by Penn Rhodeen
Republican Alex Maskey expressed it in virtually the same way:
I got a sawn-off shotgun blast in the stomach. I lost half a kidney, half my bowel, half my stomach, and I still have shrapnel inside me. I also had my house petrol-bombed by loyalists. I had to drag my kids out of bed and down a burning hallway. That was very traumatic for them. All too often people talk as if only one side has a monopoly on suffering. I’m trying to get on with people who tried to murder me, and that’s because I want to make sure others don’t have to endure the suffering that we have. We now have an opportunity to break the logjam.
George Mitchell’s years of experience as majority leader of the US Senate, presiding over the endless bloviating that can afflict that chamber, proved to have been the perfect training ground for presiding over months and months of such expressions of deep feelings, accompanied, as is inevitable with imperfect human beings, by the posturing, parsing, bickering, dithering, and everything else that can make talks go on forever—especially with the Irish and British, truly great masters of those arts. Although in some respects this was the post-American, post-Clinton phase, in a deeper sense this phase was, as Morrison saw it, quintessentially American, a quality crucial to its success. Mitchell was the embodiment of that. In contrast to the hidebound, class-based British way, this was the American way: Everybody speaks, nobody has to keep in his place, and tomorrow is a new day with potential not limited by class or position in society.
Morrison mentions another American aspect:
Inclusiveness is inherently a goal—not always an achievement, but a goal—in the American political process. Marginalizing people as a way of dealing with them is just not how our politics works. The British are very class-based and very much, “we will sort it out at the levels of the people who matter, and those other people will just have to deal with it.” There was a real culture shock in what Clinton did. The big tent was contrary to all of their theory of management of problems.
Mitchell found Morrison’s description of that American quality to be “pretty accurate” and elaborated on the theme, emphasizing that while the talks were American in style, the agreement, if and when one was reached, would be all Northern Ireland:
Here’s what I had in mind: I knew that they didn’t speak with each other. Or I guess it would be more precise to say they all spoke but they didn’t listen to the other. So I also knew that it was going to be very difficult, and I wanted to create a sense of confidence that everybody would have his or her say, that nobody would be excluded or left out or unable to speak their piece. I couldn’t guarantee them that the other side would listen, but I worked very hard at that privately, to say to people, you really gotta sit and listen, because they listened to you.
I said to them on the first day that I don’t come here with an American agreement that I’m going to try to persuade you to accept. There’s no Clinton agreement, there’s no Mitchell agreement. I said, “Any agreement you reach will be yours,” because I thought it important that they feel a sense of ownership in the process. In fact, I said to them, “Look, when this is over, I’m going home.”
I was extremely careful two years later when it came time to draft the agreement to make certain that it was in their words, and I recall very clearly that when I sent around a covering note containing the very final version, I reminded them of my comment on the first day. I said, “Every word in this agreement has been spoken or written by a delegate from Northern Ireland.”
Billy Hutchison, a loyalist paramilitary man who became a politician and a Good Friday negotiator—he was one of the four UVF men who met with Morrison, O’Dowd, Flynn, and Feeney at the Dukes Hotel in 1993—takes the theme even further:
George is very American. We all knew about George’s love for baseball and that he wanted to be the commissioner. He always gave me the impression when he was chairing these things that he was very serious as an American politician. He loved that serious bit, but he also liked to do the razzmatazz, so I could see why he wanted to be a commissioner of baseball.
George started work early in the morning, and he continued at night, and he didn’t understand that we like breaks. He just managed the whole thing—we worked hard, but he also gave us breaks and time to think. These were all very American things to us. Whenever they talked about “breakout sessions”—there were a number of ex-prisoners there—we were starting to think we were breaking out of jail.
When he was doing his analysis or stuff like that, it was as if he was using some sort of business manual from IBM, you know, this notion of having the breakout and this notion of its time to evaluate. He came across as very American, which was totally new to us.
Morrison may have left the playing field by this point, but the depth and breadth of his understanding of what was happening at Stormont makes him an ideal analyst of Mitchell’s remarkable accomplishment in helping the parties make their way to the Good Friday Agreement.
I’d known George as a colleague since the 1980s. He was always the most gracious of people, always the consummate gentleman who was low on rhetoric and strong on focus and substance. Many expected him to be Bill Clinton’s first appointment to the Supreme Court, but he declined in favor of staying in the Senate and working on healthcare reform. So sticking with a project and focusing on a result is something that was George Mitchell’s calling card.
He was a very astute choice for Northern Ireland. He didn’t come with the kind of baggage that some of us certainly had. He had connections to Ireland but was more a person of great experience in handling difficult negotiations and dealing with endless debate.
For most of the talks, the debate seemed to be mostly about nothing; they were long on talking and short on proposals. George experienced a certain level of frustration, but in some remarkable way, he let people talk to the point that they got everything they could possibly say off their chests. George exhibited this extraordinary patience in letting people kind of talk themselves out.
Then he made his decision to set a deadline. At the time, like most deadlines, you never knew how real it was, but George was adamant that he was going home if this wasn’t a success by Good Friday. We’ll never know if he actually would have, but he certainly convinced the people listening to him that he was serious. After all that time, George really came to sense his audience there and to have built a level of credibility. It wasn’t given to him; he earned it for himself. That allowed him to tell people, “Enough already, I’m not going to sit here for the rest of my life. If you can’t finish, then I’m finished.”
People took it seriously, and they did what they hadn’t done up until then: They got down to cases and they started negotiating. They started doing what politicians in Northern Ireland hadn’t done for decades, which was to make substantive decisions about what they could agree to.
As Mitchell’s Good Friday deadline drew close, Morrison, like much of the rest of the world, followed what he called “the cliffhanger” on television. There was no hint that Mitchell would relent on his deadline, and there were encouraging signs of progress. Tony Blair and Ireland’s Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who had taken office shortly after Blair became prime minister, were putting together a draft of an agreement that they thought all sides could support. It was their task because they would be the ones to sign a binding agreement on behalf of their respective countries. Their draft went to Mitchell the Sunday night before Good Friday. It was handed over with the proviso, especially important to the Irish, that, except for the areas of cross-border institutions still being negotiated, nothing could be changed—not a single word or punctuation mark.
When Mitchell read it, he was sure the unionists would never agree to it, but the no-alteration restriction boxed him in. Mitchell wrote later of how troubled and anxious this left him. Time was running out. He considered ordering an adjournment but knew it would eat up too much time. So he did what negotiators, diplomats, and politicians do when they want to resolve an impasse: He and his partners de Chas
telain and Holkeri talked to everyone.
After working through the night, Mitchell, de Chastelain, and Holkeri reviewed their options. Monday morning was fast approaching. The possibility of doing a major redraft themselves was a non-starter: It would take several days. They decided they had to accept the no-change rule and told the parties Monday morning that they would get the Blair-Ahern draft to everyone by midnight. But as the negotiators worked their way through the remaining issues all of Monday, it became obvious that the resolution of the cross-border provisions known as Strand Two, which would provide direct involvement of the Republic of Ireland in the affairs of Northern Ireland, was far from a loose end. Predictably, the nationalists, who welcomed more involvement by the Republic, wanted more areas of cross-border involvement; the unionists wanted fewer and, therefore, less involvement by the Irish government. Strand Two was a potential deal breaker for each side.
The negotiators finally got their markup of the Blair-Ahern draft to Mitchell shortly before midnight Monday. Mitchell and his co-chairmen knew once again that the unionists would never accept it, but they had promised that the full draft would be given to everyone by midnight. In a decision Mitchell quickly came to regret, they decided to keep that promise and out it went, festooned with desperate reminders that it was a draft only, not a final document to be accepted or rejected. In the after-midnight meeting with party leaders, Mitchell literally begged them not to leak the draft. They agreed, and it was never leaked, which avoided the public firestorm that could very well have made agreement impossible. They still had room to maneuver and a little time left. But not much: Good Friday was just seventy-two hours away.
Although the draft itself wasn’t leaked, the unionists and loyalists minced no words in making their opposition clear. Mitchell knew that their reaction would be negative, but he “soon learned that I had underestimated how negative the reaction would be. The process now spun into a new crisis.”
It was already Tuesday morning, and the Good Friday deadline would hit at midnight Thursday. UUP leader David Trimble told Blair that Strand Two would have to be changed fundamentally and that if there was no willingness to consider doing so, “we would prefer not to get involved in negotiation and to say, well, that’s it.”
Mitchell, de Chastelain, and Holkeri met separately with the representatives of the British and the Irish governments and laid it on the line. Mitchell said, “It’s the unanimous judgment of the independent chairmen that the prime ministers have to agree to renegotiate, in good faith, the Strand Two section. Otherwise these talks are over. We don’t think Trimble is bluffing. He can’t live with this.”
Tony Blair flew to Belfast Tuesday evening. Before leaving London he said, “I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.” Mitchell admired Blair’s willingness to take the gamble of personally involving himself in the final negotiations when the outcome was so much in doubt, later writing that, “most political consultants would have told him to stay away.”
Blair made plans to meet Bertie Ahern the next morning in Belfast. Ahern, whose mother had died suddenly just days before, left Dublin before sunrise Wednesday morning. At breakfast he gave Blair the welcome news that the Irish government would renegotiate Strand Two. After hurrying to meetings at Stormont, he left Belfast and got back to Dublin for his mother’s funeral at noon; then he flew back to Belfast late that same afternoon for a series of meetings that ran into the early morning hours. Mitchell met with Ahern at 2 a.m. on Thursday, later writing of him with sympathy and awe: “I don’t recall ever having seen a person as exhausted. I also had never seen a person more determined.”
Blair and Ahern continued their negotiations throughout Thursday. They were making real progress, but Mitchell’s deadline was just hours away. He had made it clear to both prime ministers that he was willing to keep the talks going after midnight with one proviso: “There’s not going to be a break—not for a week, not for a day, not for an hour,” he said. “We’re here until we finish. We’ll either get an agreement or we’ll fail to get an agreement. Then we’ll all go out together and explain to the press and the waiting world how we succeeded or why we failed.
It was a little like the way American football works: If a play is in motion when the clock runs out, the game continues until the play ends. As long as the parties stayed in motion, Mitchell was willing to keep it going.
Late Thursday night Ian Paisley and his DUP followers, who had long ago pulled out of the negotiations but didn’t like what they were hearing about what was going on at Stormont, broke through the main gate and stormed up the mall toward the parliament building, flags flying, in what George Mitchell later described as “a last-ditch effort to block an agreement.” They raised a ruckus and finally said they’d leave if they could hold a press conference. The British agreed. Paisley began with gusto, denouncing the talks and both governments. He called David Trimble a traitor. This was vintage Paisley, but suddenly it all changed: Other loyalists committed to the negotiations shouted him down with chants of “Go home!” and accusations that he was the one who’d run away. “We should never have listened to you, Paisley,” shouted one. “We’re not going to prison for you anymore!” George Mitchell later summed it up as “a sad spectacle.” Although in the years to come Paisley would lead the DUP to become the dominant unionist party and show himself to be capable of remarkable surprises, that night he and his supporters eventually left Stormont to the negotiators.
With the Paisley distraction done, it was back to business as midnight approached. Sinn Féin still had not accepted the agreement, and Ahern decided he had to take action: to “sit down with Sinn Féin, have all the issues that concern them on the table, and negotiate this out, however long it takes.” He got his sit-down, but when Sinn Féin pulled out a list of seventy-eight items they wanted clarified or resolved, he knew it was going to be a long night.
After hours and hours in which, as Ahern later recalled it, “I painfully went through every single one of those with them,” a sense was building that Sinn Féin was getting there, although a persistent stumbling block was the release of prisoners who had been convicted in connection with the fighting. Sinn Féin wanted them released as soon as possible; the British said release in three years was their limit. Sinn Féin pounded away, and Blair finally agreed to two years but would go no lower. Sinn Féin argued vehemently for release in one year. Finally, at about six in the morning, Belfast time, Blair called Bill Clinton to ask for his help. It was well past midnight, Washington time, but Clinton was still up, following the events closely. He later recalled the conversation: “Tony Blair said they were getting close and George Mitchell was over there hammering away. He said, ‘We’re close, but we can’t get there.’”
Clinton agreed to speak to Adams, who told him the prisoner release issue came down to this: “When the war is over, the prisoners come home.” Clinton, as only he could, went to work:
I said, “Gerry, you gotta understand this is a nightmare for Blair, because if there’s any act of violence after any one of these guys gets out, he’ll be accused of basically being made a dupe for murderers. And so it’s hard for him, and the longer he gets to wait, the more he can point to acts of good faith which justify this clemency.”
So we talked about it, and I explained to him what those kind of issues looked like on the other side of the table. It’s a very difficult issue if you see people who are in prison as terrorists rather than freedom fighters—this really all depends on what your view is. It’s the same exact problem we have in the Middle East every time we have to try to make another incremental step there. So I knew it was tough for Blair, but I knew it was tough for Gerry, too.
After that conversation, Adams and others he described as “very, very close colleagues” weighed everything up and decided to accept the agreement as it stood.
Now it was all down to David Trimble and the UUP. They had huge reservations, especially over arms decommissioning and Sinn Féin participation in the new
government before decommissioning was underway.
Blair met with Trimble mid-afternoon on Friday to hear him out. Blair later gave this account:
We had been going at it for days. Everyone was very tired, most of us had had about two, three hours of sleep in the last few days and no sleep whatever the night before. I remember at a certain point in the meeting when I really thought they were at the point of leaving, I really was concerned at one point that they would just get up and walk out. I remember actually getting up and saying to them, “For goodness sake, calm down, we will sort this out. There is a way through, there has got to be. We haven’t come this far to fail now.”
Blair gave the UUP strong assurances that his government would support their positions as life under the agreement unfolded, and he agreed to put it in writing via a side letter. Trimble and his lieutenants appeared receptive, and Blair and his staff quickly drafted it. As soon as it was done, about four o’clock, Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell took it straight to Trimble. Trimble held the letter so he and his deputy John Taylor could read it together. When they got to the end, Taylor said, “Well, that’s fine, we can run with that.”
Trimble was also boosted by much-needed support from other UUP leaders, including Reg Empey and Ken Maginnis. For Empey, demonstrating the ability to negotiate and conclude a reasonable agreement was crucial: “My argument was simple: If this all collapses, do we not prove that Northern Ireland is a failed political entity?”
To Maginnis, it was a matter of meeting the moment:
I remember pointing out that if we walked away from the agreement we couldn’t come back tomorrow morning—we were actually turning our back on a defining moment in history.