Belfast is an unlikely venue for a gathering of the deposed Grand Dukes and Duchesses of Europe, minor celebrities, local entrepreneurs, American publishing tycoon Malcolm Forbes and Caspar Weinberger.  Although they dutifully raise their glasses to the city's economic well being at this morale-boosting ball, confidence is at an all time low.  Inward investment has dried up, bankruptcies are at an all time high, unemployment not set to change until well into the next century.  Thousands leave the sinking ship annually for new lives in Britain or overseas.  After twenty-three years of direct rule from Westminster, fifteen of them under the Conservatives, British ministers still vainly struggle to revive the spirit of free enterprise in a society which the Economist describes as "more closely resembling that of an Eastern European country than privatising Britain", an economy totally dependent on the British exchequer.

High drama in the court rooms of America has cost the British taxpayer millions of pounds as the British Government fights a rearguard action against the MacBride Principles, a set of affirmative action principles, which force American companies who do business in Northern Ireland to employ on a fair and equal basis.  It is a battle that many senior economists and political scientists believe ill judged.  Legislation has flown through American State legislatures not in spite of British testimonies but because of them.  Last year President Clinton endorsed the Principles.  Although the MacBride Principles go further than British Fair Employment legislation in insisting on a timetable for action and defined quotas, they remain a set of very basic criteria for equality of opportunity for all the people of Northern Ireland.

Report after report, survey after survey has made the same point: job discrimination lies at the heart of the on-going conflict in Northern Ireland.  In 1972 Catholic males were two times as likely as Protestants to be unemployed; in 1991 almost twenty years later - with a number of revisions to the Fair Employment Act - they are now two and a half times as likely to be unemployed.  In 1992 the Department of the Environment for Northern Ireland, in a secret document, stated that Catholic inequality was the major social problem in Northern Ireland and would persist well into the next century.

Is there a way out of the economic morass?  UNFINISHED BUSINESS charts a powerful story of a people's struggle for a lasting peace against the backdrop of continuing discrimination and economic recession and in so doing brings uncomfortable truths about the nature and continuing conflict in Northern Irish society to the fore.

Music by Rich O'Shea
Produced by Marilyn Hyndman
Directed by David Hyndman

Channel 4 1993. EuroAim Screenings, Donostia, Spain, 1993. Financial Assistance from Cultural Traditions Media Fund, Community Relations Council. Distributed in America by Celtic Videos.