Hence Gerry Adams speech at this years Ard Fheis said that Protestants needed a De Klerk to lead them to compromise. But it should come as no surprise. There is a real danger of this current round of talks with the British government just serving to fuel the loyalist death squads. Sinn Fein has made it clear that it sees a settlement as being in the interests of the British government rather than being forced on them. So this means that either the settlement will not solve the real economic inequalities suffered by Catholic workers or it will only solve them at the expense of Protestant workers.
Catholics are still two and a half time more likely to be unemployed.
The option of bringing Catholic workers living standards up at least to the level of Protestant workers would involve a massive cost to the bosses. Anything else would promise at best a temporary peace, with the real possibility of sectarian massacres. For anarchists, the way forwards lies in workers' unity. There has been significant unity around economic issues in the past, from the 1919 Belfast Engineers strike to the 1932 Outdoor Relief riots. Both these saw thousands of Catholic and Protestant workers uniting to fight their common enemy, the bosses.