Building Government Institutions in Northern Ireland—Strand One Negotiations

BUILDING GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS IN NORTHERN IRELAND —STRAND ONE NEGOTIATIONS Deaglán de Bréadún —IMPLEMENTING STRAND ONE Steven King IBIS working paper no. 11 BUILDING GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS IN NORTHERN IRELAND —STRAND ONE NEGOTIATIONS Deaglán de Bréadún —IMPLEMENTING STRAND ONE Steven King No. 1 in the lecture series “Institution building and the peace process: the challenge of implementation” organised in association with the Conference of University Rectors in Ireland Working Papers in British-Irish Studies No. 11, 2001 Institute for British-Irish Studies University College Dublin Working Papers in British-Irish Studies No. 11, 2001 © the authors, 2001 ISSN 1649-0304 ABSTRACTS BUILDING GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS IN NORTHERN IRELAND —STRAND ONE NEGOTIATIONS The Good Friday Agreement was the culmination of almost two years of multi-party negotiations designed to resolve difficult relationships between the two main communities within Northern Ireland, between North and South and between Ireland and Great Britain. The three-stranded approach had already been in use for some time as a format for discussion. The multi-party negotiations in 1997-98 secured Sinn Féin’s reluctant acceptance of a Northern Ireland Assembly, which the party had earlier rejected, as a quid pro quo for significant North-South bodies. Despite the traditional nationalist and republican slogan of “No return to Stormont”, in the negotiations the nationalists needed as much devolution of power as possible if their ministers were to meet counterparts from the Republic on more or less equal terms on the proposed North-South Ministerial Council. Notwithstanding historic tensions between constitutional nationalists and republicans, the SDLP’s success in negotiating a cabinet-style executive, rather than the loose committee structure favoured by unionists, helped ensure there would be a substantial North-South Min- isterial Council, as sought by both wings of nationalism. BUILDING GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS IN NORTHERN IRELAND —IMPLEMENTING STRAND ONE Though bearing some similarity to the new devolved institutions in Scotland and Wales, those in Northern Ireland are in important respects unique. The existence of the institutions depends on the will of Westminister, but politicians in Belfast were given large discretion in working out the details of the scheme. The number of departments was of great political significance, since on it depended the degree of representation of the four main parties. In return for an arrangement relatively fa- vourable to nationalism, nationalists agreed to a less ambitious array of cross- border bodies. The new departments were created on the basis of careful compro- mise, with political criteria overriding administrative ones. The balance sheet to date would suggest that, notwithstanding tensions on specific issues, the Execu- tive, the Assembly, and the Assembly’s committees have been working effectively and to the satisfaction of a large portion of the population. Publication information This contains the revised text of two lectures presented as part of the seminar series “Institution building and the peace process: the challenge of implementation”, organised jointly by the Conference of University Rectors in Ireland and the Institute for British-Irish Studies. The lectures were presented in UCD on 30 April 2001. BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Deaglán de Bréadún is Foreign Affairs Correspondent with the Irish Times. He is a graduate of University College Dublin, where he specialised in English. He has been a journalist with the Irish Times for many years, and was head of the paper’s Belfast bureau from 1997 to 2000 as Northern Editor. His reportage of the peace process won the Northern Ireland Press and Broadcast Award for daily news jour- nalism in 1998. He is the author of The far side of revenge: making peace in North- ern Ireland (Collins Press, Cork, 2001). Steven King is adviser to David Trimble, MP, MLA, and a long-standing commen- tator on Northern Ireland affairs. He is a columnist with the Belfast Telegraph and honorary secretary of the Irish Association . He has been an Ulster Unionist Party activist for several years. A political science graduate of Queen’s University, Bel- fast, he has recently completed a doctoral thesis on Charles J Haughey and the Northern Ireland Question 1957-92 at the University of Ulster. BUILDING GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS IN NORTHERN IRELAND —STRAND ONE NEGOTIATIONS Deaglán de Bréadún I Traditional Irish republicanism has been crudely if pithily expressed in the slogan, “Six hours, six divisions, six counties”. Traditional unionism was encapsulated by Sir James Craig’s famous phrase, “Ulster is ours: what we have we hold.” The bitter lesson many have learnt from 30 years of conflict in the North is that the situation is far more complicated than their favourite shibboleth suggests. It is not simply a question of the relationship between the two parts of the island, or between the British and Irish governments, or the two communities in the North, or the Irish government and northern nationalists, or the British and the unionists, or any other bilateral combination. There is a complex set of relationships involved, with constant interaction between the different components. The beauty of the three-stranded approach was that it simplified and clarified the tasks facing those who wanted to set the conflict on a path towards resolution. • Strand One: Given that Northern Ireland was likely to exist for a considerable time to come and the majority of its inhabitants wished it to continue on a permanent basis, how could it be governed in a way that ensured justice and equality for both sides of the community? • Strand Two: Ireland was a small island divided by a line on a map, so what was the right and proper relationship between its two component parts and how could the unionist desire to maintain the status quo be reconciled with nationalist ambi- tions for the ultimate achievement of unity by peaceful means? • Strand Three: The British and Irish governments had a close interest in the situation in Northern Ireland but continuing conflict threatened their security, their de- mocratic values and their respective exchequers, so what kind of permanent arrangement could be established between these two sovereign states to facilitate a harmonious relationship between the warring factions in the North and help guar- antee a basic level of peace and stability? II Twenty years ago the republican Bobby Sands died on hunger-strike. Seven days later his fellow-republican Francis Hughes succumbed. A week after that five British soldiers were killed when their armoured car was blown up at Bessbrook, Co Ar- magh. Anyone who remembers those days with young men fasting to death or get- IBIS WORKING PAPER NO. 11 IBIS WORKING PAPERS NO. 11, 2001 ting blown up, amid the ever-present fear of civil war, would not wish to relive them. I recall WB Yeats’s phrase from a previous time of trouble: “The nightmare rides upon sleep.” We should not undervalue the present comparative peace and stability in the North nor should we allow it to make us blasé and complacent about the fu- ture. Many people today may not even have been born then and all I can say to them as a member of a generation whose lives were overshadowed by the conflict is “Don’t let the peace slip away”. The three strands may be a fascinating abstraction but we should never forget that they were rooted in the need to restore and maintain normality in people’s lives and remove the threat of anarchy and civil strife. The terrible example of the Balkans shows how a relatively placid situation can deteriorate rapidly and dramatically into all-out conflict, with tragic consequences for thousands of people. The recent re- lease of state papers in the Republic underlines how close we came to a similar disaster in 1970. The guiding principle and overarching rubric for the operation of the three strands was the axiom “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”, and I am fascinated to see this phrase cropping up even in the world of industrial relations these days. Ul- timately none of the strands can be separated because they interrelate and interact with one another. The 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement of course was strictly a strand three operation. But it had and was intended to have implications for strands one and two. A very senior civil servant with a distinguished record in relation to the North described it in Irish as gunna chun cleamhnais. Bluntly speaking, it was the shotgun for a shotgun wed- ding between nationalists and unionists. We all remember now the years of “Ulster says no” and mass unionist protests against “the hated Anglo-Irish diktat”. Happily Her Majesty’s Government—whatever other compromises it may have made—did not retreat on the fundamental principle that representatives of Dublin would have a presence in the North and an oversight of how the place was governed. Critically, the Irish civil servants remained in their so-called “bunker” at Maryfield, on the out- skirts of Belfast. The three strands were a central feature of the Brooke-Mayhew talks of 1991-92. Seen in the light of events at Castle Buildings six years later, these talks appear like a mere curtain-raiser, the minor match preceding the Big Game. While the political associates of the paramilitaries waging war on the ground were not invited to attend, nevertheless certain unwritten taboos were broken. Irish ministers came to Stormont to talk across the table with unionist representatives and the unionist leader James, later Lord, Molyneaux led a delegation to Dublin Castle to discuss North-South relations. The fact that the Brooke-Mayhew process failed to bring about a resolution of the conflict was hardly surprising, since key parties to the conflict were absent, but the talks laid the groundwork for the later and more successful encounter in Castle Buildings.

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