Dilemmas of terror

In the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict, when British and Irish officials barely spoke to each other and politicians in the province paraded their enmity to the world as part of their vote-catching appeal, a group of academics, journalists and businesspeople created a parallel universe in which genuine debate was possible. Protected from the noise outside by rules of confidentiality, the British-Irish Association’s annual conference in an Oxford or Cambridge college may even have helped to change the political tone in Northern Ireland. With a new terrorism risk arising from political Islam, many of the factors which distorted debate over Northern Ireland have re-emerged. Government and civil liberties groups often speak past each other, the first declaring we are on the verge of terrorist chaos, the second that we are about to become a police state. What would happen if people on all sides of the argument got