Megan K. Stack writes:

On a steel-skied summer day I dropped by the Northern Ireland Assembly to watch legislators discuss anti-immigrant riots, each speaker straining to upstage the last in outrage and fervor. To my eyes, though, the drama of the day’s debate was utterly eclipsed by the improbable scene itself: such a collection of people in such a place as this.

There was First Minister Michelle O’Neill, the daughter of an Irish Republican Army member and the first Catholic to lead Northern Ireland, which was carved from the rest of the Irish island a century ago as a bastion of Protestant supremacy. The deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, is the daughter of a former Protestant paramilitary gun runner. In the back rows I spotted Gerry Kelly, onetime I.R.A. bomber of London’s Old Bailey criminal court, now a blazer-clad minister representing North Belfast.

These politicians grew up in communities that battled one another bitterly for about 30 years before finally making peace in 1998. The conflict euphemistically called the Troubles still lingers uncomfortably close to the surface. Predictably, it was invoked in the debate, with the hard-line conservative Timothy Gaston suggesting that Ms. O’Neill was a hypocrite for denouncing anti-immigrant violence. Hadn’t she claimed that there had been no alternative to the armed republican uprising of the Troubles? “I hear from people regularly who see that violence has worked for others in Northern Ireland,” Mr. Gaston said darkly.

Odd as it sounds, I felt inspired watching this verbal sparring in the grand, gloomy hall of Stormont, the vast hilltop complex designed for a “Protestant Parliament and a Protestant state.” This onetime monument to perpetual sectarian supremacy is now the seat of a government in which the communities share power.

A pacified Belfast made a welcome contrast to the relentless carnage in Gaza, a place where I used to report. Here was a negotiated peace, unsteady though it may be. Northern Ireland is veined with frustrated hope and unsettled grievance, but it is also vivid proof that a dirty war fought around questions of identity can be channeled into a peaceful, albeit fraught, politics.

Staring into the abyss of the Middle East — Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on Oct. 7 — it feels hopeless even to mention peace. The plan unveiled this week by President Trump was devised by the conflict’s most powerful participants and presented as an ultimatum to Palestinians, whose political hopes were left unanswered. In other words, it’s the opposite of what finally worked in Northern Ireland.

There’s no perfect parallel between the two struggles, but it’s worth recalling that Northern Ireland’s conflict was also dismissed as unresolvable — too complicated, too tangled with religion, too sensitive to an important ally. The road to the Good Friday Agreement was crowded with frustrations, setbacks and perilous political gambles.

Decades of furtive and fruitless talks preceded the agreement, and some of the hardest work came after, when sworn enemies suddenly had to govern together while insurgents clung to their hidden guns. Paramilitary disarmament was one of the last hard-won concessions of trust, not the first step. (I recall this whenever I see demands for Hamas to relinquish weapons immediately.)

The lessons: Persist. Talk to people you despise. Bring international pressure, particularly from the United States. Don’t push for a military solution before attaining a political settlement; disarmament can wait.

People in Northern Ireland had to work with others they considered murderers, terrorists or bigots, and accept a settlement that was nobody’s ideal. Peacetime politics is messy. Reconciliation remains elusive. But pretty much everyone I’ve ever spoken with in Northern Ireland, from any and every background, has one firm conviction in common: We are not going back. [Continue reading…]