by Penn Rhodeen
There was just a sense that decommissioning hadn’t gone away and that they were going to pounce on the point again. Decommissioning was something that at the end of the day wasn’t wrong; it just didn’t fit the situation. It would have been good if it could have been achieved, but it couldn’t and so you’ve got to find another road.
The main point of my discussions was that when you get a new ceasefire, the reaction’s going to have to be different, and the only way a different reaction would be trusted would be if the British response was essentially agreed to before the ceasefire happened. In other words, instead of the ceasefire being offered and a response coming, this will be a bargained-for ceasefire, it will be conditioned on having been promised certain things quite explicitly, rather than the expectation of a good-faith response, which was not their experience the first time.
I never got far enough in those talks with the British, never got things I could take back to Sinn Féin and say, “Well if you did this, they would do that.” They were pretty much mired in their “We’ll have the elections and if they come back, they’re going to have to deposit some of their arms at the door.”
Morrison and many others, including top security experts he consulted, believed strongly that the British insistence on prior decommissioning was contrary to history, overblown in terms of its likely practical effect, and certainly not something that justified squandering the ceasefire. “Nobody ever decommissioned in Irish history,” Morrison notes. “They just stopped. Beyond that, the security people we consulted made it clear that guns are so available in the world that decommissioning some guns didn’t mean you couldn’t get new ones.”
Albert Reynolds had made a similar point directly to Major:
I explained to John Major that [when] my party went into power . . . they didn’t hand over their guns to anybody. In fact, some of them brought their guns in their hip pockets going into the parliament. So I couldn’t have any credibility in asking the leadership of Sinn Féin to hand over guns when our own party didn’t and all the other partisan governments here didn’t either.
Throughout this period in which so much hinged on a new IRA ceasefire, it wasn’t clear that Major had any understanding of the situation from the republican point of view. He sometimes spoke as if Sinn Féin itself, regardless of what the IRA thought, could simply declare a new ceasefire and that would be that. Asked how Sinn Féin could reenter the peace process, Major answered this way:
Well the choice now is with Sinn Féin. We have set out, with the Irish government, the way that we believe matters should now proceed. There is an option for Sinn Féin. They can decide that they are going to opt into the democratic process, call a ceasefire, meet with the other parties, decide to meet the Mitchell principles, and deal with decommissioning, or they can decide to opt out of the democratic process.
Absent from Major’s statement was the slightest recognition that the most Sinn Féin could ever do would be to persuade the IRA to restore the ceasefire. For all the British and unionist protests that Sinn Féin and the IRA were basically one and the same, there were plenty of professionals and knowledgeable authorities on their own side who were aware of the limits of Gerry Adams’s ability to influence the decisions of the IRA. When George Mitchell and his co-commissioners on the International Body on Decommissioning asked RUC chief constable Hugh Annesley if Adams could persuade the IRA to decommission arms before all-party talks, Annesley said, “No, he couldn’t do it even if he wanted to. He doesn’t have that much control over them.” His top assistants agreed, and Mitchell wrote later that that was the “clinching argument” against prior decommissioning. He also wrote that such truth-telling didn’t go well for the messenger: During the commissioners’ meeting with John Major, after they mentioned what they had learned from the RUC, a letter from Annesley was produced, obviously under pressure from above, “that modified and explained” what he’d told the commissioners, although he didn’t change his conclusion. The episode made Mitchell feel bad for the chief constable: “He had been truthful with us, and now, because his opinion didn’t fit with the government’s policy, it became obvious that his honesty with us had gotten him into trouble with his superiors.”
And still, Major either didn’t recognize or didn’t accept how difficult persuading the IRA to call another ceasefire would be in the face of their experiences after they called the first one. The IRA hardliners now had the advantage and they had plenty of operations to carry out, including an attack on a British military base in Germany and the detonation of a huge bomb in the center of Manchester in the English midlands. Major continued to maintain that in adhering to his demand for prior arms decommissioning or new elections, he was simply and sincerely seeking “confidence-building measures” that would make meaningful negotiations feasible, since without sufficient confidence, the unionists would never agree to negotiate directly with Sinn Féin. Morrison found himself extremely vexed by Major’s complete refusal to recognize his own obligations as a leader to find—or perhaps create—the right moment and to act decisively, seizing the opportunity to help his supporters and his nation come to a better place, which everyone who had suffered for so long so richly deserved.
The talks among British-approved parties began, as Major had pledged, on schedule in June of 1996. Despite its electoral success, Sinn Féin was absent, because the IRA hadn’t restored its ceasefire. George Mitchell presided over the talks, with de Chastelain and Holkeri returning as co-chairmen, and they accomplished as much as anyone could have. But there wasn’t ever going to be an effective peace agreement while Sinn Féin was on the sidelines. In the meantime, Mitchell and his co-chairman focused on what they saw as the essential task of just getting something going: “I do think it was important to get it started. The reality was that it was extremely difficult. It was more trying to get this thing going, trying to keep it going to make it a credible process.”
There was also another outlet, not led by Mitchell, that was ostensibly available to the parties for further debate: the Northern Ireland Forum for Political Dialogue, the body to which those participating in the talks—and Sinn Féin as well—had been formally elected in May. Its sessions weren’t promising. The unionists had a clear majority, which allowed them to dominate the proceedings and turn a purported forum for discussion into a unionist echo chamber. The sole voice of the nationalist community was that of moderate John Hume’s SDLP, and they gamely went to the first session of the Forum. But Hume, who always seemed willing to go the extra mile for a conversation about the future of Northern Ireland, quickly registered his discouragement when he quit the Forum after a single session. He did stay with the slog of the Mitchell talks, although the rate of progress there was glacial.
In Making Peace, Mitchell’s book about his role in the process, he summed up the first year and a half of negotiations with this cri de coeur:
For hundreds and hundreds of hours I had listened to the same arguments, over and over again. Very little had been accomplished. It had taken two months to get an understanding on the rules to be followed once the negotiations began. Then it took another two months to get an agreement on a preliminary agenda. Then we had tried for fourteen more months to get an accord on a detailed final agenda. We couldn’t even get that, and we were about to adjourn for the Christmas break.
Mitchell later spoke of the long road that got him to those talks:
I began by serving as President Clinton’s economic advisor. When I went, it was to be for five months, until the May 1996 White House conference. As I described in the book, the night before [the conference], Clinton called me and I agreed to stay on for another six months. Then later that year Prime Minister Major and Irish prime minister John Bruton asked me to do this commission on the decommissioning of weapons. Then Major called me and said, “Your report is being used as the basis for the negotiations, so it’s logical you should be chair.”
I’m telling this to say that sort of one thing led to another. I beca
me more and more involved, more and more immersed. I began to get to know people more, to spend more time there; I read more books—I read many, many books about the history of Ireland and Northern Ireland and so forth—and so you sort of get pulled in. And then it’s hard not to have your emotions be engaged; you really want this thing to work. I think it’s fair to say had I been asked to chair the negotiations at the very beginning, say just as soon as I left the Senate, I’m not sure I would have done it. By the time I was asked, it was by then a year and a half later and I’d become more deeply involved.
The state of war, along with the negotiations, ground on through the rest of 1996 and into 1997 with no indication that a new IRA ceasefire was on the horizon. John Major did demonstrate an understanding of the challenges facing the loyalist negotiators and the importance of having them at the table despite their violent affiliations: “With the end of the IRA ceasefire, loyalist paramilitaries were straining at the leash; it was essential to have their political representatives at the table if we were to keep them on-side and off terrorism,” he wrote in his autobiography. It’s a shame he wasn’t able to muster the same understanding of the challenges facing Sinn Féin and the value to all sides in getting them to the table as well. If he had done so, there is every reason to believe the ceasefire would have held.
In the spring of 1997, the talks recessed for the British general election. Major’s conservatives and Tony Blair’s Labour Party were locked in a campaign that Labour was expected to win after eighteen years of Tory rule. The campaign was spirited but eerily silent on the war in Northern Ireland, with neither Major nor Blair discerning any political benefit to saying anything at all about it. Although Blair made it clear privately that he would take a new approach, he cautioned that as a campaign topic it wouldn’t help his party win.
It was a landslide victory for Labour, which proved to be an essential step toward peace. Blair soon made it clear that a new ceasefire was essential, and if one came, the British response would be to include Sinn Féin in all-party talks quickly. He gave the IRA five weeks, after which time the “peace train” would leave without Sinn Féin.
Morrison stressed to the republicans that the opportunity had to be seized. He forcefully pressed his analysis that there would be a limit to Blair’s willingness to expend his political capital on Northern Ireland: If the republicans couldn’t bring themselves to take advantage of what he was offering, it wouldn’t take long for his attention to shift to another urgent issue. How long Blair would put up with republican bickering and indecision was impossible to say. Unquestionably, the new ceasefire had to happen right away. But also unquestionable was the reality that pressuring the IRA to do something usually resulted only in stubborn delay.
In July of 1997, with the clock ticking on Blair’s deadline, Morrison, his wife, and their young son were about to leave for Los Angeles, partly for a family vacation and partly for an immigration conference. In that sunny land of dreams at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, Northern Ireland would be far, far away. And then Sinn Féin called, saying they needed Morrison to come to Belfast right away and to keep it a secret. The precise purpose wasn’t stated, but Morrison was fairly sure that it involved a new ceasefire.
After a quick family conference, they decided to fly to LA as scheduled, at which point Morrison would immediately fly to Belfast. His wife and son would start the California vacation without him, keeping his sudden departure, not to mention his destination, under wraps. Nancy Morrison, a highly practical person, knew she didn’t want to face endless questions about where her husband was and what he was up to. Although she was tremendously supportive of his activities in the peace process and handled his many absences from home, long and short, with grace, she was becoming pleasantly accustomed to the lessening of the demands on his travel time as the British election took center stage. Her solution was to scoop up their four-year-old son, Drew, and head twenty-six miles out to sea to Santa Catalina Island to wait out his absence. Nobody on the island was going to ask her where her husband was.
For Morrison, the nine-hour flight to Belfast offered the possibility of more sleep than his usual flight from New York, but it wasn’t going to be enough to compensate for passing through eight time zones. When his plane landed, Morrison, seriously jet-lagged and still with no information about what to expect, was whisked straight from the airport to a hotel and then, after a brief rest, to a meeting with Ted Howell. Howell was Sinn Féin’s éminence grise: a theoretician, strategist, tactician, taker of the long view, and creator of the language necessary to get something done. Morrison describes him as Adams’s “right-hand intellect”; he was like a chief of staff but much more so. When a problem was especially thorny, Adams would say, “Talk to Ted.”
Howell was so rarely seen in public that a photograph taken through a window at night with a telephoto lens showing him with Adams was big news in its own right. Morrison and Howell had worked together previously, usually with others present. But this time it was just the two of them in a small room in Howell’s home. Tea was poured, enjoyed briefly, and then it was time for Howell, in many respects the key architect of the political course Sinn Féin had begun more than ten years earlier, and Morrison, the key architect of the political strategy behind the new American policy on Northern Ireland, now in its fifth year, to get down to work.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
All-Party Talks at Last, Good Friday Ahead
Tea enjoyed, small talk—not the forte of either man—kept to a minimum, Bruce Morrison and Ted Howell were hard at work in the small room in Howell’s house. It was immediately clear to Morrison that the IRA was ready and willing to declare a new ceasefire. Now the two men were putting together a list of the guarantees and commitments needed from the White House in support of that step, which Morrison would take to Washington.
After a full day’s work, the list was ready, and Morrison was taken straight back to the hotel for some sleep before a morning flight back to California. When he touched down at LAX, he had been gone for all of forty-two hours. In Los Angeles there was the last of the immigration conference and a little more family vacation, including a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Boulevard—a fine metaphor for the perils of getting stuck in the past.
Before leaving LA, Morrison e-mailed the list to the White House and scheduled a visit with James Steinberg, Nancy Soderberg’s successor at the National Security Council, to discuss it. In Washington they went over the list and quickly got it approved. Morrison told Sinn Féin, and soon after, on July 19, 1997, the IRA declared the new ceasefire.
New British prime minister Tony Blair responded to the IRA’s latest declaration with impressive decisiveness. He wanted ninety days for the ceasefire to show itself to be the real thing, and he said that if it held, the peace talks, with Sinn Féin at the table at last, would resume in mid-September. There was no more talk from the British about the preconditions that the ceasefire be “permanent” or that decommissioning of weapons begin in advance of the talks. Blair wasn’t going to bury the new ceasefire in words as his predecessor had done.
The ceasefire held, and, as promised, Sinn Féin was brought into the talks in September. For this critical new phase of the peace process—September 1997 until April 1998—matters were at last in the hands of those who lived in the north: nationalists, unionists, loyalists, and republicans. The leaders of the governments of the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic, the two sovereignties with the authority to make official agreements, were intensely involved and showed themselves willing to negotiate and do whatever was necessary to put together a good agreement that the Northern Ireland representatives would support and the voters in Northern Ireland and the Republic would approve by referendum. The Irish Americans who had done so much to bring the United States into the process watched from a distance as it played out.
When Morrison and others from his group went to Northern Ireland during the talks, it was, as he put it, as “cheerleaders and kibbitzers.
” What they saw in Belfast was that real all-party peace talks capable of bringing about an end to the centuries of warfare were well and truly under way at last. The people at the table were direct representatives of those who had been fighting for all those years, and they had plenty to get off their chests before they would be able to get down to the business of negotiating a deal and setting the course to the creation of a new society that accommodated both populations. Experiences and feelings were extreme, and the personal challenges participants from each side faced in dealing with the other were immense. Yet a willingness to proceed with hope despite the overwhelming losses suffered shone through miraculously in statements by participants from each side. Loyalist Gary McMichael explained it this way:
It’s very, very difficult for me, because they not only killed my father but also my best friend, and three years ago they tried to kill me. That obviously makes it difficult to even be in the room with representatives of those people, never mind engage in any form of negotiation with them. But it’s actually that suffering that makes us take the line that we do and makes us go that extra mile to try and remove the threat against the community forever. That means we have to tackle republicanism, because we know that if we walk away from this process, there is going to be another stage of conflict, that others will have to go through what we’ve gone through.