Finally, a future that can defeat the past: the Independent year

FOR Northern Ireland, 1998 was a year of extraordinary violence and extraordinary political progress, a year in which appalling tragedy went hand in hand with huge strides towards accommodation.

It was a year so filled with incident that it is still difficult to absorb the lasting significance of it all, for the sheer number and scale of developments was almost without precedent, even for Northern Ireland.

Movement and change were the order of the day, much of it of a positive nature, so that as the year ends hopes remain high of more progress next year. The goal of having all or almost all of the main elements working together in a new coalition government now seems within grasp, assuming another crisis or two can be negotiated.

Yet nothing is guaranteed and, even though much pro-gress was made, no one is really celebrating a year in which more than 50 people were added to the death toll, 29 of them in the Omagh bombing in August. It may or may not be of consolation to the bereaved families to think, as most observers do, that the bombing has made all thoughts of any new sustained campaign of violence virtually inconceivable.

That word "virtually" is there because Northern Ireland is always the most unpredictable of places, as the beginning of 1998 illustrated. Just days after last Christmas, the killing within the Maze prison of the loyalist leader Billy "King Rat" Wright sparked off a furious cycle of retaliation that left 21 people dead.

The Wright shooting created a wave of political and paramilitary turbulence, which threatened the multi-party talks then dragging on at Stormont. When loyalist prisoners in the Maze voted to withhold support from the peace process, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, took the unprecedented step of going into their H-block to meet them.

It was a gamble but it paid off: the meeting went well and the prisoners agreed to give the peace process another chance. But it did not end the violence, which continued in March with a double killing of extraordinary poignancy.

This was the murder of two friends, Philip Allen, a Protestant, and Damien Trainor, a Catholic, shot by loyalists in the Co Armagh village of Poyntzpass. Belfast was all too accustomed to violent death, but Poyntzpass had remained largely untouched by the Troubles.

The two friends were having a quiet drink when loyalist gunmen burst in and fired repeatedly into their bodies and those of two other people. Mr Allenhad just asked Mr Trainor to be his best man, but instead of a wedding the people of Poyntzpass attended two funerals.

Those responsible, and those who carried out most of the year's killings, wished to stop the peace process in its tracks. But although these and other killings induced fear and dismay, they never stopped the process: indeed, most of the negotiators closeted in Stormont seemed to strengthen their resolve not to be deflected.

This was true even though the violence reached right into the talks building itself, touching key negotiators. The Ulster Unionist MP Ken Maginnis, a former member of the Ulster Defence Regiment, sat across the table from Sinn Fein, many of whose representatives had served time in prison for IRA offences. Mr Maginnis lost several close friends, shot or blown up by the republicans.

Gary McMichael, leader of the Ulster Democratic Party, political wing of the Ulster Defence Association, had lost his father to an IRA booby- trap bomb, and at one stage was himself an IRA target. The SDLP, led by John Hume and Seamus Mallon, had also suffered. One of their members, Paddy Wilson, had been killed by the UDA in the 1970s: the man who killed him sat with them in the talks, having served a life sentence and been released.

The Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, lost a family member during the year, when his niece's husband was killed by loyalists. A Sinn Fein colleague, Alex Maskey, was almost killed several years earlier when loyalists blasted him with a shotgun, causing him to lose half a kidney, half his stomach and part of his bowel.

With histories such as these, the talks were never going to be easy, or friendly, or quickly resolved; and so it proved. There was much obstruction, much dislike and great distrust. Yet they stayed at the table and in the end achieved what many had thought impossible: agreement.

On 10 April, most of the parties signed up to the Good Friday Agreement after a marathon overnight session. Unionists and republicans both had major reservations, yet in the end the Unionist leader, David Trimble, and Mr Adams felt they could sign up to the new accord. It was nobody's first choice but most felt they could live with it.

A complex document full of checks, balances and trade-offs, it set out a blueprint for a new constitutional settlement. There would be a new assembly in Belfast, headed by an executive formed by the largest parties; there would be new north-south institutions and new arrangements linking Belfast with Scotland and Wales.

All parties promised to work towards arms decommissioning while new commissions would study future policing requirements and the need for emergency legislation. New bodies would safeguard human rights and equality while, most controversially, prisoners from subscribing paramilitary groups could expect release within two years.

It was an extraordinary and possibly historic document since, if it works, it will provide a new template for co-existence in Northern Ireland. The document's emergence triggered a period of intense political activity, with dual referendums north and south of the border, quickly followed by elections to a new Belfast assembly.

The northern referendum and the elections produced a near-identical result, with just over 70 per cent voting for the new accord. Clearly not everyone had signed up: well over 90 per cent of nationalists were in support but, within the Unionist community, a bare majority was in favour.

That division within Unionism has helped to ensure that the decommissioning issue, which is essentially a metaphor for mistrust of republicanism, continues to beset the process.

The anti-agreement loyalists believed they had found, in July's Drumcree marching confrontation, an issue that would both assert Protestant parading rights and, with luck, dash the agreement as well. But it all went wrong for them when a petrol-bomb attack burnt to death three young boys. After that horror most of the protesting Orangemen went home, though a hard core of Porta-down loyalists say they will never give up. They seem to mean it for even yesterday, Christmas Day, some remained camped out in that frosty field, saying they will wait for as long as it takes to get down the Catholic Garvaghy Road.

The "Real IRA," a breakaway from the main organisation, also resolved that it would never give up and kept up a campaign of bombings, which culminated in the Omagh atrocity. It very quickly became evident that the killings had swept away much of the lingering toleration for violent acts. Just as the Good Friday Agreement transformed politics, so Omagh seemed to spell the end for large-scale terrorist campaigns.

Since then, there have been Nobel peace prizes - for Messrs Hume and Trimble - negotiations and more negotiations. None has been easy, but the desire for peace is palpable, and that is the most hopeful factor in suggesting that next year's crises too will be overcome.