Belfast Agreement: Ulster apartheid?

Robin Wilson, director of Northern Ireland's first think tank Democratic Dialogue, argues in Fortnight magazine that the Belfast Agreement has set conditions for government and political discourse that have led to the equivalent of a Cold War. One of the practical outcomes, he suggests, is that:

"... thinking is suffused, ironically, with the ‘group rights’ of apartheid, recruiting individual Catholics, Protestants and other- or non- believers to the ‘nationalist’ or the ‘unionist’ ‘community’"

Importantly, at a time when the talks are in full swing at Stormont, he states that interparty negotiation is insufficient in itself and that a serious injection of new thinking is required to get the institutions into a working condition for the long term.