Politics & Power Quote by Clare Short

Anger, here, isn’t treated as a moral failure but as a predictable political fuel source. Clare Short is doing a very politician’s trick in plain language: reframing “security” not as the hard-nosed alternative to compromise, but as one leg of a three-legged stool that collapses without the other two. The phrasing is slightly untidy, almost breathless, and that matters. It reads like someone reaching for the memory of a hard-won outcome and insisting it wasn’t an accident.

The context is the Northern Ireland peace process, where decades of violence made it tempting to believe that order could be imposed. Short’s subtext is that order without legitimacy is just a pause between outrages. “That feeds anger” points to a cycle familiar in conflict zones: heavy-handed policing, discrimination, and the slow grind of unequal institutions don’t just provoke resentment; they recruit for the very militancy the state claims to suppress.

Her emphasis on “justice within Northern Ireland” is the real payload. It’s a warning against mistaking a political settlement for peace itself. A deal can stop the shooting, but if daily life still communicates second-class citizenship, the anger simply changes form. The line “thank heavens got towards peace” carries a weary acknowledgment of contingency: the process could have failed, and it will fail again if leaders treat justice as optional garnish rather than infrastructure.

Short is trying to extract a portable lesson: security measures can hold the line, negotiations can redraw it, but justice is what stops the line from being contested forever.