BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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successful enterprise would rely heavily on a third ‘moderniser’. In June
1997 Bertie Ahern became Taoiseach for the first time. And it would be
Ahern’s ground-breaking engagement with Trimble – and, in particular,
his subsequent willingness to withdraw the Irish constitutional claim to
Northern Ireland in face of fierce resistance within the Irish system – that
would finally enable Blair to put the Union on a secure footing.
It would be a very different Union, with compulsory power-sharing
between unionists and nationalists and republicans, an effective dual premiership at Stormont, checks, balances and mutual vetoes in an unprecedented system of devolved government bound to the principles of
equality and ‘parity of esteem’, and tied to an over-arching North/South
and East/West British–Irish framework. In strict constitutional terms,
however, Blair’s eventual bequest would give unionism the best deal
available from any British Prime Minister in fifty years.
As the original civil rights crisis erupted in the late 1960s, Prime
Minister Harold Wilson actively pursued a fifteen-year plan for Irish
unification. Heath’s government was seen as instinctively anti-unionist
and abolished the discredited Stormont Parliament in 1972. And the
‘most unionist’ of them all, Thatcher, had excluded unionists from the
process leading to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement that for the first time
formally recognised Dublin’s interest in, and right to be consulted about,
Northern Ireland.
The subsequent Belfast Agreement secured by Blair and Ahern on
Good Friday, 10 April 1998, would trigger the biggest crisis within unionism since the early 1970s, and eventually see Paisley’s Democratic
Unionists supplant the once hegemonic Ulster Unionist Party. Yet by May
2007 DUP ministers in Belfast would be echoing Trimble, loudly trumpeting that Northern Ireland’s constitutional position was secure, and
likely to grow even more so following the restoration of devolved government (though this would seem at least questionable).
Perhaps British policy would have naturally evolved in this way after
the IRA abandoned its violent campaign. Ironically, too, the IRA’s violence had forced a fundamental Irish rethink of what Garret FitzGerald
describes as ‘the counter-productive and provocative anti-Partition
policy’ to which the parties in the Republic had committed themselves
between 1949 and 1969: ‘It also forced a recognition that the security
interests of the Irish State required a stabilisation of the Northern Irish
polity within the UK.’6 The fact, however, is that it only finally happened
on Blair’s watch.
The hand of history
The Prime Minister would be mocked mercilessly after first feeling the
‘hand of history’ during an emergency dash to the province in April 1998.
His task then was to save the inter-party talks chaired by former US
Senator George Mitchell. With only days left to what would prove the first
of many British–Irish ‘deadlines’, the Ulster Unionists and the moderate
Alliance Party had reacted angrily to the first draft of an agreement presented by the independent international chairman. ‘If Tony Blair wants
an agreement he’d better get over here fast’ was the terse message from
then Alliance leader John (Lord) Alderdice. Trimble’s private communication to Blair’s Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell, meanwhile, ensured the
Downing Street cavalry were already on their way. And of course Powell
himself was a vital member of the elite troop. Acting as Blair’s ‘shock
absorber’ and ‘early warning system’, as well as ‘interface’ for Blair’s
Northern Ireland strategy across other departments of government, this
16 Garret FitzGerald article, Irish Times, 19 May 2007.
:
unusual ‘civil servant’ would also at times be expected to go to places and
talk to people when and where prevailing political conditions decreed
that a Prime Minister or Secretary of State could not.
Ironically, given what was to pass in 2007, a crowd of Paisleyites were
on hand to jeer Blair’s arrival at Hillsborough Castle and, they hoped, to
witness his failure. There was seemingly no guarantee that he would
succeed.
Senator Mitchell would later suggest that Paisley’s decision to boycott
the original inter-party talks actually cut Trimble the necessary slack with
which to make the first landmark Agreement from which all else would
subsequently flow. However, there was little sign of it on 7 April as
Mowlam welcomed her Prime Minister to the Queen’s official residence
in Northern Ireland. Blair was pessimistic, his communications director
Alastair Campbell apparently even more so.7 Yet in an episode that might
have made even the legendary spin-doctor blush, Blair appeared to experience one of his ‘Princess Diana’ moments. Just in time for the early
evening news and with no hint of embarrassment, the Prime Minister
solemnly declared: ‘Now is not the time for soundbites, we can leave
those at home. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.’
This was classic Blair, oblivious to ridicule, commanding attention to
that ‘big picture’. And ‘history’ would indeed be made just three days
later, and less than twenty-four hours beyond the original deadline. A full
quarter of a century after the then Ulster Unionist and SDLP leaders
Brian Faulkner and Gerry Fitt had attempted it in the Sunningdale
Agreement, here was a power-sharing settlement to be driven by the constitutional ‘centre parties’ in what Seamus Mallon – Hume’s subsequent
nominee for Deputy First Minister in the first Executive – would characterise as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’.
In spite of Hume’s pre-eminence – and that he and Trimble would subsequently share the Nobel Peace Prize – Mallon was the acclaimed SDLP
star of this negotiation. Like many others he wept tears of joy on the final
morning after what he described as ‘the greatest night’ in a long political
career.
The tears were, of course, fuelled in part by the sheer exhaustion of
some of the principals. The conflicting briefings of the rival parties also
pointed to what Adams correctly predicted would be ‘trench warfare’ still
to come. Yes, it was possible that day to anticipate the light after Northern
Ireland’s long darkness. Yet, as a triumphant and finally vindicated Hume
17 Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 131.
reminded, this was not so much the end, or even the beginning of the
end, more the end of the beginning.
From the outset controversy attached to a ‘sidebar letter’ given by Blair
to Trimble even as Mitchell prepared to unveil the final Agreement. In
it the Prime Minister assured the UUP leader that if the Agreement’s
provisions for excluding ministers who failed to honour the commitment
to exclusively peaceful means proved ineffective he (Blair) would change
them. This spoke directly to continuing unionist concerns about the
‘conditional’ nature of the republican movement’s participation in the
political process and, of course, to the issue of republican weapons that
had dogged the process since the first IRA ceasefire.
It would become a commonplace that the question of ‘decommissioning’ had been a particularly unhelpful invention by the Major government. In fact, Tanaiste Spring had been among the first to suggest that
ceasefires would have to be followed by ‘a handing up of arms’. Echoing
this, Major and Mayhew argued that disarmament was rendered necessary by the IRA’s refusal to confirm that its cessation was ‘permanent’ and
intended to hold in all circumstances.
In what would become a familiar theme explaining many subsequent
controversies from the republican perspective, Adams and McGuinness
characterised the decommissioning demand as evidence of an agenda
devised by British ‘securocrats’ (MI5 and other servants of the secret
state) intent on republican humiliation and defeat. However, the
response from Sir John Chilcot, former Permanent Secretary at the NIO,
is compelling and accords with the objective political realities. According
to him, decommissioning was ‘the snake coiled at the heart of the peace
process’ and ‘an inescapable physical and political problem which had to
be addressed in the full knowledge of all the republican history, sentiment
and resistance surrounding it’. For Trimble, certainly, it became the
litmus test of the republican commitment to the Mitchell Principles of
exclusively peaceful and democratic means.8 This translated into a UUP
policy proclaiming the simple message, ‘no guns, no government’.
Unfortunately for Trimble, it would never be so simple. Secretary of
State Mowlam eventually finessed the issue, declaring IRA and loyalist
paramilitary disarmament ‘an obligation’ under the Agreement. However,
18 Senator Mitchell was originally asked to head an international body to report on the
decommissioning issue. On 22 January 1996 it said that prior decommissioning would
not happen but suggested that decommissioning could take place in parallel with political
negotiations. It also set out a list of anti-violence statements – the ‘Mitchell Principles’ –
that parties in the negotiations should accept.
:
she and Blair sided with Sinn Fein, the SDLP and the Irish against Trimble –
upholding their view that the Agreement did not stipulate decommissioning as a ‘pre-condition’ for Sinn Fein’s entry into government.
They were right, and the seeds were sown of Trimble’s eventual downfall. The Agreement placed an obligation on the parties to use such influence as they had to secure decommissioning by May 2000. And Mallon at
one point – in an initiative conspicuously not taken up by the rest of his
party or the Irish government – expressed a willingness to see Sinn Fein
ministers expelled from office if the IRA did not meet the May 2000 target
date. Trimble, moreover, would contend that he never abandoned the ‘no
guns, no government’ policy – continuing his effort to disarm the IRA
through the suspensions of the Executive forced by him in 2000 and 2002.
However, his failure to make it a condition of the Agreement foretold the
scenario in November 1999 when he was finally forced to ‘jump first’ into
government with Sinn Fein, albeit with a post-dated letter of resignation
that would oblige Mowlam’s successor Peter Mandelson to impose the
first suspension just six weeks later.
In taking the power to do so, Mandelson faced stern opposition from
Sinn Fein and the SDLP, as well as the Irish government and the Clinton
administration. They viewed this exercise of British sovereign power as a
clear breach of the international treaty that was the Belfast Agreement. The
calculation in Downing Street and the NIO, however, was that they had no
choice, since there was no guarantee that Trimble, if allowed to resign,
would secure a unionist majority in the Assembly for his re-election as
First Minister.
The Belfast Agreement had won a spectacularly fair wind by way of
popular endorsement in the dual referendums held simultaneously in
May 1998 in Northern Ireland and the Republic. Private polling ordered
by Tom Kelly – then Mowlam’s communications director, later to become
Blair’s official spokesman and a significant player in relation to Northern
Ireland policy – suggested the vote in Northern Ireland could be lost.
Senior SDLP and Irish figures would complain bitterly that Blair took terrible liberties with the Agreement in order to assuage unionist doubts
about decommissioning and the proposed release of paramilitary prisoners. But they would at least acknowledge that it was Blair’s campaigning
zeal – and the solemn ‘pledges’ written in his own hand, albeit broken at
great cost to Trimble – that saved the day.
Blair, however, could not return to the fray for the ‘internal’ Northern
Ireland elections to the new Assembly the following month. And it
was at this point – beset by critics in his own party led by MP Jeffrey
Donaldson – that Trimble fell short of a secure majority and found
himself effectively ‘holed below the water line’.
True to form, Paisley, then still the minority unionist leader, had characterised the Agreement as another ‘sell out’ on the road to a united
Ireland. In this, and his subsequently successful effort to destroy Trimble’s
majority leadership, he would be greatly assisted by Adams’ repeated
assertion that the Agreement provided for a ‘transition’ to Irish unity.
Trimble’s counter-argument was that the IRA and Sinn Fein had in fact
been fought to a standstill by the British state and brought to accept a
‘partitionist’ settlement. To his mind, Adams’ talk of transition to unity
was strictly for the birds – necessary rhetoric to keep the republican
troops on board as the republican movement made the all-important
‘transition’ from terror to democracy. In this, crucially, Trimble was bolstered by the acceptance of the principle of ‘consent’ for any future
change in the constitutional position – and Ahern’s final amendment of
Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution withdrawing the Republic’s
formal claim to the territory of Northern Ireland.
After the high-water mark of the referendums, however, unionists
showed an increasing tendency to believe Adams and Paisley over any
assurance by Trimble and Blair. First Minister Trimble would also be
further undone both by the explicit provisions of the Agreement and –
more corrosive still – by his failure to have secured on decommissioning
that which he said was necessary to sustain unionist confidence.
The release of loyalist and republican prisoners and the reform of the
Royal Ulster Constabulary – complete with the removal of its royal title –
strengthened and emboldened Trimble’s internal enemies and DUP
rivals. To which might be added that Trimble himself often appeared
conflicted about the Agreement he had signed. Something of the intense
pressure on the man was certainly reflected by his initial welcome for the
legislation effecting the prisoner releases, and his subsequent decision to
vote against it in the Commons. Policing reform was likewise always
going to be neuralgic from the unionist perspective. Yet Trimble and his
party appeared in denial about the really quite predictable proposals of
the international commission led by former Conservative Party chairman
Chris (Lord) Patten.
The Patten Commission was specifically tasked to advise on the culture
and ethos of the policing service, and it was widely expected, at
minimum, that Patten would propose the removal of titles and emblems
exclusively identifying the police with the symbolism of the British state.
Long after it was credible to do so, Ulster Unionists maintained that since
:
Northern Ireland’s constitutional position had been accepted the
symbols of its Britishness could hardly be in dispute. Nationalists and
republicans countered that they had not made the Agreement in order
themselves to become unionists, and that the Agreement established their
right to regard themselves as Irish while promising ‘parity of esteem’ for
their tradition. For all the furore, critics of Trimble’s handling of this
issue would also note that, while denouncing Patten, his party (and
Paisley’s DUP) took their positions on the new Policing Board and cooperated enthusiastically with the new dispensation. Indeed Trimble would
subsequently venture that its ultimate success would see the recruitment
of officers to the ‘new’ Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) from
within the republican community.9
In the final event, however, it was the admitted opacity10 over decommissioning – and the inevitable requirement that Trimble ‘jump first’
into government with Sinn Fein, having said that he would not – that
marked the beginning of the loss of trust that would contribute to
Paisley’s triumph in the second Assembly elections held in November
2003.
Trimble refuses to concede that he might have been ‘suckered’ by Blair
and suggests that – even as it was being hailed around the world – he
regarded the Belfast Agreement as a work-in-progress. ‘I knew there were