The ESTORMONT AGREEMENT, or the Good Friday agreement, gave great importance to the issue of prisoners in the Northern Ireland peace process. The agreement was signed in April 1998 and stipulated that, by July 2001, 500 prisoners should be on the street. However, there was no amnesty, and an independent commission was set up to analyse the situation of prisoners on a case-by-case basis in order to steer this process. The committee was chaired by a South African lawyer named Brian Currin, who has been appointed Chairman of the committee. 250 prisoners were already on parole by January 1999. Between 1998 and 2000, 433 prisoners were on the street, 229 of whom were from the IRA.

The release of prisoners and the issue of victims was also very sensitive in Ireland, but all parties understood that this was a journey that had to be made at all costs. In general, the prisoners had conditions, but the important thing was that, if their armed organizations returned to armed activity, they would return to prison. In an interview with Gara in 2012, former IRA prisoner Pat Sheelan – currently a member of Sinn Féin Parliament – highlighted two points of particular relevance. The former is well known in any peace process, but it is key and, despite the difficulties, it should never be forgotten: “The release of prisoners is essential to stabilize the process.” The second refers to the movements that prisoners have to give, to relations with their armed organizations or political movements, and that is what is said less here, at least publicly: “The decision on this area should be made by the political movement and not by the prisoners,” Sheelan said in the interview.

The paragraph on the freedom of prisoners in the peace process was finalised in February 2003. Until 2005, the IRA did not report the cessation of its armed activity. In 2005, Harold Good and Alec Reid, a Protestant and Catholic priest, also confirmed that anger was demobilized.

The peace process in Euskal Herria is in LEKU, but similar measures will have to be taken sooner or later. Fifteen years after the agreement, Northern Ireland is carrying out a process of coexistence in the North African country. There is no doubt that each place has its own characteristics to negotiate peace and coexistence, but in all of them there are some basic points in common: the will to materialize peace in the substance and some agreements for a new coexistence. Just the opposite of what proclaimed the demonstration of the victims of Saturday in Madrid: the coexistence of winners and losers can hardly have a future, less if it is based on revenge.

And someone does not know when the Madrid Government is going to start the slug of the victims and I would like to think that the Parot doctrine gives the possibility to do so. But, perhaps, seeing how they are given the forcefulness and strength that the institutions of the victims have, it is logical to think that there is a party with the governments of the PP and that perhaps one should wait for some PSOE to give a solution to the Basque question.

There are always some meters of the situation at every moment, and the most appropriate thing now is the day after the Parot doctrine, in which basically it is about how and when the prisoners affected by the doctrine are released. It makes no sense to think that the Spanish National Court is going to study and free the situation of a prisoner under the doctrine every Friday. It would make no sense, either from pragmatism or from the legal point of view, so it is to be assumed that, after this first whirlwind, the release of the prisoners induced by the doctrine will take place within a reasonable period of time. But, on the other hand, the position of pp on coexistence and agreement has not been reasonable until now, which also generates pessimism in the most optimistic view. Many times it can be thought that pp is actually provoking the return of ETA and, as this is not possible, dreams of some sort of division in the armed organization or in the left Abertzale.

With the exception of the PP, the other actors and actresses of Basque society are showing a common sense attitude after the Strasbourg judgment, and especially the Abertzale left, which, despite the thousand reasons and the needs to celebrate the judgment, is demonstrating that it is capable of acting with sense and responsibility for public celebrations. I wish it were all a responsible attitude towards a hidden script, right?