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Paul Bew: Ten years of talking for the new top dogs in Ulster
IT is with some nostalgia that I now recall the week of Good Friday, 1998. At the beginning of the week, I was optimistic that there would be a negotiated historic compromise for Northern Ireland.
In fact, things took a turn for the worse. The first version of the Agreement presented by the British and Irish governments was far too green to be acceptable even for moderate unionism, which was led then by David Trimble. It looked as if both governments had decided to prioritise the IRA's ceasefire over the maintenance of the centre ground in Northern Ireland.
It became essential to persuade the Prime Minister that there was a need for a substantial change in strategy. To his credit, Tony Blair grasped the nettle. He even went as far as to put great pressure on the Irish Prime Minister to shift his position.
As Alastair Campbell has explained in his published diaries, Bertie Ahern was told that the world would not understand if he did not show some flexibility.
Essentially, the same picture is confirmed in Jonathan Powell's recent memoir, Great Hatred, Little Room. It is worth stressing – amid all the currently fashionable talk of the need to do deals with the extremes – that the Good Friday Agreement represented in the first instance a calculated decision by Tony Blair to give priority to the centre parties (the UUP and SDLP) to cut their own deal. As this prospect emerged, Sinn Fein was rather miffed.
Gerry Adams did, however, adapt very quickly and cleverly. Presented with a fait accompli which he could not alter, he moved rapidly to claim ownership of the deal which had, in fact, been created by others.
As he acknowledged at the time, he turned his party's policy on its head.
Today, his party dominates the Northern Ireland Executive along with Dr Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, the other party which was marginalised in 1998. At St Andrews at the autumn of 2006, they embraced what become known as the Good Friday Agreement "in a kilt".
On the morning of Good Friday 1998, the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP were confident that the electorate of Northern Ireland would respond with gratitude in support of their negotiating efforts. The structure they negotiated has survived, but both parties have been marginalised.
Was this inevitable? There were both demographic and class factors working against the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists in the late 1990s. Both parties were likely to find the new century difficult, no matter what the political context.
Nevertheless, there is a question-mark about government policy. Jonathan Powell is quite right to insist that Tony Blair was very reluctant to lose David Trimble, and he continued to support Trimble until well into 2004, even though important voices in the Northern Ireland office, the Dublin government and, indeed, the US government, had been urging a gamble
on Peter Robinson – not Ian Paisley – since 2001.
Powell offers a vigorous defence of Downing Street policy in this period. It is fair to say, however, that he will not convince those who believe that the IRA could not go back to war after the Omagh bomb of August 1998, and certainly not after 9/11.
In short, such critics argue that there was no need to sweeten Sinn Fein so much in the subsequent negotiations. The same critics also argued that the visible bribery of Sinn Fein helped to weaken both the moderate SDLP within the Catholic community and the Ulster Unionists within the Protestant community.
There is no point now in attempting to re-write history. The DUP and Sinn Fein are top dogs in Northern Irish politics, but they have accepted the framework set out by the now electorally-scorned moderates. This is both the strength of the new Northern Irish political institutions and their weakness. Neither the DUP or Sinn Fein have been honest with their supporters. The recent by-election in Dromore showed a significant hard-line Unionist revolt against the DUP.
The DUP's response has been to dismiss its leader, who was perceived to have altered publicly and become besotted with his office – an office, after all, shared with Martin McGuinness.
The big question here is whether a mere change of style when the dour technocrat, Peter Robinson, will be enough to save the party from further wrath at the hands of the Unionist electorate.
Sinn Fein has also been having unaccustomed difficulties. The party was routed in the Irish elections in the summer and no longer has a remotely credible all-Ireland strategy – an important matter for a party whose raison d'tre is supposed to be Irish unification. There has been a recent rash of resignations, and Mr Adams has been criticised by the ever loyal Anderstown News.
The waters, in short, are likely to get choppier. The almost surreal amity of the "Chuckle Brothers" era – as the Paisley/McGuinness combination was known – is at an end. The big outstanding issue – the date for the devolution of policing and justice – shows no sign of resolution.
Northern Ireland has probably one more serious political crisis left in it – it is one that might shake, but not destroy, the
new institutions.
Lord Bew of Donegore is professor of politics at Queen's University, Belfast.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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