A JOURNEY

by Blair, Tony

  There was never again a negotiation as comprehensive as at Castle Buildings, but there was a constant stream of meetings over one, two or three days, which we usually tried to hold in a nice place. Looking back, it reads like a roll call of stately homes: Hillsborough, Weston Park, Leeds Castle, St Andrews. The parties always feigned reluctance to be taken out of their natural habitat in order to have the discussions to move the process forward, but I had a hunch they were probably like me: if you were going to have a hellish time arguing back and forth, you might as well do it in a pretty environment. It also served to free people up, in some strange way – if we had had the meetings in the middle of Belfast or in Downing Street, people would cling to cherished positions, but somehow a new setting produced a new attitude. Or at least sometimes it did. Anyway, that was my justification for the partnership between the Northern Ireland peace process and something from the pages of Country Life.

  I could go through, by chronology, all the tortured and tortuous steps between June 1998 and May 2007, but you can be grateful that I won’t. Essentially it took another fifteen months or so, even after the June 1998 Assembly election, to get the Executive up and running. The Executive was chosen according to an erudite voting formula named after the Belgian mathematician d’Hondt (whose name can be added to the proud list of famous Belgians). Let me not attempt the impossible by explaining it to you. Suffice to say, it meant Martin McGuinness and another Sinn Fein member, Bairbre de Brún, became ministers, in charge of education and health respectively; itself a historic moment.

  The reason for the delay in setting up the Executive was the endless wrangle over decommissioning. There was also a long-running dispute over policing, because in the new Northern Ireland the RUC had to be changed into something all parts of the province could accept. The process was suspended in February 2000, reinstated in May 2000 and lasted until October 2002 when, again over the IRA disarming and various other things, it was suspended. It stayed that way up to May 2007. In the meantime, Ian Paisley’s DUP overtook David Trimble’s party as the largest Unionist party, and Sinn Fein overtook the SDLP. It took approximately three and a half years of negotiation before the historic day dawned when Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness sat down in government together and we could say the peace process, though not ended, had fructified.

  But throughout the setbacks, the steps forward that were immediately displaced by steps back, the declarations succeeded by new declarations succeeded by clarifying declarations, the accusations against us were legion (usually all sides could agree at least on the perfidy of the British government). We experienced, as a modus vivendi, the roller coaster of emotions in which hope and despair coexisted on an almost daily basis.

  The Good Friday Agreement came to be a vastly different exercise in negotiation, and the document vastly more compendious, than originally thought. If I hadn’t been a (relatively) new prime minister, if I hadn’t ended up, by a mixture of happenstance and good fortune (though it seemed at the beginning ill fortune), taking charge of the negotiation and then passing the point of no return in the search for a solution almost without knowing it, we would probably never have reached agreement.

  Every conflict is, of course, different – each has its own genesis, its opposing traditions, its shared history, its variegated array of dimensions to resolve – so lessons in resolution are difficult to draw, but I came to the conclusion by the end that there were indeed core principles that have a general application. Rather than describe each and every event of the nine years of implementation, let me describe what I think are the central principles of resolution and weave some of the key events of the years into the exegesis.

  1. At the heart of any conflict resolution must be a framework based on agreed principles. One of the things I always try to do in politics is to go back to first principles: what is it really about? What are we trying to achieve? What is at the heart of the matter?

  In Northern Ireland we had a basic disagreement which made the conflict very hard to resolve: one side wanted a united Ireland, the other wanted to remain in the United Kingdom. Sometimes people say to me: Northern Ireland can’t be as hard as the Middle East, surely. In fact, in this respect it is even harder. In the Middle East peace process, there is an agreement as to the eventual outcome: a two-state solution. In Northern Ireland, there is a profound and actually irreconcilable argument whether Northern Ireland should remain in the United Kingdom or unite with the South and become part of the Irish state. Because we couldn’t resolve this issue, we had to search for principles that would allow peace while leaving that issue open for the future.

  It seemed to me that the first principle was really what was called the principle of consent. If a majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted to unite with the South, then there would be unity, but until then, Northern Ireland would be part of the United Kingdom. It was this principle that Republicans could not accept historically, arguing that the partition of Ireland was constitutionally invalid and that the island as a whole should be treated as the voting constituency. Obviously this meant peace was impossible. So they had to be brought to accept the principle of consent, explicitly or implicitly.

  The question then was: on what basis and on what principles would Republicans accept it? The answer, which then underpinned the formation of the Good Friday Agreement, was peace in return for power-sharing and equality, i.e. the IRA war would end if there was a government in Northern Ireland which was truly representative of all parts of the community and there was genuine equality of treatment for Protestants and Catholics alike. Hence the need for reform of the police and the courts, and hence the acknowledgement of the Irish language. Those wanting a united Ireland would have to accept partition, at least until they were in the majority; but in return, within a divided Ireland, they would receive fair and equal treatment and recognition of the aspiration to a united Ireland. Hence also the North–South bodies.

  Once those core principles were agreed, everything else then became a matter of intensely complicated, hard-fought, often malfunctioning engineering, but based on a valid design concept accepted by all parties.

  Without such a framework of principle, progress in conflict resolution is difficult, if not impossible. It is an enduring reference point. It constitutes guidance. It also traps the parties within it. Once they accept the framework they can’t argue things inconsistent with it; or if they do, the inconsistency tells against them. So, if there is an agreed programme for policing, based on the principle of equal treatment, how can there be a paramilitary army operating alongside it? Actually, once the principle of peace for power-sharing is agreed, the rationale for the IRA – founded to create a united Ireland without the consent of the Unionist majority – disintegrates. Likewise, once equality of treatment is accepted as the basis of governing, how could Unionism continue its opposition to Sinn Fein members in the government, provided of course they were committed to peace?

  In this way, establishing the core principles shapes the process and makes the reconciliation possible.

  2. Then to proceed to resolution, the thing needs to be gripped and focused on. Continually. Inexhaustibly. Relentlessly. Day by day by day by day. The biggest problem with the Middle East peace process is that no one has ever gripped it long enough or firmly enough. The gripping is intermittent, and intermittent won’t do. It doesn’t work. If it was gripped, it would be solved.

  In the case of Northern Ireland, we had a very detailed agreement across a range of issues. There were new bodies set up, new strains of working to be executed, a panoply of interlocking arrangements to be carried forward. Each of these then had to be negotiated further in the precise detail, and all of it required a perpetual grip.

  On policing, for example, we had a vast number of unresolved questions. We asked Chris Patten, a former Tory Northern Ireland minister and former chairman of the Tory Party, to head up an inquiry into how it could be done. He did a brilliant job, and his report was the cornerstone for po
licing reform; but believe me, each bit of it was refined and refined again – sometimes to his understandable annoyance – as we tried to keep the see-saw in balance.

  Decommissioning was the real bugbear. For the reasons given, this was extraordinarily sensitive for the IRA. And at one level Unionists understood it was more symbolic than real. In truth, if the IRA destroyed their weapons, they could always buy new ones. In other words, peace didn’t ultimately depend on destroying weapons but on destroying a mindset.

  We had a Roget’s Thesaurus debate about this. In the end, the IRA agreed to ‘put the weapons beyond use’ rather than destroy them – but how to tell if this had been done? We devised a means whereby two international statesmen – Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, and Cyril Ramaphosa, a leading light of the ANC – took on the task of certifying the weapons were ‘beyond use’. Those poor guys were ferried around the Irish countryside examining weapons dumps, which they did with incredible good grace. Cyril was a smart, stand-up guy who I always thought should have been a contender for leadership of the ANC. Martti was that rarity in politics, and in life: a person as modest as he was capable (and he was a very modest man).

  But then how did we know that these weapons were all the weapons? A Canadian general, John de Chastelain, who by coincidence had been to the same school as me in Edinburgh, headed up the IICD. At this time the Executive was suspended. David Trimble was trying to put it back together but needed real action on decommissioning. The IRA were still deeply reluctant. They kept doing only 90 per cent of what was needed, and in this context that might as well have been zero per cent.

  We went to Hillsborough after much negotiation, while John was taken to witness an IRA ‘act of decommissioning’. We were to await the news that the act had taken place – a bit like in the old days when crowds gathered to hear the news that the king’s marriage had been consummated. John then disappeared off our radar – literally. The IRA held him incommunicado, and while they let him witness the act, they wouldn’t let him describe it at all, in any way – a bit like the herald being unable to say with whom the king had been abed, or when exactly it had happened, or what room they were in, or something about the nightdress, or how joyful they were; in other words, anything to give the thing some damn credibility. In this case, the crowd waiting for the news was awash with scepticism bordering on downright distrust.

  Finally poor John turned up to do his heralding. It immediately became clear that he, as a man of integrity and honour, felt bound by the IRA stricture on total confidentiality. We decided nonetheless to field him to a press conference, whose only lasting historic significance is that it should be compulsory viewing for all students of press conferences.

  John gave them the bald statement that in effect it had happened, but he resolutely refused to say more. In answer to the question ‘What was decommissioned?’, he replied: ‘Well, it wasn’t a tank’ – a bit like the herald, when asked with whom the king had consummated his marriage, saying, ‘Well, it wasn’t a donkey.’

  This did then for David Trimble, I’m afraid, and I blame myself for it. Even Sylvia Hermon, one of his MPs, who was the most decent, sensible and clear-sighted of the lot and just a thoroughly lovely woman, said she couldn’t support reinstating the Executive on this basis.

  It was as well that John was a patient man; he required patience in saintly quantities. He was put upon, mucked about, abused, disabused, and took it all in the interests of peace. To his enormous credit, he stuck with it and his reputation as a straight guy was an invaluable part of the whole process. The point is that in each phase of this wrangle – and there were many – the thing had to be gripped throughout.

  3. In conflict resolution, small things can be big things. This is not just about gripping, it is also about putting aside your view of what is important in favour of theirs. And not being prissy about finding such things below your pay grade. Your pay grade covers anything important to the parties you are serving; as defined by them.

  Occasionally in my new role in the Middle East, people say to me: Don’t you find it demeaning to be arguing about where some obscure roadblock should be positioned or whether permission can be given to rebuild two hundred yards of road in some remote part of Palestine? I say: No – if it matters to them, it matters to me.

  I used to know the precise whereabouts and could describe the structure of each and every one of the watchtowers the British Army used in South Armagh. For the IRA this border country was their country, where many of their key activists lived. The watchtowers were a constant source of friction, symbolising that the British Army was still after them. Our military, of course, regarded the towers as a vital point of surveillance, especially on dissident Republicans coming up from the South to commit acts of terror. They could point to attempts foiled and lives saved. So it was delicate and the removal of the towers had to happen bit by bit, and each step had to be focused on.

  For both sides in a dispute, symbols are crucial. They need to be handled with care. In Northern Ireland, each aspect of the new policing regime, from the cap badge through to the precise method of recruiting, had to be painstakingly circumnavigated.

  Very often, such small things can be traded. With each part of the Northern Ireland negotiation, someone was always having to compromise, someone was always upset. In such a dispute, both sides are in a state of more or less permanent complaint, about each other or about the mediator. Both sides think only they are making concessions, only they truly want peace, only they are acting in genuine good faith. I would regularly have identical conversations in consecutive meetings with the two sides, each convinced it had made all the movement and the other had made none.

  I remember once talking to a group of Unionists some time after the Good Friday Agreement. One of them said to me – and not aggressively, but quite sincerely – ‘Tell me what we have really got out of this agreement.’ I said: ‘The Union. That’s pretty big, don’t you think?’ In other words, the basis of the deal meant that the principle of consent was avowed; and so as long as a majority desired it, the Union would remain. That, after all, was the raison d’être of Unionism. But he didn’t really see it like that. He just saw a string of concessions to bring ‘the men of violence’ to stop what they should never have been doing anyway.

  So the small things matter because in the minds of the key parties, they often loom large with a perspective we can’t always grasp.

  4. Be creative. Use the big or small things, singly or in combination, and if necessary invent a few more, to unblock progress. Here is where Jonathan particularly was brilliantly inventive. At times the impasse seemed insurmountable. Right at the end we had set a deadline for reconstituting the Executive on 26 March 2007. So many deadlines

  had come and gone that they were a devalued currency. They were better than no currency, however, and although they were always rejected by the parties, to my mind they always served some sort of purpose; but this time the Irish side put their foot down in unison. No budging from this deadline. We had been three years or more trying to get Ian Paisley into a deal and it was now or never, do or die, etc. So 26 March had to be it. At the last minute, as I had suspected might happen, Ian Paisley told me he couldn’t carry his party for March. It had to be May. The Irish were sceptical. Sinn Fein were furious. Everything teetered on the brink.

  I thought it crazy to bring the whole thing down for the sake of two months. Jonathan came up with the idea of giving the DUP their two months, but asking them in return to agree to a face-to-face meeting between Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, who had never met before. We made the offer. The DUP accepted and then Gerry Adams went along with it.

  Then – and yes, it really does come to this – we had to negotiate not just the choreography of the actual meeting but its furniture. It came down to the shape of the table. The DUP wanted the sides to sit opposite each other to show they were still adversaries. Sinn Fein wanted everyone to sit next to each other to show they were partner
s and therefore now equals. Robert Hannigan, a great young official who had taken over as the main Number 10 person, then supplied the final piece of creativity: he suggested a diamond-shaped table so they could sit both opposite and with each other. The deal was done.

  In the creativity, you cannot always think of everything, but you should be wary of doing anything that forfeits trust.

  By the way, trust, as a political concept, is multilayered. At one level no one trusts politicians, and politicians are obliged from time to time to conceal the full truth, to bend it and even distort it, where the interests of the bigger strategic goal demand it be done. Of course, where the line is drawn is crucial, and is not in any way an exact science. (And don’t get too affronted by it; we all make these decisions every day in our business and personal lives.) Without operating with some subtlety at this level, the job would be well-nigh impossible.

  But the public are quite discerning, and discriminate between politicians they don’t trust at a superficial level, i.e. pretty much all of them, and those they don’t trust at a more profound level. This level of trust is about whether the public believe that the political leader is trying to do his or her best for them, with whatever mistakes or compromises, Machiavellian or otherwise, are made. This is the level of trust that really matters.

  I heard an interesting example of this once from, of all people, Nelson Mandela. Mandela – or Madiba as he is also called (his clan name) – is a fascinating study, not because he’s a saint but because he isn’t. Or rather he is, but not in the sense that he can’t be as fly as hell when the occasion demands. I bet Gandhi was the same.

  I always got on well with Madiba, partly I think because I treated him as a political leader and not a saint. He knew exactly how he was used by people – including me – to boost their credibility at certain points, and provided he liked you, he was totally prepared to do it. The most fascinating thing about him was his shrewdness. He was wily, clever as in the French word habile, smart and completely capable of manipulating a situation when it suited his higher purpose.