Peacerunner

by Penn Rhodeen

  In not much time, the new Nobel laureate became Lord Trimble and retired from the playing field.

  There was no award for Gerry Adams, arguably the most groundbreaking politician of all, the one who had led the republicans’ long journey from war to politics. Morrison offers this overall analysis:

  At a later time the peace prize could conceivably have gone to four individuals: to Hume and Trimble but also to Adams and Paisley. Certainly Adams was essential to the process, and Paisley, while he failed to contribute through much of the period, at the critical moment years later made the move that solidified the actual solution on the ground by giving viability to the government at Stormont. But that wasn’t going to happen in 1998.

  The decision was quite reasonable: Adams would have been adding a second nationalist and would have called out for balance on the unionist side, and there really was nobody there. Adams’s self-definition was to be an outsider, to be the revolutionary, and Hume’s self-definition was to be at the center of moderate politics, to solve problems. Somebody like Adams doesn’t expect to be revered. He’s sort of chosen a role that is going to be denounced for being extreme.

  As for the contributions of the new British prime minister, the new Taoiseach, and the American president who did so much to help the parties break free from the long-standing dynamic that had kept everything stuck for so many years, Morrison says, “They could have given this prize to Clinton, Blair, and Ahern, but that would’ve been a bad idea, because while they were the facilitators, the people who had to make the hard decisions were the ones on the ground in Northern Ireland.”

  Similarly, there was no Nobel Prize for George Mitchell, perhaps the ultimate facilitator, but at the White House St. Patrick’s Day celebration in 1999, Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. Thomas Foley, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives who had been so steadfast in supporting the British position on Northern Ireland and opposing any participation by Sinn Féin or the issuance of a visa to Gerry Adams— a total Anglophile despite his Irish heritage—was knighted by the Queen. But because he wasn’t a British citizen, he wasn’t entitled to be called Sir Thomas.

  Also in 1998, Conor O’Clery, Washington correspondent for the Irish Times, published his account of Bill Clinton’s new American policy on Northern Ireland. In Ireland, the book was called The Greening of the White House, and in the United States, Daring Diplomacy. The book, which covered events into 1996, proved revelatory for Clinton. He loved it and invited O’Clery and his wife to visit him in the Oval Office. He told O’Clery, “I’ve known Bruce Morrison since law school and I had no idea he was doing all this.” Morrison was particularly impressed by the delight Clinton took in what he and the others had done unofficially. As Morrison put it, “The world’s most powerful leader didn’t say, ‘How dare they!’ Instead it was, ‘How great!’”

  In the fall of 1998, Morrison returned to Belfast. He had been invited as director of the Federal Housing Finance Board to participate in a Habitat for Humanity project. He found himself hammering nails at Glencairn, the same loyalist housing estate beyond Shankill Road that he had visited six years earlier, after he and Niall O’Dowd decided that Bill Clinton was the horse to ride on the road to peace.

  As he hammered away, he noticed an older man, grizzled, not much hair, not many teeth, standing by the edge of the work site. Morrison realized this was the unforgettable fellow of many grievances whose long cigarette ash had so mesmerized him on his very first visit to Glencairn all those years ago. He put down his hammer and walked over. The man asked, “Do you remember me?”

  Morrison looked again for an instant and answered, “Of course I remember you. How are you?”

  While the man didn’t seem surprised to find the American back in Belfast hammering nails, he did seem a bit flustered and uncharacteristically reticent, not so comfortable putting himself forward even that much. The encounter ended nearly as quickly as it began. The man pulled back, but as he slipped away, he left Morrison with a perfect benediction: “Ya done alright.”

  EPILOGUE

  The mail arrived late in the afternoon, as usual. Her son, who had turned nine in May, got back from day camp, had his snack, and went up to in his room. She gathered up the mail and took it out to the deck, as she had recently started doing; this was something she never mentioned to her son and didn’t think her husband knew about.

  She set the mail on the table and sat down. Evening might be approaching, but this July afternoon was still too hot. Summer days were steamy around Washington DC, and this was the hottest part of the day. As she began to open the mail, she paid particular attention to any envelope without a return address, just as the people who sent the warning had recommended, although, oddly, their own envelope hadn’t had one. She opened each piece carefully and attentively but didn’t cringe or brace herself. When she was done, she went inside—the air-conditioning was a relief—and set some of the mail on the dining room table. She took the rest to her husband’s office and left it on his desk. This business of opening the mail on the deck felt a bit foolish, but she still thought it was the right thing to do. If there was a letter bomb and it went off, her son should be safe inside and upstairs.

  Nancy Morrison found herself following this routine after her husband Bruce received a letter in the summer of 2001 informing him that his name was on a list of alleged IRA activists and sympathizers marked for death by remnants of loyalist paramilitaries. The letter said that the danger would be greatest when he traveled to Northern Ireland, but it also said that any attack in the United States would most likely be through the mail.

  As the weeks passed and not a single piece of mail seemed suspicious, she decided it was no longer necessary to open the mail out on the deck. But looking back, she didn’t regret having been so cautious. Soon enough Washington would be reeling from 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. In this changed America, the loyalist death list came to seem remote and somewhat abstract. Northern Ireland might be in the thick of the difficult and drawn-out process of implementing the Good Friday Agreement, but Americans were now focused on danger on the home front.

  One American who continued to keep a watchful eye on developments in Northern Ireland was, of course, Bruce Morrison. He returned to Belfast, as well as Dublin and London, many times in the years following the 1998 agreement. Late in 2001, he went to 10 Downing Street in London, where the prime minister lives and works, to meet with Tony Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell about a range of issues on Northern Ireland, including, as always, arms decommissioning. While Morrison was waiting in the small area in the small place that is Number 10—a fraction of the size of the West Wing of the White House—Tony Blair walked by; he and Morrison greeted each other and spoke briefly about Northern Ireland. Morrison was impressed with Blair: He had a comprehensive knowledge of the situation and an instant ability to discuss it in depth, even though he certainly hadn’t been briefed for their chance meeting. It was clear to Morrison that Blair was determined to stay on top of things and do everything necessary to successfully conclude the post–Good Friday processes. Morrison was happy to see that Blair had fully taken the torch from Bill Clinton and that the peace process was in such good hands.

  From the perspective of more than fifteen years of post–Good Friday life, fundamental change and important progress are apparent, although much of it seemed dripping slow as it was unfolding. It has been a winding road to the higher ground that Good Friday brought within reach, with dips and turns, but the clear direction has been upward.

  In June of 1998, soon after the Northern Ireland referendum ratified the Good Friday Agreement, elections were held for the new assembly. The moderate parties—the unionist UUP and the nationalist SDLP—continued as the leaders from their respective communities, although it wasn’t until December of 1999 that the powers of government, held for so many years by the British, devolved to Northern Ireland. But just weeks later, in February
, the unionist parties, citing more delay in decommissioning, refused to take office with Sinn Féin. That made it impossible for the devolved government to function, and the British government retook control. But the following May, after the IRA pledged to put its weapons “beyond use,” the British once again restored governing power to Northern Ireland, although the political atmosphere would remain charged by the efforts of the UUP to be seen as tough on the republicans in an effort to keep its harder-line DUP unionist rival at bay.

  All this back-and-forth reflected the basic reality that, as a self-governing political enterprise charged with operating for the benefit of both of its populations, Northern Ireland was a neophyte. It was attempting to do what it never had to do, nor sought to do, prior to the Good Friday Agreement. Northern Ireland had been directly governed by London for more than twenty-five years. Unionist politicians had come of age with little more to do than tell each other how awful the republicans were. The result was that those who were now in the business of governing had sparse experience with real negotiations and real deal-making on their own, with no George Mitchell at the helm.

  Complicating matters further was the elaborate system of checks and balances built into the governing system that was, of necessity, part of the Good Friday Agreement. Each side knew how easily the minority could be overwhelmed by an unchecked majority. The Catholics knew it because that had been their lot in Northern Ireland from the beginning. The Protestants knew it because they were well aware of how they’d treated the Catholics—and, as they contemplated a Northern Ireland in which population changes could leave them in the minority, they worried they would be treated the same way. So when the agreement was made, each side demanded what would in effect be a veto. The result was a system so sclerotic that it makes American political gridlock seem like not much more than a speed bump.

  And yet, despite these formidable obstacles, the Northern Ireland that emerged has made very real progress since that historic accord.

  In 1998, a commission led by Christopher Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong, was established to make recommendations for changes in Northern Ireland’s policing and justice systems—one of the central grievances that had fueled the Troubles. The commission issued its report in 1999, but there was no agreement on implementing its recommendations. Policing and justice issues would remain unresolved for several more years.

  Also in 1998, the British created a Parades Commission with the power to reroute parades that were a regular source of sectarian conflict. Unionist parades held every July 12 celebrating the victory of the Protestant King William at Boyne in 1690, in which they insisted on marching through Catholic neighborhoods that didn’t want them there, especially at night, had been particularly troublesome. Morrison says that in time the commission became a real success, but he stresses the importance of full respect for its authority from all quarters. When Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Theresa Villiers, spoke of creating a special process for particularly controversial Orange parades through Catholic areas of the Ardoyne region of North Belfast, Morrison felt strongly that the better approach would have been for the British to ask how they could help the commission that was already in place do its work.

  In 2001, there was a disturbing preview of the challenges inherent in addressing the deep separation between Northern Ireland’s two populations—a segregation that has in some respects become more pronounced since the Good Friday Agreement. Holy Cross, a Catholic primary school for girls in the Ardoyne region, found itself in the midst of a loyalist neighborhood following population shifts that were themselves the cause of controversy and hard feelings involving claims that many had been run out of places where they had lived for years. Morning after morning, the front entrance of the school became the scene of frightening, sometimes violent, demonstrations. It looked like the school integration conflicts in the American South in the years following Brown v. Board of Education.

  The Holy Cross demonstrations continued for months and into the following year. It was highly traumatic for the children, many of whom were quite young, and the loyalist community couldn’t have looked worse. “I am ashamed to be associated with these people,” said David Ervine, a great loyalist political leader. “The protest is wrong.”

  In October of 2002, more conflicts, including arrests related to an alleged IRA spy ring in the assembly, and unionist threats to quit the government unless Sinn Féin was expelled, led to the imposition, yet again, of direct rule from London. (The alleged spy ring was later found to be a concoction by a mole in the pay of the British; all charges were dropped.)

  Decommissioning and related issues dragged on, but actually great progress was being made, largely due to the dogged efforts of Canadian general John de Chastelain, who had been co-chairman of both commissions headed by George Mitchell. In 2005, de Chastelain reported that the IRA armaments had been fully put “beyond use.” It was in time learned that this had been done primarily by putting disassembled weapons into barrels that were then filled with concrete and buried under more concrete. The IRA agreed to permit the observation of this process by two clergymen—one Catholic and one Protestant— but would not allow any photographs or video, which they felt would make it look as if they had surrendered. No surrender and no turnover of arms had always been overriding principles for the IRA, and they were able to decommission with those principles intact. Additionally, by keeping the process under their own control and completing it in their own time, they made the limits of Sinn Féin’s influence over the IRA clear. This would improve Sinn Féin’s prospects in coming elections and ultimately help give the DUP a way to make a power-sharing agreement with them.

  In the summer of 2005, the IRA issued a formal stand-down order to all of its members, officially ceasing to operate as a paramilitary force. It announced that it would henceforth rely exclusively on politics to pursue its goals.

  The IRA stand-down was a huge and hopeful step, but progress on other fronts continued to be stymied. In 2006, representatives of the political parties met with the British and Irish governments at St. Andrews in Scotland in an attempt to hammer out a plan that would allow things to move ahead. The result was the St. Andrews Agreement, which included several key provisions: The Northern Ireland Assembly would be restored, the new police service recommendations by the Patten commission would be accepted by Sinn Féin, and the DUP would agree to share executive power with the republicans.

  This last element was carried out in magnificent fashion when the DUP and Sinn Féin became the two top parties in Northern Ireland following the 2007 elections. Ian Paisley—that firebrand, Dr. No— became the first minister, and Martin McGuinness, the former IRA commander, became the deputy first minister. Both men worked so well and so affably together that they came to be called the Chuckle Brothers. Before long, their relationship deepened into one of genuine respect and affection. McGuinness said that his secret was to act toward Paisley as he acted toward his own grandfather. Dr. No had become the key to the success of the Good Friday Agreement he had so intensely opposed.

  Another important step forward came in 2010, when the Saville Commission issued its findings on the 1972 Bloody Sunday tragedy in Derry. Previously, official inquiry had been limited to a British whitewash just weeks after the shootings. In early 1998, more than twenty-five years later, a new investigation led by Lord Saville, a prominent and widely respected jurist, was ordered to reexamine the episode. After years of extensive testimony and detailed investigation, the commission found that the British army had indeed killed fourteen unarmed demonstrators without justification. British prime minister David Cameron apologized in Parliament the same day the report was issued.

  Also in 2010, the British turned control of the Northern Ireland police and justice systems over to the government of Northern Ireland. At long last, these systems were under control of a Northern Ireland in which both populations had major voices.

  There have also been encouraging developmen
ts on the symbolic front. Queen Elizabeth visited Ireland in 2011 and laid a wreath to the fallen republicans at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin. In 2012, she and Martin McGuinness shared a handshake in Belfast that was front page news around the world. The queen’s outfit that day was a vivid fresh green—a fascinating choice for the occasion. But despite its obvious symbolism, the outfit seemed to pass without comment. Journalist David McKittrick later said that in Belfast, the queen is beyond criticism in such matters.

  In 2014, McGuinness was invited to a state dinner at Windsor Castle in honor of Irish president Michael Higgins. He, of course, was not beyond criticism, and he took heat from both sides: Unionists said that inviting an IRA man was a disgrace, and some republicans accused him of selling out. But he looked elegant in his white tie and tails and had a fine time.

  Not all symbolic issues developed in a positive way. In 2011, the nationalist parties won more seats on the Belfast city council than the long-dominant unionists, although they didn’t win a majority. The nationalists wanted to stop flying the Union Jack over city hall but didn’t have the votes. In late 2012, they supported a compromise by the small Alliance Party that would allow the flag to fly for the eighteen days of the year that it was being flown over Westminster. Unsurprisingly, the unionists, who had been flying it daily since 1906, were angry, and tumultuous demonstrations followed, continuing throughout 2013 and into 2014. An effort to broker a resolution was made by George Bush’s envoy to Northern Ireland, Richard Haass, who had originally been an opponent of Clinton’s involvement in Northern Ireland. Haass’s involvement in the flag dispute helped but fell short of fully resolving it. Morrison felt that a more vigorous practical-politics approach—expanding the scope of issues beyond the symbolic to include practical things that would give those on each side something important to them—would have yielded better results.