Irish-British Relations, 1998-2012
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IRISH-BRITISH RELATIONS, 1998-2012: FROM PROVINCIAL CONFLICT TO EUROPEAN TENSIONS Paper for University of Strasbourg conference, 6 December 2012 by Andy Pollak Centre for Cross Border Studies, Armagh and Dublin Abstract My thesis in this paper is that until recently the foreign policy of Ireland, a small country which broke away from British rule only a little over 90 years ago, was preoccupied with the continuing problem of Northern Ireland, the province which remained part of the United Kingdom in 1920, and which between 1968 and 1998 experienced a civil conflict in which over 3,500 people died. Ireland’s huge economic dependence on the UK only started to wane in the 1960s and 1970s, and joining the EU in 1973 – despite the violence in Northern Ireland – represented a high point in Irish national sovereignty. In the 1980s the British government for the first time recognised the central role of the Irish government in resolving the Northern Irish conflict, and this led, with US support, to the remarkable diplomatic success that was the 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Agreement. Another decade was needed for this agreement to ‘bed down’. Its cross-border or North- South dimension (between Ireland and Northern Ireland) was one of its quiet success stories. In the past couple of years Irish-British relations have been able to move to a wider agenda involving a comfortable recognition of the two countries’ interdependence across a range of fields. This may now be threatened by the UK’s moves towards withdrawing from the EU while Ireland, despite severe financial difficulties, is determined to remain a core member of both the EU and the Eurozone. Before 1998 For much of the 1945 to 1998 period the issue of Northern Ireland dominated the new Irish state’s foreign policy activity. Its circumscribed independence in the early years from 1921 – with a continued oath of allegiance to the British monarch, membership of the British Empire and most of its northern province of Ulster remaining part of the UK – did not make relationships with the old colonial power in London easy. Irish neutrality during the Second World War did not help. After the Second World War the powerlessness of the impoverished Irish state continued in the face of her powerful neighbour. British government legislation in 1949 formally recognised Ireland’s declaration that she was now a republic, but a common travel area remained between the two countries (facilitating a high level of emigration from Ireland to Britain) and there was little recognition by either British politicians or people that Ireland was in any real sense a foreign or even a sovereign state. For their part, Irish diplomats tried to raise the issue of Northern Ireland internationally in the vain hope of embarrassing Britain, but ‘beyond that there was no coherent strategy either to achieve Irish unity or to attain a more sustainable situation short of unity.1 The Irish government was ill-prepared when a civil rights movement in the late 1960s demanding an end to the discriminatory treatment of Catholics and nationalists was 1 DOYLE, J., ‘British-Irish Relations and the Northern Ireland Conflict’, in TONRA, B., KENNEDY, M., DOYLE, J., and DORR, N., Irish Foreign Policy. Dublin 2012. 1 repressed by the unionist regional government in Belfast; and even more ill-prepared for the resulting birth of the Provisional IRA, which aimed to drive the British from Northern Ireland by force. However as the conflict in the North deepened through the early 1970s, the first diplomatic efforts were made to persuade the United Kingdom that the Irish state could play a constructive role, not least in informing London of Northern nationalist concerns. However it was not until at least the mid-1980s that there was any real acceptance on the British side that they should take Irish government arguments seriously, with successive governments sharing the view of the unionists that Dublin had no business ‘interfering’ in Northern Ireland. The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 saw a significant change. Common fears about the rise of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, led to the British and Irish governments reaching an agreement which gave the latter a consultative role in the running of Northern Ireland. This was the beginning of ‘an unprecedented new partnership between London and Dublin’2, based on the two governments seeing Northern Ireland as a difficult common problem which needed to be jointly managed and contained. However in the early 1990s, a more politically-minded IRA leadership, and mediation by the constitutional nationalist leader John Hume, the Irish and US governments opened up new possibilities of compromise in Northern Ireland. The IRA, conscious that it was in a position of military stalemate as part of a three-way conflict with the British security forces and the pro-British loyalist paramilitaries, and recognising the possibility of gaining at least some of their demands by political means, declared a ceasefire in August 1994. Nearly four years of talks then led to the remarkable diplomatic and political accord that was the 1998 Belfast or Good Friday Agreement, which laid the foundations for the end of the conflict. This has three ‘strands’: an internal Northern Ireland strand, which brought Sinn Fein, the political party of the IRA, into a regional power-sharing government with their ancient enemies, the Unionists; an East-West strand, which institutionalised relationships between Britain and the two parts of Ireland; and a North-South strand, which set up inter- governmental institutions to oversee greater cooperation across a range of fields between Northern Ireland and Ireland. North-South cooperation as part of the Belfast Agreement The third of these strands has been a quiet cross-border success story. Cooperation overseen by the new North-South institutions has in the past 14 years helped to bring a new pragmatism to relations between leaders and people in Northern Ireland and Ireland. It has involved a wide range of people in both jurisdictions learning how to work together so that they can gain both short-term mutual benefit and longer term greater mutual understanding from such joint activities, without anybody having to give up their cherished political beliefs or national identities. It has not been easy. The institutions set up in 1998 were suspended several times – notably for nearly five years between 2002 and 2007 – but agreement between the British and Irish governments ensured that the North-South element in these institutions was kept going on a so-called ‘care and maintenance’ basis. When Sinn Fein and the Unionists were pressured by the British, Irish and American governments into agreeing to re-form a power-sharing administration in 2007, those institutions and the cross-border bodies they oversee were ready to pick up where they had left off. The bodies work in eminently practical areas such as trade and business development, EU funding, tourism, marine management, inland waterways and – at a more local level – health services. Overseen by a North South Ministerial Council serviced by officials from both Irish jurisdictions, these North-South institutions have helped to ‘normalise’ the previously difficult relationship between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Now – 14 years on – this relationship is 2 McKITTRICK, D. and McVEA, D., Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict. London 2012. 2 better than at any time in the past 90 years3, when the island was first divided. Cross-border cooperation has now become an entirely accepted part – albeit a very small part – of the governance of both parts of the island. The North South institutions which manage it provide a sophisticated inter-governmental framework which is far in advance of any comparable cross-border governance system in other parts of Europe. EU funding of more than 2.5 billion euro has led to a blossoming of non-governmental organisations alongside these institutions (of which my Centre for Cross Border Studies is one). For those of us who lived through the violence of the 1970s and 1980s all this is something of a miracle. It helped that the late 1990s and early 2000s brought a combination of national and international circumstances that were particularly favourable to building peace and cooperation in Ireland: the end of the Cold War led to the drying up of arms supplies to the IRA from Eastern Europe and Libya; the US under President Bill Clinton was free to concentrate on a conflict that was of particular concern to his large Irish-American constituency; and the huge expansion in the international economy led to the ‘Celtic Tiger’ period of spectacular foreign investment and growth in Ireland. East-West cooperation as part of the Belfast Agreement The East-West dimension of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement consisted of a complex series of interlocking institutions to link the five national and regional jurisdictions in the British Isles: Britain, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales (and in one of them, even the tiny Channel Islands and Isle of Man!). These were mainly of symbolic importance, to assure the unionists of Northern Ireland that their link with UK remained important, and they have not developed significantly over the years. Much more important than these formal institutions was the community of interest that had grown between the British and Irish governments and their senior officials who had been working since the mid-1980s first to manage the conflict, and then to bring the warring parties to the table to explore how it might be ended. There was a new respect on the British side, born out of a number of factors, ranging from admiration for the booming Irish economy – one of the fastest growing in the world in the late-1990s – to recognition of the diplomatic skills of the Irish negotiators, skills honed through 20 years of making Ireland’s voice heard in the councils and corridors of power in Brussels.