by Penn Rhodeen
People knew that we hadn’t got as much of our wish list as we would want. They knew that if we walked away we would be surrendering things that we did want. So there was this balancing act. Eventually we took a quiet moment again, we looked through it, and I remember saying to David, “Well, I’ll accept it.” And he looked round and he said, “I’m going to accept it.”
At 4:45 Trimble called Mitchell and said the words he had been waiting all day—maybe all year—to hear: “We’re ready to do the business.”
Within fifteen minutes Mitchell had everyone gathered together for the plenary session that would take the vote and tell the world. When the vote was done, Mitchell said, “I am pleased to announce that the two governments and the political parties in Northern Ireland have reached agreement.”
The Good Friday Agreement was done. On April 10, 1998, the long war was over.
Just as Morrison had a unique understanding of the process Mitchell oversaw, he had a solid grasp of the final agreement itself, both what it was and what it was not:
It was a watershed agreement. On the fundamentals, it underpinned the ceasefire, so there was no sense that there was any going back. It wasn’t the agreement to end all agreements: It was the agreement to create further agreements, a very politically astute resolution. When something couldn’t be agreed [on] right then, instead of saying that’s a deal breaker, it became, “Well, who should decide? Let’s put that into this commission or that commission and let them decide. Let’s get down to the core.”
The core was about the principle of consent and about creating a structure of governance that was protective of minority rights, a referendum process North and South, cross-border, interisland, intercommunity kinds of structures, which could grow in strength over time as these other processes resolved the outstanding questions.
Most of it was process, in some sense deferring decisions by delegating them. All of these were new processes that would have to be negotiated. The Good Friday Agreement came at the end of the negotiations—and it was the beginning of new rounds of negotiations.
But the most essential wasn’t the details of any of that. The most essential was feeling that a deal had been done and that all the people in the big tent were part of that agreement. You can’t overstate George’s accomplishment in helping the parties get there.
In the wake of this remarkable outcome, Morrison enjoys recalling that Mitchell initially came into the process as Clinton’s economic envoy, not the peace envoy he had promised during the 1992 campaign. A number of Irish American activists remained frustrated that Clinton never appointed Mitchell or anyone else as his officially designated peace envoy, even as Mitchell became more and more involved as economic envoy, head of the international commission on arms decommissioning, and overseer of the peace talks themselves. Morrison could only respond that in Mitchell, Bill Clinton had delivered nothing less than “the peace envoy on steroids.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Finishing Up, Holding It Together, and Starting Out
Bruce Morrison, whose adventures in Northern Ireland began in the ashes of his election defeat nearly a decade earlier, was back on the campaign trail in the spring of 1998, this time not as a candidate but as an observer of the referendum process that was the first order of business under the Good Friday Agreement. There were to be two separate votes, both on May 22, 1998, just six weeks after the peace agreement was signed at Stormont. Northern Ireland would vote on the agreement itself, since this would create its new governmental structure. The Irish Republic would vote on whether to amend its constitution to drop its claim that the six counties were part of the Republic, irrespective of the wishes of their inhabitants.
Morrison was well aware of the crosscurrents and sensitivities involved in the complex groupings and subgroupings that would be voting; he spoke with the discretion and restraint befitting a foreigner who would not himself be voting. In discussions and interviews, he stressed the moderate, respectful, and incremental nature of the peace agreement: Nobody was surrendering, and every voice and viewpoint was respected. He had a simple message: “If this passes, everybody has a vote. If it loses, nobody has a vote.”
Describing his visit during the referendum campaign years later, Morrison said:
I wasn’t there to campaign; that would have been totally inappropriate. It was not a decision for Americans, it was a decision for the people of Northern Ireland. What Americans had fought for was the framework so that the people of Northern Ireland could in a peaceful way advocate their points of view and compromise and move forward. So this was the ultimate test of that proposition, and I was there to observe and celebrate that achievement. It was pretty amazing, if you take the fact that in 1992, this was seen as a largely hopeless situation in which American politicians tended to talk much more than act, that we’d got ourselves a president who did a lot more acting than talking, who created the environment in which this change could occur and in which the decision was made that there was a political solution to these problems and that the war was over.
He still marvels that the referendum ever came to be, with each side managing to surmount long-held bedrock convictions:
The fact that one can get to that kind of vote is a triumph of practical politics. I think unionists felt they put themselves much at risk by giving what once had been a one-party, one-ethnicity state over to a local governmental structure that in their own perception was moving away from them, moving toward Irish rather than British as its identity, and put themselves at risk to consent because that consent could go against them over time. At the same time, republicans gave up, for the time being, their position that you can’t have partitionist institutions because they represent illegitimacy: They’re a product of the conquest of Ireland, not the self-determination of the Irish people.
Then there were the all-important questions of who would vote and on what:
What is the unit of self-determination? The British Isles? The island of Ireland? The Republic of Ireland? The United Kingdom? Just Great Britain? Wherever you draw the line determines the outcome in a certain way.
It was pretty clear that the peace agreement was going to win, but it was also pretty clear that it depended on very strong nationalist turnout and there being enough unionists of goodwill to push it over the half—and that’s about what it was. So the campaign for the yes was really a nationalist campaign, and that’s what you saw when you were there: The main energy came more from the community segment, the Inez McCormack segment—the one part of Northern Ireland where women were really important and where cross-community work really went on, where people do things in a nonsectarian way—than from the political segment, which was always heavily sectarian.
In the north, election turnout was huge, over 80 percent, and when the votes were counted, the Good Friday Agreement won over 70 percent of the vote. Post-election polling indicated that well over 90 percent of Catholics voted yes and about half of Protestant voters, perhaps a slight majority, did the same. In the Republic of Ireland, nearly 95 percent of the voters approved the amendments to their constitution. If there was any doubt about whether the Northern Ireland Catholics as a group, nationalists and republicans, not to mention Irish citizens of the Republic, were willing to vote on the basis of their desire for a fair shake, an end to the violence, and a political way forward, instead of sacred tenets of republican ideology—principally, that Ireland is one nation, thirty-two counties, not twenty-six—a yes vote above 90 percent made their willingness clear beyond any question.
For Morrison, the referendum reflected Sinn Féin’s profound shift under Gerry Adams:
The strong republican and nationalist support for the agreement really is a testament to Adams’s pragmatic politics. He wouldn’t say it was the goal, but a stage in the evolution of Irish unity. I guess my observation is that Adams and Sinn Féin as political thinkers accepted compromise as the heart of politics and not the heart of revolution. This event was really the demonstrati
on that they had made the switch in the years from ’86 to ’97, they had accepted that the way forward was going to be political, and that political institutions gave them the opportunity to persuade in a way that violence didn’t.
With the peace agreement ratified by the people affected, the next stage was the establishment of new civic life and the creation of a new governmental structure. Morrison stressed the basic nature of the peace agreement: It was really an agreement to reach future agreements to create processes and institutions that would establish a government and a society to accommodate both populations. Key among the matters of early focus was the creation of a new police service to replace the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its long history of discrimination against Catholics. Policing had been a source of great contention and conflict throughout the Troubles; the unifying principle for getting it right, articulated by Gerry O’Hara, Morrison’s Sinn Féin host in Derry in 1987 and who became a member of the Northern Ireland Policing Board—a nineteen-member body with the power to hire and fire the chief constable and other top leadership—was that “both communities have a basic interest in receiving effective police services.”
With the Good Friday Agreement now ratified by the voters, Morrison found himself a bit bereft. The people of Northern Ireland were on their own, and he felt like a doting parent who has just sent his child off to college with high hopes and more than a few worries.
And sadly, there was plenty to worry about in the summer of 1998. In mid-August, less than three months after the referendum, Northern Ireland’s new world of peace and democratic institutions was violently thrust back into the terrible old world of death and destruction, with an act of terror so awful that it had the potential to destroy everything that had been gained.
It was in the market town of Omagh in County Tyrone, a little after three on a busy Saturday afternoon. A republican splinter group calling itself the Real IRA detonated a 500-pound car bomb on a street filled with shoppers and tourists. Twenty-one were killed outright, and eight more died in ambulances or in the hospital. Six children and six teenagers were killed, as was a woman pregnant with twins. More than 220 were injured, many grievously. A woman who lost her sixteen-year-old son and suffered injuries herself described hearing an “unearthly bang,” followed by “an eeriness, a darkness that had just come over the place”—and then the screams.
No bomb, no attack of any kind, had killed more people— Protestants, Catholics, foreigners—throughout the entire three decades of the Troubles. The feeble explanation by the splinter group that their intended target had been the courthouse farther up the street and that they had called in a warning in time for people to be moved to safety— something a still-seething Bill Clinton would denounce as “crap” over fifteen years later—only compounded the outrage, especially when it became clear that that the “warning” had been careless and stupid in the extreme—deliberately so, many believed—and actually led the police to herd people toward the bomb instead of away from it.
The young and still fragile world of Northern Ireland at peace was now at the mercy of answers to questions that no one wanted to face again so soon: Who did this? Who supports them? Can hope survive such a blow?
Morrison was outraged and worried. “Omagh was early on and I was very frightened. It set off all kinds of alarm bells. I mean it really did call the question of which side the republicans were going to be on.” In other words, would Sinn Féin break with the past and condemn the attack?
The answer came swiftly and forcefully. Gerry Adams minced no words, declaring, “I am totally horrified by this action. I condemn it without any equivocation whatsoever.” He later elaborated in movingly human terms: “This action was wrong. I hope that the people involved will reflect on the enormity of what they have done. I would like whoever is responsible to accept that responsibility in a public statement, and I want them to cease. I want them to stop.”
Sinn Féin deputy leader Martin McGuinness spoke out with equal force: “This appalling act was carried out by those opposed to the peace process. It is designed to wreck the process, and everyone should work to ensure the peace process continues.” McGuinness spoke movingly of how the tragedy, coming with supreme irony in the first summer of the Northern Ireland’s widely agreed on shift from war to politics, was so murderous to both populations: “All of them were suffering together. I think all of them were asking the question ‘Why?’ because so many of them had great expectations, great hopes for the future.”
For Morrison, the great development after Omagh was that historic shift from Sinn Féin:
It was the first real occasion in which republicans condemned violence perpetrated by other republicans. That had never happened, and the condemnation that came was really a turning of the page, although it came at a very high price. The condemnation marked the fundamental change that Sinn Féin would no longer excuse violence in the name of the republican cause. They had now joined the side of the opponents of the use of force to settle political questions in Northern Ireland. That conversion, which was later followed by actual decommissioning by the IRA and essentially a stand-down of the IRA as the army of the republican movement, is the completion of the journey from 1986, from “the Armalite and the ballot box” to “put down the Armalite and trust the ballot box.”
While Sinn Féin was in many respects the most crucial voice to be heard, it wasn’t the only one. SDLP leader John Hume called the bombers “undiluted fascists.” Taoiseach Bertie Ahern called it “a ghastly act . . . the most evil deed in years.” Tony Blair said it was “an appalling act of savagery,” and Bill Clinton called it “butchery.” Queen Elizabeth sent her condolences, as did the Pope. Just days after the attack, Prince Charles went to Omagh, spoke of his own feelings when his great uncle Lord Mountbatten was murdered by an IRA bomb, and said, “Let us pray this time that it will be the end to all the horrors that poor Ireland has suffered.”
Saturday, August 22, one week after the massacre, was designated a Day of Reflection. Tens of thousands came to Omagh, a town of 25,000. As many as 60,000 people, including nearly every top leader from Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and the UK, filled the downtown for a service held on the steps of the courthouse the killers had claimed was the target of the bombing. The names of the dead were read aloud, a moment of silence was observed at the exact moment of the attack, baskets of flowers were taken to the hospitals caring for the injured, and two children, a Catholic and a Protestant, gave a prayer of hope. As the crowd began to disperse, many exchanged the Sign of Peace, shaking hands and saying, “The peace of the Lord be with you.”
Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with Tony and Cherie Blair, visited a week later. In its account of the visit, headlined, “Most Powerful Man on the Planet Weeps as He Visits Omagh,” The Independent noted Bill Clinton’s sadness and the local reaction to it: “‘He had tears in his eyes,’ said Brenda O’Leary, one of the nurses. ‘I know he’s a politician, but they were genuine.’ ‘Look, he’s taken the time and the thought to see us here,’ said Kelvin O’Rourke, who works in a shop upon the stricken High Street. ‘Who cares why he’s doing it?’”
In the end, the combination of precedent-shattering republican condemnation of the bombing, the powerful and sympathetic expressions of world opinion, and the enormous crowd that came to Omagh added up to an overwhelming determination not to let violent fanatics hijack the peace that so many had worked so hard to win. This was enough to keep the process on track. Not even the Omagh bomb could wreck the peace.
As the summer of 1998 ended and autumn followed, the judgment of the world, like that of the voters of the island of Ireland, was that the peace settlement in Northern Ireland was good. Formal recognition followed: The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to John Hume and David Trimble at the end of 1998.
The award to Hume was easy to understand, even though it could be argued that his own preferred path was not ultimately the way to peace. But it was nevertheless an award he richly deserved,
going back to his civil rights days and up through his collaborations with Gerry Adams and his crucial support for the Adams visa, which was in many respects against his own political interests, but was still the essential thing to move the peace process forward. Morrison saw it this way:
For Hume it was the affirmation of a lifetime of fighting for pretty much all the same things that Sinn Féin was fighting for, but forswearing violence and accepting the limitations that went with that, and yet recognizing that the republicans had a place, an important role, and putting his own career at risk in various ways to recognize and cooperate with that to the extent he could. And so it was an award for a lifetime, a lifetime of taking the peaceful road. It was completely earned.
For Trimble, the award was basically for his answering the call when history tapped him on the shoulder on Good Friday. He had no particularly distinguished history as a long-term seeker of peace, yet he rose to his moment and, like many who answered the call during the peace process, he had plenty to lose in voting yes to the agreement. Indeed, for him, the Nobel Prize was a decidedly mixed blessing. Ultimately it contributed to the destruction of his political effectiveness in the unionist community: In Morrison’s phrase, it was seen by many unionists as “a prize for a sellout.” To Morrison, Trimble’s response to the award was sad:
The sadness was really that Trimble almost apologized for getting the award. He was not proud of it. The prize to Trimble demonstrated his limitations, because a better leader would have seen it as international affirmation for a hard job well done. Instead, he retreated into the traditional unionist position of “We don’t care what the world thinks, we only care about what we think.” That perspective has held the unionists back a lot, and I think that from the time he made the decision not to claim the high ground, he slowly became politically irrelevant.