for Salon was a commentary on the feud between Salman Rushdie and John le Carré.

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