by Peter Taylor
Under Blair’s ‘New Labour’, party policy on Ireland underwent a subtle change of emphasis. When Blair became leader following the sudden death of his predecessor, John Smith, in May 1994, official party policy was a commitment to seek Irish unity by consent and had been such for many years. Blair endorsed it shortly before becoming leader but the realities of leading the party and becoming more closely familiar with the complexities of the Northern Ireland problem led to the side-lining of ‘unity’ and an emphasis on ‘consent’. Blair recognized that a million Protestants could not be forced into a united Ireland against their will. He was by instinct a unionist and had no wish to preside over the break-up of the United Kingdom by encouraging the province to sever its bonds with the mainland. One of his officials told me that Tony Blair was more of a unionist than John Major. Blair believed the solution to the Northern Ireland problem lay in the context of devolution for the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, with elected assemblies for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Whilst recognizing that any agreed solution in the province would have to have strong nationalist or ‘green’ elements, involving institutional links with Dublin as outlined in the Downing Street Declaration, Tony Blair, like John Major before him, steadfastly opposed the urgings of John Hume and Gerry Adams that the British Government should be a ‘persuader’ for Irish unity.
Nationalists were therefore dismayed when, a fortnight after the election, Blair made a speech at the annual Balmoral Agricultural Show in Belfast on 16 May 1997 in which he smoothed unionist feathers ruffled by Mo Mowlam’s overtures to Sinn Fein in her visit to Derry the previous week. Within a few weeks of coming to power, ‘New Labour’ learned the necessity of balancing every step and utterance in treading the tightrope to peace. He assured the predominantly Protestant gathering that his agenda was not a united Ireland. ‘None of us in this hall today, even the youngest, is likely to see Northern Ireland as anything but a part of the UK,’ he said. ‘That is the reality, because the consent principle is almost universally accepted.’6 Unionists heaved a collective sigh of relief, calculating that in Blair’s view, if there was to be a united Ireland, it was probably seventy or eighty years away, assuming babies in pushchairs were in the audience. Blair also offered immediate talks between Government officials and Sinn Fein if the IRA instituted a new cease-fire, warning that the ‘settlement train’ was leaving the station with or without them. Five days later, Sinn Fein had every encouragement to get on board when its electoral rise continued at the District Council elections, with the party winning 74 seats and 16.9 per cent of the vote. Gradually it was closing the gap with its nationalist rival, the SDLP, which won 120 seats with 20.6 per cent.7
Unionist scepticism about the IRA’s true intentions was increased even more when, on 16 June 1997, two IRA gunmen killed Constable Roland Graham (34) and Reserve Constable David Johnston (30) as they were on foot patrol in Lurgan. Both were shot through the head. Blair immediately banned further contact between his officials and Sinn Fein. Nevertheless the dialogue continued, with both sides recognizing that the best way to avoid further killings was to persuade the IRA to re-instate its ‘cessation’ of 1994 so Sinn Fein could get on the ‘settlement train’. On 9 July, the Government wrote to Martin McGuinness MP saying that Sinn Fein could participate in the all-party talks without any decommissioning as long as it adhered to the ‘Mitchell Principles’. Unionists were outraged, accusing the Government of buying a cease-fire at any cost. In opposition, Tony Blair had supported John Major in insisting on decommissioning as the sine qua non of Sinn Fein’s inclusion in talks. Now the condition had been dropped. Blair knew that if a cease-fire was to be won and the all-party talks were to be genuinely inclusive, decommissioning would have to be placed on the back burner. The new Prime Minister soon learned that the realities of Northern Ireland politics dictated that some principles, like deadlines, had to be flexible.
Ten days after the letter had been sent to McGuinness, the IRA announced that it was restoring its 1994 cease-fire with ‘a complete cessation of military operations’ from midday on 20 July 1997. Its statement said, ‘We want a permanent peace and therefore we are prepared to enhance the search for a democratic peace settlement through real and inclusive negotiations.’ It stressed that the IRA remained ‘committed to ending British rule in Ireland’. There were no celebrations in West Belfast.8 Blair had already set out a timetable with substantive talks beginning in September and a final settlement envisaged by the following May. Ian Paisley’s DUP would have nothing to do with what it regarded as a sell-out and walked out of the talks, never to return. David Trimble, stepping onto a tightrope that was to become ever more frayed the further he progressed along it, agreed to stay in and do business with Sinn Fein, although refusing to address its representatives directly. Trimble was able to persuade his party to back him – although it did so with no great enthusiasm – because the British and Irish Governments had given assurances that decommissioning would be pursued in tandem with all-party talks.
When the talks opened at Government Buildings, Stormont, on 15 September, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahem, who had succeeded John Bruton as Taoiseach on 6 June 1997, issued a statement saying they viewed ‘the resolution of the decommissioning issue as an indispensable part of the process of negotiation’.9 The mechanism for this was to be the establishment of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), headed by General John de Chastelain, Senator Mitchell’s former colleague on the International Body on Arms that had tried to resolve the same problem almost two years earlier. Realizing that the IRA was not going to make any move in that direction short of a final settlement – and even then there was no guarantee that it would do so – the British and Irish Governments had little alternative to fudging the issue in the hope that it would either be resolved, or go away as a political settlement and the prospect of a lasting peace appeared on the distant horizon. But however hard the two Governments tried, like Banquo’s ghost, it could not be exorcized. The issue was always there at the table.
Meanwhile, the problems for Adams and McGuinness were growing within the Republican Movement. It came as no surprise to the agencies of British intelligence that Sinn Fein’s two new Westminster MPs faced some fierce internal opposition to the policies they were pursuing. Since embarking on the peace process, the strategy of the leadership of the Republican Movement had been to draw the Provisionals into the political mainstream without causing a split. With Sinn Fein now in all-party talks designed to end up with a devolved Government in Northern Ireland – albeit with strong cross-border links – and the party signed up to the ‘Mitchell Principles’, a split within the IRA became inevitable. The problem for the leadership was to minimize its effect. This, through careful lobbying and planning, it skilfully did. Opposition crystallized around the IRA’s Quarter Master General (QMG), a powerful figure because of his rank, track record and personal standing. Although his support was limited, those prepared to follow him were experienced, battle-hardened IRA men.10
The split, small though it was, finally came after an Extraordinary Army Convention held on 10 October 1997 in the tiny village of Falcarragh in County Donegal. The QMG and his supporters had tabled two motions: that the ‘Mitchell Principles’ should be rejected and that the IRA’s renewed cease-fire should be ended. Both motions were defeated and the QMG – who was apparently bent on engineering a coup – left to form the splinter group that became known as the ‘Real’ IRA. Its ‘political’ wing became known as the ‘32 County Sovereignty Committee’. Its Vice-Chairperson was Bernadette Sands-McKevitt, the sister of the republican icon Bobby Sands. Although the numbers were small, there were now two dissident groups at large as a magnet for disaffected Provisionals. The other was the Continuity IRA (CIRA) that had been formed after the earlier split in 1986. It had already made its presence felt in a series of attacks through 1997, culminating in a 350-lb bomb that exploded outside Markethill RUC station, County Armagh, on 16 September, as Sinn
Fein made its historic entry into all-party talks.
The split was a concern for Adams and McGuinness and the Provisionals’ leadership but in the event it could have been far worse. I understand that the QMG and his fellow defectors were subsequently door-stepped by senior IRA men and told to keep their hands off the Provisionals’ arms dumps if they wanted to carry on breathing. The split, it was thought, was contained, leaving Sinn Fein to maximize the opportunity of being involved in the talks from which it had hitherto been excluded. Tony Blair had met Gerry Adams during one of the sessions in Belfast and was reported to have shaken his hand, but the real sign that the Republican Movement had finally been brought in from the political cold was when Adams and McGuinness and a Sinn Fein delegation walked into Downing Street on 11 December 1997. Six years earlier, the IRA had mortared Number Ten. The last time Sinn Fein had been entertained there by a British Prime Minister was when David Lloyd George met Michael Collins during the Treaty negotiations of 1921. One senior Provisional had told me that they wanted to be ‘friends’ with the new British Prime Minister. This was the beginning of the process.
Finally, after months of intensive negotiations in Belfast, Dublin and London, during which time both the loyalist UDP and Sinn Fein had been briefly suspended from the talks for breaches of the UDA/UFF and IRA cease-fires, the elusive agreement seemed in sight. It had been touch and go and only the patience of Senator Mitchell and the ‘inter-personal’ skills of Mo Mowlam had kept the talks on track. The most difficult moment had come at the beginning of January 1998 when UFF prisoners in the Maze, led by Johnny Adair, voted by two to one to withdraw their support from the peace process and had sent out an instruction to their political party, the UDP, to pull out of the talks. Barely a week earlier, between Christmas and New Year 1997, the loyalist paramilitary icon Billy Wright had been shot dead by INLA prisoners in the Maze, triggering a bloody cycle of tit-for-tat killings the like of which had not been seen for several years.11 To save the process, as she saw it, the Secretary of State went into the Maze for a face-to-face meeting with the leaders of the UFF prisoners, including Johnny Adair and Michael Stone, who in 1988 had attacked the funerals in Milltown cemetery of the three IRA Volunteers shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar. The loyalist prisoners’ concern was that the Government was selling out to the IRA and that the Union was in jeopardy. Mowlam had to convince them that neither was the case. ‘It was a very, very difficult and tough time,’ she told me.
She convinced the UFF prisoners to stand by the peace process and assured them that the Union was safe. The principle of consent guaranteed it. As one British official involved backstage in the talks told me, ‘The problem with the unionists is that they don’t realize they’ve won. Look how clever Gerry Adams is, claiming victory at every stage. If the unionists asked for bacon and eggs, they’d complain if you gave them champagne and caviar!’
Finally, as May 1998 approached and agreement seemed frustratingly just out of reach, Senator Mitchell set a deadline to concentrate the minds of all the parties involved. It was to be midnight on Thursday 9 April 1998, the eve of Good Friday. Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern – realizing that, after not just months but years of negotiation, the talks stood on the brink of success or failure – offered to fly to Belfast, roll up their sleeves and do all within their power to push the parties the last inch of the way. George Mitchell accepted their offer on condition that there was to be no break in the final negotiations, however exhausted the participants. ‘We will stay in session until we finish,’ he said. Without his patience and personal, political and diplomatic skills, it is unlikely that any consensus would have emerged. Over the long, hard months of negotiation, he won the respect and admiration of all sides.
The historic Agreement was finally reached at 5.30 p.m. on Good Friday afternoon after Senator Mitchell received a telephone call from Trimble confirming that the Ulster Unionists were on board. Mitchell said he felt ‘a great sense of relief, gratification and really genuine happiness’. Mo Mowlam said she was ‘too tired for elation after such a long, hard slog’.12 John Major, who with Sir Patrick Mayhew and officials from the NIO and Number Ten had done the vital spadework, sent Tony Blair his congratulations.
Blair, who in his first year as Prime Minister had spent as much time on Northern Ireland as on any other issue in government, said the Agreement gave the people of Northern Ireland the chance to live in peace and to raise their children without fear. ‘This isn’t the end. Today we have just a sense of the prize that is before us,’ he said. ‘I hope that the burden of history can at long last start to be lifted from our shoulders.’ Addressing the parties who had put their names to the Agreement, he then added a prophetic warning. ‘Even now, this will not work unless in your will and your mind you make it work.’13 None of those involved underestimated the difficulties that lay ahead but perhaps few realized how fine was the margin between success and failure. Ian Paisley, whose party had taken no part in the negotiations and who was, unwisely, being written off yet again as a political dinosaur whose day of extinction had come, warned that the Agreement was capitulation to the IRA and ‘the saddest day that Ulster has seen since the founding of the province’.14 If all parties stuck to both the letter and the spirit of the Agreement, then there was a good chance it would work. If any departed from it, the likelihood was that it would fail.
The Good Friday Agreement was a meticulously worded document that remarkably gave both sides just enough of what they wanted to make the deal possible. Most important of all to unionists, it guaranteed the security of the Union. That, above all, enabled David Trimble and most of his Ulster Unionist Party to go along with it since it was underpinned by the principle of consent. This was the foundation on which it stood, as Tony Blair made absolutely clear.
At the very heart of it is the principle of consent: that there should be no change to the status of Northern Ireland except with the consent of the people here; that Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom as long as the majority of people here in Northern Ireland wish it to be so … This is the chance for Northern Ireland to gain a better future. I don’t know if that chance will come again this generation if we turn our back on it now but I do know … we’ve got the chance now to provide the future that our children need.15
Unionists knew, too (although they rarely publicly credited the fact to their enemy), that the IRA had made enormous ideological concessions in tacitly accepting the principle of consent and giving Sinn Fein dispensation to participate in a Stormont Assembly and take seats in a new Northern Ireland Cabinet. By doing so, the Republican Movement was effectively accepting partition, at least for the time being, a volte-face that would have been unimaginable only a few years before. Furthermore, as part of the Agreement, republicans and nationalists had to swallow the abolition of Articles Two and Three in the Irish constitution that enshrined the Republic’s historic territorial claim to the North. Acceptance of such concessions was a measure of how far the Republican Movement had come to reach an accommodation that it believed would ultimately lead to the united Ireland the IRA had fought for. The strength and the weakness of the Agreement was that it gave both sides reason to believe they would achieve mutually incompatible goals, the guarantee of the Union and a united Ireland.
Unionists had to swallow hard too. There were to be elections to a new Assembly from which an executive would be drawn that reflected proportionally the strength of the various parties in the Assembly. This meant that, should Sinn Fein win sufficient seats, unionists would not only have to share power with the nationalists of the SDLP (although the emotive word ‘power-sharing’ was never used) but with the political representatives of the IRA. This held out the astonishing prospect of what was tantamount to the IRA in government. The Agreement, like the Downing Street Declaration, also had a powerful Irish dimension which nationalists and republicans saw as a stepping stone to a united Ireland. There was to be a North–South Ministerial Council and cross-border bodies set up to
oversee matters such as Agriculture, Education, Transport, Social Security, Health, Environment and Urban and Rural Development. To reassure unionists, these ‘green’ institutions were balanced by a ‘British–Irish Council’ with the purpose of promoting ‘the harmonious and mutually beneficial development of the totality of relationships among the peoples of these islands’.16 It was to be made up of representatives from the British and Irish Governments and the newly elected Welsh and Scottish devolved Assemblies and was designed both institutionally and psychologically to underpin unionists’ continuing attachment to the rest of the United Kingdom. The matrix of the Agreement therefore comprised three sets of relationships: cross-community, cross-border and cross-channel. The ‘strands’ were interlocking and interdependent. It was pointedly described as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’.
But the most controversial aspects of the Agreement had nothing to do with the intricacies of political structures and institutions but concerned three gut issues that every person in Northern Ireland could identify with and felt passionately about. They were the release of prisoners, decommissioning and the reform of the RUC, which the Agreement described as ‘an opportunity for a new beginning’ for the vexed issue of policing in the province.17 As far as the British Government was concerned, although it never openly said so, the Agreement was a deal in which the paramilitaries on both sides would agree to give up their arms in return for the release of their prisoners. Although the word ‘amnesty’ was never used (for that, like ‘power-sharing’, had emotional connotations), effectively that was what it was. Prisoners belonging to organizations on cease-fire were to be released on licence which could be revoked should they transgress. Making prisoner-releases happen, as long as the respective paramilitary organizations remained on cease-fire, was emotionally charged, not least for the families of their victims, but was administratively quite straightforward once the British Government had given its commitment to enact the appropriate legislation.
