From WNYKRZE

New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week, hell froze over, or something once thought just as unlikely.

Longtime enemies in Northern Ireland joined forces today to form a new unity government.

Protestants, led by Reverend Ian Paisley, will run the government jointly with Catholics led by Martin McGinnis, a veteran commander in the Irish Republican Army.

The end of a war without end. The event itself didn't even make the three big newscasts Tuesday. It was, after all, a rather bland ceremony involving white-haired men smiling gamely at each other.

But it concluded a nearly 40-year battle for the six counties of Northern Ireland and the hearts and minds of the world.

With over 30 million Irish Americans, that battle has been fought particularly hard here in the U.S.

For much of the 90s, movies alone could have kept Northern Ireland in the public's eye.

In the name of the father, some mother's son, the crying game, the boxer, the devil's own,

the jackal, blown away, and patriot games all used the conflict as a backdrop.

Neil O'Dowd, founder of the New York-based Irish Voice newspaper,

helped broker U.S. recognition of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army in the early 90s.

He says the films just echoed a growing public awareness as the once shadowy sectarian groups

moved the struggle from the theater of war to that of politics.

It was very much a public relations war right from the beginning. Clearly, the IRA had a very

distinct point of view that Ireland was unfairly partitioned in 1921. The 600,000 Catholics were

corralled into a state that they wanted no part of. The British, on the other hand, held a very

strong view

that the partition of Ireland was the only way of stopping an all-out conflict because

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