We are not three months in, and already 2011 looks like a gamechanging year, in Ireland and across the world. It is a year in which Northern Ireland will have to learn to get on with the rest of its life and shake off that special feeling of entitlement that went with being an international trouble spot.
For me a personal marker of the change was my first long sit-down interview with Martin McGuinness, a man who had previously answered my questions only through his solicitor. Of which more anon.
This year will be like 1968 in its impact on attitudes across the globe, Kevin Connolly, a veteran BBC foreign correspondent, recently told a conference in Belfast. The most notable event is the series of popular uprisings still rippling across north Africa and the Middle East. It is as important in geopolitical terms as the tsunami that has devastated northern Japan and cast a shadow over the promise of nuclear power. The "Arab Spring" they are calling it, in a reference to the Prague Spring in 1968. The reforms launched by the Czech government seemed irreversible at the time, but the clock was soon turned back to the old order when the Soviet tanks rolled into Wenceslas Square.
We still don't know how it will end in Libya: as a triumph of democracy as was initially assumed or another bloody Vietnam as Muammar Gadaffi predicted if he was thwarted. Either way it's big stuff. It affects the future direction of world politics and the security of our energy supply. Oil-producing regions are being thrown into chaos and nuclear power, still the most reliable alternative, is being re-evaluated.
In Northern Ireland, doors on the troubled past are slamming shut. Last week the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) delivered its last report to the British and Irish governments. Our ceasefires no longer need monitoring. Sinn Féin has been safely in the democratic tent for years and no breaches of the IRA ceasefire have been reported.
Lord Alderdice, an IMC member, has said the devolution of policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont marked the decisive "bedding down" of the peace process and "paved the way for the demise of the commission". In America the International Fund for Ireland appears to be spluttering to a close. It may be in its final year, as attention moves into other conflict zones.
Normal values are taking over the northern news agenda. For the first time since Bill Clinton was elected president, neither UTV nor BBC Northern Ireland sent reporters to Washington for the annual St Patrick's Day focus on Ireland. It wasn't just that the North doesn't command so much attention any more. Enda Kenny and the republic's economic woes had grabbed centre stage and the new taoiseach secured the promise of a moraleboosting presidential visit this year. There are rumours, but no more, that President Obama may venture north on a side trip.
It was against this background of rising normality that I did my first proper interview with McGuinness, the deputy first minister. Having co-authored an unauthorised biography of McGuinness, I had spoken to so many people who knew him that I felt I knew him too. We had also sat on a panel together at East Belfast Speaks Out and had chatted amicably at a reception before it. But, up to now, most efforts to ask him questions had been met with letters from his solicitor if they were put in writing or the brush-off from a former press officer if I phoned him.
This time it was different. The press officer had changed and it was time for business. It was agreed with his staff beforehand that we wouldn't waste time wrangling over past difficulties or pussyfooting around them, either. We would get on with it. That is not a bad model for Northern Ireland.
McGuinness was friendly, charming and pretty direct in his answers. "There is nothing romantic about war," he said, to preface an anecdote from his peace negotiations with Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff. "It was just before the invasion of Iraq in the privacy of a small sitting room in Downing Street. I advised Tony – I was maybe too big for my boots – that it would be one of the biggest mistakes of his life. Jonathan took me aside and said, 'Martin, we will have this sorted in a couple of months.' I told him he was living in cloud cuckoo land." It seemed like a lesson learnt from the IRA's own long war with the British.
In the Stormont elections on May 5, Sinn Féin may emerge as the biggest party, as they did in last year's European elections. If they overtake the DUP, that would make McGuinness first minister and Peter Robinson, who currently holds that position, deputy first minister. Although the positions are co-equal and each one can veto the other, this has raised alarm in unionist ranks. So, would McGuinness see it as a big deal? "I think too much is made of it," he said. "The reality is, for this place to work, we have got to agree. For unionists it is about what message does it send to the international community if Sinn Féin was to emerge as the largest party in the assembly. I think the international community are absolutely delighted at the progress that has been made here. They aren't fixated about who is in what position.
What they are really content about is that there is a viable peace process."
He is right. The rest of the world isn't keeping a close score to see who is ahead at each point. North American investors want to know whether Northern Ireland can provide a stable bridgehead to Europe or if it is likely to go pear-shaped again. They don't really care about the electoral ups and downs, any more than they take sides between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in the south.
Sinn Féin has grasped that, and so probably has the DUP, though it helps them attract more unionist votes if they keep alive the old concern about Sinn Féin topping the poll for one more election. Thinking your leadership is essential to stability, the "l'état c'est moi" syndrome, is an indulgence of dictators that has no place in democracy. Like the DUP, Sinn Féin isn't quite free of it yet. McGuinness, for instance, opposes the creation of an official opposition or movement towards a voluntary cross-community coalition. He defends the present, enforced all-party government that has provided four years of stability, but has been too broadly based to reach consensus, even on a budget.
"Whenever nationalists or republicans look at that terminology they see a ganging-up by all of the other parties to get Sinn Féin," he said, saying that it was code for "Sinn Féin not being in government".
In the normal society we are aiming for, the imperative to retain office and the insistence that your party's guiding hand is essential cannot be clinching arguments against change. That goes for Sinn Féin as well as the DUP.
