Yes, peace may have come to Northern Ireland. After over 3,500 deaths and three decades of bomb blasts, prison hunger strikes, children killed or maimed by fist-sized plastic bullets fired from police rifles; media-covered paramilitary funerals, shows trials masquerading as a thinly-disguised substitute for internment, religious demagogues posing as politicians, and British governmental responsibility over a statelet for which they have had no acute accountability, the guns may have at last gone silent. Maybe.

And as peace arrives, as a troubled sliver of the world attempts to slam the breaks on years of strife and conflict to turn toward a brighter, more optimistic direction, the average American reflects, from thousands of miles away, burrowed in the safeness of our vastness, and wonders: "What was all that fighting about, anyway?" And, more pointedly, "Why should we care?"

Three years ago, these types of questions became my daily reality when I was hired as a paralegal at the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster LLP, where I was selected to represent a pro bono client by the name of Kevin Barry Artt.

As a teenager growing up in Belfast in the 1970s, Kevin lived in hell. Both he and the residents of North and West Belfast were subjected to daily harassment and abuse by the majority Protestant population and the 93 percent Protestant local police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary ("RUC"), based on their Roman Catholic faith and their fervent belief that the island of Ireland should be one united 32-county republic. Over the course of six years, Kevin was the target of at least three assassination attempts (two of which were at the hands of the governing security forces), and he was twice arrested and interrogated at an internationally-condemned interrogation center, where he was denied access to family and legal counsel. Eventually, he was tried in a juryless court, which was presided over by a judge who was a member of the Orange Order, a Protestant supremacist organization. Kevin was corralled with 37 other Catholic defendants (held on unrelated charges) and found guilty of a murder he didn't commit, despite the state's inability to bring any evidence(forensic, eye-witness, or otherwise) against him other than a coerced confession.

Kevin was incarcerated in the Maze Prison outside Belfast. A short time later, he escaped and made his way to San Diego, California, where he led an ordinary, family-oriented lifestyle until his arrest in 1992, at which time the British government commenced exhaustive efforts to insure that he was extradited to Northern Ireland. Kevin is now 38 and has been in jail for over five years while continuing to fight his extradition.

OUT OF BELFAST

My exposure to Kevin, his friends, and other citizens of Northern Ireland, led me to ponder: what could I do for and learn from the other "Kevins" in Belfast, Catholic and Protestant, that would in some way ameliorate the strife and legal abuses endemic to Northern Ireland society?

Finding the Northern Ireland political scene hard to identify with, last fall I focused instead on the quest for human rights in general and on the Committee on the Administration of Justice ("CAJ") in particular. CAJ is a well-respected, non-sectarian, cross-community based human rights group located in Belfast, with a focus devoted exclusively to Northern Ireland's situation. In a portion of the world dominated by violence and intolerant, shrill voices, CAJ stands apart. Its cohesive group of professionals, academics, lawyers, citizens, and international volunteers focuses instead on the misrule of law and how to change the havoc it has wrought over both communities, Protestant and Catholic, throughout Northern Ireland. CAJ does this by observing trials and potentially contentious community demonstrations, researching and writing about the rule of law in Northern Ireland, and lobbying for change at venues ranging from CAJ-convened community meetings to attendance at such international bodies as the United States Congress and the European Court of Human Rights. To that end, during my stay in Belfast, CAJ assigned me to periodically attend and monitor trials and to devote the majority of my efforts to researching and writing a pamphlet on the Northern Ireland inquest system.

From my extant knowledge gathered from the Artt case, as well as a few quick walks and taxi rides around town, it didn't take me long to discern the lay of the land. Northern Ireland is small(very small) about the size of Connecticut with a population of about 1.6 million citizens, divided roughly 57% - 43% between Protestants and Catholics, and, similarly, between those favoring ties with the United Kingdom and those desiring unification with the Republic of Ireland. With that kind of intimacy intertwined with division, it doesn't take long to confront problems.

Within days, I witnesses several scenes that deeply disturbed me. Protestant and Catholic working class families ghettoized into their separate neighborhoods. Police headquarters which resembled armed fortresses out of a Soviet bloc nightmare, many adorned with security towers with high resolution cameras that monitored every street, every house, in Catholic neighborhoods. British army helicopters flying overhead late at night. A long-developed and well-deserved fear and apprehension from my Catholic neighbors in West Belfast toward the police, the British army, unattended packages (a bomb?), or strange voices from the "wrong" (i.e., Protestant) part of town.

Adding a delightful counterweight to the grim security presence and sectarian divide, however, was the overwhelmingly genuine warmth and intelligence of the Belfast people, at least toward outsiders. During my stay, I was dined, driven about, watched over, and embraced by the community in a way reminiscent of Rockwell's America. There was a laugh a day as I tried to plough through dense Irish names such as Eamonn, Niamh, Aoibhe, Roisin, and Padraigin, while they likewise tripped over my awkward Dutch last name.

And Belfast natives love nothing more than a good round of craic, a Gaelic term roughly translating into good times or good conversation. And, believe me, the craic is brilliant (i.e., the conversation is great). The slang alone would keep a linguist fascinated for years. Cops are "peelers", British soldiers are "squaddies", prison guards are "screws", a false alarm or a much-ado-about-nothing occurrence is a "damp squib", "hello" is "what about ye", good-bye is "all the best", "I'm doing O.K." is "I'm dead on", and small is "wee" (and everything is "wee": it wouldn't be unusual to hear someone refer to a new building in downtown Belfast as "a lovely wee building".) These and sundry other peculiar phrases are bantered about in a rapid-fire, sing-song like quality that is usually peppered with an avid eye for international concerns and domestic politics that renders the average American citizen superficial and ill-informed by comparison. All of which makes it such a shame that there have been so many problems in Northern Ireland for so long.

Which brings us back to the two questions:

1. What has all the fighting been about? and
2. Why should Americans care?

In a nutshell, the answer to the first question is that Northern Ireland is an unresolved colonial question mired in an age of merging European identities. Hundreds of years ago mainland Britain, both through military intervention and plantation of its Protestant citizens, established control of Ireland in order to insure its territorial imperatives, particularly in the northeastern portion of the country. In the early part of our century, when the southern twenty-six counties of Ireland gained their independence from England, Northern Ireland was created, partially at the behest of the native Protestant population, and partly with the encouragement and manipulations of Britain, to maintain this foothold. The indigenous Catholic population of these six counties has been struggling ever since to gain respect, parity of employment and housing, proper legal and human rights, and, for some, Irish territory, from the dominant Protestant population(themselves ruled by a British government which has been, at best, perplexed by a legitimately complex problem, and, at worst, guilty of one of the worst human rights records in Europe in its attempts to squelch IRA terrorism and preserve the Union.

And why should we care? First, because there are over 40 million Americans who claim Irish descent, a number comprising almost one out of every six Americans. And although they may have roots extending back anywhere from a week to over a century, the fundamental problems responsible for fostering their exodus still remain. More importantly, however, for all non-Irish Americans, is the need to consider why there are so many Irish-Americans in this country, and what we can do as Americans to help prevent another generation of Irish children and parents from feeling they have to flee their native land in order to obtain the basic necessities of life we consider our birthright.

And there's no doubt our country can make a difference(not with bombs or bullets or arrogance(but with good old-fashioned diplomacy, coupled with genuine interest. The past few years of support for the Northern Ireland peace process by President Clinton, Senator George Mitchell, Jean Kennedy-Smith, and a host of public figures, private individuals, and human rights groups all helped foment the recent Good Friday Agreement(the blueprint for Northern Ireland's future.)

Thanks to Senator Mitchell and most of the Northern Ireland political parties, the Good Friday Agreement is an extensive document with enough paragraphs and subparagraphs about cross-border arrangements and executive power-sharing to make any lawyer or high school civics teacher proud. However, to borrow a Northern Ireland phrase, the Agreement won't be worth a penny candle unless, [and] in a short period of time: