Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley Have A Cup of Tea

A few weeks ago I said this to a friend: "These people, the ones who are sending out those suicide bombers - the ones who want to kill us - we'll be negotiating with them someday."

Rash statements like this can come back to haunt you. Sometimes, though, the day's news backs them up.

Monday morning I picked up the New York Times and read a front page story which reported that our departing ambassador in Iraq, a man who is expected to become ambassador to the United Nations, confirmed that there have been talks with insurgent groups, even though the Bush administration has railed against this.

Perhaps it means nothing. Or perhaps it is a hint of things to come.

"Hell," I said to my friend on that day weeks ago. "Forget about negotiating. We might even be voting for them."

As horrifying as this sounds when thinking about our ongoing war, it is not a new concept. Just ask Nelson Mandela. Or ask Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland.

Years ago I covered that war in Northern Ireland and it was my distinct impression that these two guys had vowed to do all they could to kill each other's movements, if not each other. But here's the extraordinary tête-à-tête of sorts that Nytimes.com described: "After years of mutual hostility and recrimination, the leaders of Northern Ireland's dominant rival groups, Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams and the Protestant leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, met today for their first face-to-face talks and agreed to form a joint administration for the province on May 8."

They might not have kissed. But, certainly, they made up.

The war in Northern Ireland was, by comparison a small war with "only" 3,720 dead over three decades. But like the war in Iraq- or better said the civil war that was re-ignited by our invasion - the hatreds are deep, ethnic and centuries old. I also wrote about the war in Northern Ireland in a recent novel titled Exclusive. I took great pains to point out the potential for absurd contradictions and then wondered if it sounded believable enough to work as good fiction.

Perhaps I shouldn't have worried that much.

In real life back then, my husband and I were both reporters covering Northern Ireland and lived for a while with a woman who was in the Irish Republican Army. We made sure to balance that with plenty of time spent with the Unionist side. As part of that effort, I spent a day speaking to the wives of Protestant political prisoners. Back in Catholic Andersonstown, an IRA wife had a husband on the run in America, while she raised four children on her own. One was a boy, named John. He saw buses burn in his neighborhood and paper bags filled with guns. He saw that his father couldn't come home. He saw everything. A decade later John was in prison, charged, like his father, with politically-motivated crimes. I don't know where John is now but I hope with my heart and soul that he is someplace good and that he doesn't regret the years of his young life that were wasted waiting for Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley to have a symbolic cuppa and say that, yes, they will work together. I hope the Protestant wives I spoke to feel the same way, too.