by Blair, Tony
Why on earth did I think it could be settled? Jonathan Powell always used to put it down to what he referred to (I think jokingly) as my Messiah complex, i.e. I thought I could do what no one else could. In fact, it wasn’t that. Or, at least, it may have been, but there was another reason too: I thought it was no longer in anyone’s interest to tolerate conflict, not in Northern Ireland, but more important, not outside it. I thought the whole thing had become ridiculously old-fashioned and out of touch with the times in which the island of Ireland lived.
You might wonder what I mean by ‘no longer in anyone’s interest to tolerate conflict’. When was it ever? Of course, for the people inside Northern Ireland it never was, but it was fuelled by bigotry and by the pain of the Troubles. For the external world, Northern Ireland was a dispute in which too often people could express their emotional connection without ever having to live with the consequences, rather like the Palestinian cause. I don’t mean by this that they actively sought to prolong the conflict, but they saw it pretty much from one side only. It was a rallying point. For communities with an Irish pedigree, it reminded them of their roots. They didn’t really think it could be solved, so they never rallied to making peace.
Parts of the Irish-American community were a prime example. Thousands of miles from a lawlessness which they would never have tolerated for an instant, they would reflect on Irish history and folklore, the iniquities of the British, the cause of their kith and kin, and happily raise money used to kill innocent civilians and British soldiers.
The gallant attempts by Gladstone, Asquith and then Lloyd George to resolve the issue by devolution within the United Kingdom – which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries undoubtedly could have worked (and nearly did) – were repeatedly broken on a wheel of sometimes opportunistic and always prejudiced rabble-rousing by Unionists and Tory MPs. Even great figures like F. E. Smith were prepared to use the dispute to cripple a United Kingdom government they did not like. For the politics of the Irish Republic, it was a useful unifying theme, giving point and purpose to the fledgling state as it gradually built itself. In the Second World War, Ireland was neutral, even mildly anti-British, though many brave and great Irishmen volunteered to fight the Nazis.
But times were changing as the modern world took form around us. Old attitudes clashed with new realities which had a youthful vigour. American statesmen like Teddy Kennedy began to dream of an Ireland at peace. Republican congressmen, who worshipped Margaret Thatcher and lauded her friendship with President Reagan, began to think it a trifle odd that they were supporting people who were actively trying to kill her. For British governments of whatever persuasion, the drain on resources and military manpower which Northern Ireland required made any prospect of peace extremely attractive.
But most of all, the Irish had changed, and with it attitudes to them. It is hard to understand now how the Irish were regarded by many British and Unionists. They were the butt of jokes, all revolving around stupidity. They were dismissively labelled ‘the bog Irish’, to be employed as a builder’s labourer but not in a bank. They were often regarded, I am ashamed to say, rather as some whites in South Africa regarded blacks in the era of apartheid: as inherently inferior. It seems incredible now, yet at one time it was true. And their politics were defined by the legacy of their relationship with Britain.
In the 1980s and later under Albert Reynolds with Bertie Ahern as a reforming finance minister, the Irish embarked on a remarkable process of self-transformation. They joined the European Union and with the benefit of its generous programme of development, which they used with adroit intelligence, the country modernised. Dublin became a thriving go-ahead European city, and the economy boomed. U2 became one of the world’s biggest bands, Bob Geldof was a hero, Roy Keane became the best football player of his time. Irish business, Irish art, Irish culture, in short Irish everything took off.
In the space of a few years it was no longer the backward old South that was looked down upon, but the North. The South was sprinting down the track towards the future, while the people of Northern Ireland were hanging around the starting blocks arguing about Protestants and Catholics in a way that obscured the race ahead in mists of irrelevance.
This was the factor that I thought gave us a chance of peace. For the Republic this was no longer a dispute to be clung to as a unifying symbol of Irish identity, but a painful and unwelcome reminder of Ireland’s past. For decades, also, Unionists could point to Irish economic backwardness and their cultural and religious differences as making a fit between the two impossible. Now these elements were either fading or being reversed.
Even before taking office, I was working out a strategy. One of the first things I did on becoming Labour leader was to change our long-standing policy position on Northern Ireland. The Labour Party policy had for years been to try to negotiate a peace deal between Unionists and Nationalists on the grounds that we believed in a united Ireland and could be a persuader for it. It didn’t take a political mastermind to realise that such a position wholly alienated Unionist opinion, and in doing so disabled any attempt to negotiate a deal based on that premise.
I knew I could never get a policy change through the party’s usual policymaking machinery – certainly at that time – so I’m afraid I just popped up one morning on the Today programme not long after becoming leader and announced we would henceforth have a new policy: neutrality on the issue of a united Ireland or a United Kingdom. I also replaced Kevin McNamara – a really lovely man but wedded to the old policy – with Mo Mowlam, who had held a junior Northern Ireland position under John Smith.
I then put us basically in a bipartisan position with John Major, fully supporting his foray into peacemaking. At the time, the bipartisan approach was very rare, partly because of the sharp moves to left and right of Labour and Tories, but also because it was thought to be bad politics. John Smith, however, had cannily backed Major in talking secretly with the IRA.
I decided to make it a full-blown demonstration not just of a change in Northern Ireland policy, but of a change in approach to being in Opposition. As I expected, people thought it mature politics; no one believed Northern Ireland should be a focus of partisan point-scoring. We held this approach up to and through the 1997 election. I cultivated ties with David Trimble and the Unionists. I sent messages showing interest in Sinn Fein. I met Bertie Ahern, also a Leader of the Opposition, and we got on immediately like the proverbial house on fire. The Taoiseach John Bruton was a great guy but was plainly going to lose.
Our victory of 1 May 1997 had released new energy everywhere. Challenges that mired a tired and psychologically demoralised government now inspired an energetic and confident team to have a go. I often reflect that such audacity could only be given wing in the first flush of enthusiasm that greets a profound moment of change.
The first few weeks taught me a lot about the nature and complexity of this challenge. While I was at my first European summit, news came through that the IRA had killed two off-duty police officers, shot in the head as they walked down the street. Two lives ended; two families in mourning. I was repelled. I had sent warning messages to the Sinn Fein leadership before the election. It didn’t seem a wildly optimistic start.
I had also decided that my first major speech as prime minister would be on the subject of Northern Ireland and peace. I had been mulling over what to say for some time even before the election, and had talked about it with David Trimble. Once we were in Downing Street, the diplomat John Holmes, who had done sterling work under Major, joined us and became an integral part of the team. Jonathan Powell was the key operative in the government effort from the outset.
I was never entirely sure why or how Jonathan became so important on the issue, but he did. You can always exaggerate in such situations and say ‘Had it not been for so-and-so this would never have happened’, but in this instance it is no less than the unvarnished truth. Without him, there would have been no peace. Every talent he ha
d – and he has many – seemed to be displayed to best effect in pursuit of this peace agreement. He was diligent, quick-witted, insightful, persistent, inventive and above all trusted – in so far as anyone was – by both sides. He and Adams struck up a genuine friendship. The Unionists respected him and he got the best out of the Northern Ireland Office that all parties affected to despise and which was the object of innumerable complaints, but which in fact did a superb job in well-nigh impossible circumstances. His invariable calmness was also a great foil for the mood swings which Northern Ireland produced in me.
I say invariable, but there was one meeting which I had on the Drumcree madness when he erupted in a way I had never seen before. The Drumcree people were the unreasonable of the unreasonable of the unreasonable. In the premier league of unreasonableness, they left every other faction, in every other dispute, gasping in their wake. There was one guy, Breandan MacCionnaith, who represented the residents of the Garvaghy Road . . . But first let me explain Drumcree in a nutshell.
The Unionist marches often went through Catholic and even Republican areas. Not unreasonably the Nationalists and Republicans didn’t like it. Somewhat unreasonably they wanted them banned. Wholly unreasonably the marches would provoke violence. Of the several hypersensitive routes, Drumcree was the most sensitive. Part of the route of the annual march there went down over a hundred yards of Garvaghy Road, a highly Republican neighbourhood. There was a Parades Commission that had to decide whether to allow it or not, and then the police, poor things, had to keep order.
The whole thing was a nightmare. Banning it caused tens of thousands of Unionists to take to the streets. Allowing it caused riots in Republican areas. Part of the peace process was trying to resolve it. The residents were led by this Breandan MacCionnaith. He was so unreasonable that in the end I became rather intrigued by him, much to Jonathan’s disgust. He took unreasonableness to an art form. He conceded nothing, and I mean nothing. I’m not just talking about the substance of meetings, I mean where a meeting should be held. Who should be there. Who shouldn’t be there. When it began. When it ended. What its purpose was. Who spoke first. Who spoke last. Who spoke in between first and last.
A great belief of mine is that when you are negotiating with someone, the first thing is to set the atmosphere at ease; signify a little glimmer of human feeling; exchange a few pleasantries; and above all start by saying something utterly uncontroversial with which disagreement is impossible. Get the other person’s head nodding. It’s that nod which establishes rapport, and which is an early, tiny sign that all is not lost. I might say: ‘I know you feel strongly about this.’ Well, of course they do; that’s why there’s a dispute; and there would be a nod.
Breandan MacCionnaith was completely and totally nodless. If I said to him, ‘I know you feel strongly about this,’ he would say, ‘I don’t feel more strongly about this than anything else.’ So I’d say, ‘Yes of course, sorry, but obviously you do have strong feelings.’ ‘Who are you to tell me about my feelings?’ he would reply. When I said that the purpose of the meeting with Orangemen and residents was that we could resolve the dispute satisfactorily for everyone so that peace broke out, he said, not a bit of it; the purpose was to dispatch the Orange Order and their oppressive provocation of ordinary decent residents on the Garvaghy Road to the dustbin of history, or some such. In the end I would say, ‘What about . . .’ and then pause, just to hear him start to say ‘No’ before I’d even explained the proposition. If I tell you Breandan MacCionnaith didn’t stand out dramatically for his unreasonableness (though he did ultimately clinch gold medal), you might understand how unreasonable they all were.
Strangely it was with the Orange Order that Jonathan lost his cool. We were having one of those interminable, circular and unproductive meetings around whether, where, how the march might be done, and the Orange Order (in the main fairly polite) were making their points. One of them made a childish remark about my involvement. Suddenly I became aware of a rumbling to my right followed by Jonathan leaping to his feet, virtually throwing himself across the table, face red with anger, shouting: ‘How dare you talk to the British prime minister like that? How dare you?’
We were all speechless with amazement. Except Jonathan, who was full of speech, somewhat repetitive but making his point with great clarity. The Orange Order chap was quite shaken. So was I. As I say, I’d never seen him like that before. We had some words afterwards along the lines of ‘You should have taken your tablets this morning’, and I’ve never seen him like that since. No one ever quite behaved normally around the issue of Northern Ireland. The incident also raised an interesting reflection on the nature of the job: you have to absorb a large amount of abuse. Not crude shouting down or protests, but your motives constantly questioned or traduced, your words misunderstood or misrepresented, your attempts to do good seen as attempts either to further your own interests or even to do bad.
I had a constant problem of trust, mostly with Unionists but often with the other side too. It derived partly from the necessarily tricky path that had to be woven through the hazardous thickets of Northern Irish politics, and deals of every description – side, secret and surface – abounded; but it was more to do with the general point that people find it hard to accept political leaders might genuinely be trying to help. So, in respect of Northern Ireland, you might think the involvement relatively selfless: the conflict was the issue in Northern Ireland (no Labour voters there) but not really an issue in United Kingdom politics (indeed, the more you solve it the less salient it becomes); fantastically difficult; inordinately time-consuming. In terms of pure political self-interest, stakes were high if you failed, low if you succeeded.
Yet all the way through the process, the good faith of the government, never mind its good government, was in question. In the end I decided people operate at two levels in relation to political leadership. At one level, they vest all their hopes, expectations and, most of all, once in government, their frustrations in the leader. You are the focal point, and therefore the focal point for criticism. At this level you aren’t measured against a reasonable yardstick but against perfection. Unsurprisingly, you fall short.
However, at another level, less visible but real, people indeed take a more mature view and if you are really trying, you get credit for it. Nevertheless, as I say, a great capacity for absorbing abuse was a necessary part of the job.
There was another trait that served me well in Northern Ireland. I don’t really get on my high horse. I am not big on the ‘dignity of office’ stuff. I rested my authority on motivating and persuading people, not frightening them. It’s possible I took this too far, at times, and it may also be true that on occasions a bit of hauteur and bossing, even bullying, would have served me better, but there it is: it’s my nature. In Northern Ireland, it worked. People could be really very insulting without much provocation, yet if you fell out with them over it, the consequences could be unpredictable. So by and large I didn’t.
In those first months after taking office, I was trying to give shape to our strategy. I made the speech at the Royal Ulster Agricultural Show on 16 May and deliberately set out to woo and bring onside Unionist opinion. The setting itself was indicative – right in the heart of the Unionist community. Acting on David Trimble’s advice, I made it clear I valued the Union and then, in a passage that caused a lot of sucking through teeth, said that I doubted we would see a united Ireland in the lifetime of anyone present. Since some of those present were in their twenties, it was quite a bold pro-Union statement. It was the weirdest place to give a major speech, in a tent where outside prize bulls jostled with ruddy-faced farmers while the potential future of the land was being made.
Despite the murders of the two police officers (and the IRA sent messages essentially saying it had been unauthorised), we gave the IRA five weeks to renew the ceasefire, which in the past eighteen months had lapsed. This they did on 19 July 1997.
Weeks later the British and Irish gove
rnments agreed to establish an Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD). The issue of decommissioning was one very unfortunate legacy from the previous administration which was to become a big ball and chain round our legs in the years to come. Under Unionist pressure, John Major had agreed that a vital precondition of peace and power-sharing was for the IRA not merely to embrace peace but to decommission their weapons. Of course, at one level this is entirely reasonable: if you are for peace, you don’t need weapons; but on another level, it carried an implication for the IRA of surrender, of not merely embracing peace but of apologising for ever having been to war, and it complicated their internal management horribly. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were trying to bring their movement with them. Like all such situations, there was a spectrum of Republican opinion. There were real hardliners. They would stay hardliners. The important thing was not to let them have traction on the middle ground. The prospect of the IRA being forced to destroy their weapons gave them such traction, but there it was; to renege on John Major’s commitment was impossible, so it just had to be managed. The IICD bought us some time and space.
George Mitchell had been doing great work drawing up principles of non-violence and common positions – a commitment to exclusively peaceful means for all parties in government, for example, things that were broad but set a framework for the much bigger negotiation to come – and had been chairing talks before we came to office. Sinn Fein immediately said they would abide by the Mitchell principles, but the IRA refused to give the same commitment. That didn’t exactly reassure Unionists, but we persevered and identified three strands to the negotiation which had begun when John Major was prime minister: how Northern Ireland would be governed under a devolved system of power-sharing; relations between the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland (East–West); and relations between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland (North–South).