The hand of history but on whose shoulder?

Tony Blair was, after Bonar Law, the second British Prime Minister of the 20th century to have Ulster Protestant parentage. Because of this he made holiday trips to Ireland and visited relatives in his teenage years. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he supported those who felt his college junior common room should subscribe to An Phoblacht, the IRA’s newspaper. By the time of his last major speech in Ireland, he seemed to regard the Ulster conflict as outmoded as the flared jeans of his student days. On April 6, 2006, he said at the Navan Centre, Armagh, ‘the way this struggle was being conducted was indeed brutal and bloody, but most of all unbearably old-fashioned and pointless. No one was ever going to win’; it was a fair enough comment.

Tony Blair’s legacy is a good one. All the more important then to remember what he owes to others. In the first place there is a debt of gratitude owed not just to John Major but to Margaret Thatcher. In 1986-7 Father Alex Reid opened up a line of communication between Gerry Adams and the Northern Ireland Office then led by Tom King.

This was part of the context to an interview given in November 1989 in which King’s successor, Peter Brooke, conceded that the British and the IRA were in a military stalemate. But, said Brooke, if ‘debate’ broke out in the terrorist community ‘which led to a cessation of violence, government would be imaginative’. Brooke’s interview was ‘not authorised’ nor cleared first with Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street, but he was gratified by the support he received from that quarter, in particular from Charles Powell, the prime minister’s senior aide and brother to Jonathan Powell who was to be chief of staff to Tony Blair.

It was the Major government which put together the Downing Street Declaration with the Reynolds’ government in Dublin. It was a document of some sophistication. Sinn Fein had told Dublin that, in exchange for an IRA ceasefire, ‘what is required is a package which creates a political dynamic for irreversible change and whose objective is the exercise of the right to political determination’.

In the fourth paragraph of the Downing Street Declaration, the self-determination of the Irish people was conceded by Britain, but solely on the basis that the Irish government would only apply that principle with the provision that Irish unity would require the support of a majority in the North.

Britain became a persuader for an agreed Ireland — a power-sharing plus Irish dimension solution — but not a united Ireland. The achievement on the British side was that of John Major and Patrick (now Lord) Mayhew. The leading officials were Sir John Chilcot and Sir Quintin Thomas.

The first sign of Blair’s future adroitness on the Irish question came when he began to adjust Labour party policy in the light of the Downing Street Declaration. Labour’s spokesman, Kevin McNamara, had supported the idea that Britain should actively back a policy of Irish unity. His departure and the arrival of Mo Mowlam signified the emergence of a new approach. By the summer of 1996, Mowlam — ably assisted by Jonathan Powell — was fully committed to the Downing Street approach.

In the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement, just a year after New Labour took over government, and in the years which followed, Tony Blair made one essentially correct character judgement — he never doubted David Trimble’s good faith. As he would tell the Irish Times in 2002, ‘So republicans will say, “Well, David Trimble is not really interested, he wants the whole thing brought down, he really wants Unionist supremacy and all the rest of it.” I know that is not true. I just know it is not true’. Given this judgement, was the British government right to prioritise the Adams leadership and its capacity to control the republican movement over the moderate unionists of the UUP, or even the moderate nationalists of the SDLP?

Was it really possible, as John Hume has pointed out, for the IRA to go back to war after the all-Ireland referendum underpinning the Agreement in 1998? Or after the Omagh bomb outrage that same year? Or was it remotely possible after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 2001?

Blair insisted in an interview with Frank Millar of the Irish Times (November 8, 2002): ‘The terms of debate have changed post-September 11. There is no support for it anywhere. There is no real inclination to excuse it anymore. I never did excuse it, but I think there were parts of the political spectrum, themselves respectable, which kind of excused it or said ‘Well, we sort of understand why it is happening’. It is just not the case anymore.’

Yet the IRA was still issuing public threats of a return to war as late as early 2005; threats that would not have been issued if those making them did not think that the British were in some way susceptible to them. But despite the British government’s softness in the face of republican demands — for example, calling an election in 2003 in a context which suited them but inevitably destroyed Trimble — in the end the republicans had to stomach five years of exclusion from government (2002-2007) without returning to war.

Ultimately, the movement also delivered both decommissioning and policing without enduring a serious split. Is not the implication clear? — the Adams leadership was in firm control all along and republicans had nowhere else to go. A policy based on this recognition may have helped to preserve the centre ground. Instead, Tony Blair ended up with ‘a second-best’ version of his deal.

Ironically, Mr Adams has ended up rather worse. Following his party’s debacle in the Irish general election it has no credible political strategy. The best efforts of British policy makers to ensure that Adams would always be able to say that he was making progress towards Irish unity — if not actually achieving it, a rather different matter — have been blown away by the voice of the Irish electorate. A little more tough love from Tony and Sinn Fein might have avoided this fate. In the end, Sin Fein dragged the process out too long; they got caught up in embarrassments such as the Northern Bank raid and the McCartney murder; they effectively alienated the Irish electorate.

After Trimble’s collapse, Blair was at first reluctant to believe that any Paisley deal was possible. Blair seemed to lose his way in his dealings with republicans. Despite insisting in his Harbour Commissioners speech of 2002 that ‘the crunch is the crunch’ and that the IRA had to make a decisive break with illegality, there was, in fact, no crunch, ‘no fork in the road’.

During the negotiations of 2004 which led to the fiasco of the failed ‘Comprehensive Agreement’ it became clear that the British government had at no point during the negotiations laid any firm emphasis on the criminality question. When the IRA refused to make any firm commitments on the issue, the British government tried to persuade the Irish government to downplay it.

The reward was the brutal wake-up call of the Northern Bank robbery in December 2004 which forced a new realism on both the British and Irish governments. Even then, as late as the summer of 2006, the British government seemed reluctant to coerce the republican movement into acceptance of policing.

In the end, Mr Blair got his deal. But that was because Dr Paisley, for his own reasons, decided to give it to him. It is true that Blair made a remarkable effort to bond with Dr Paisley. Asked if he shared an interest in religion with Blair, Dr Paisley had declared that ‘we shared books that I thought it would be good for him to read, and I am sure he read them. He always takes the books away with him’ (Guardian March 14, 2007).

Dr Paisley decided in the summer of 2005 to ‘deliver’; his willingness to share books sits easily with that decision. The really important thing was that Blair realised at St. Andrews in October 2006, if not before, that he had to deliver Sinn Fein on policing in return for power-sharing.

The timing of such a deal was the subject of much confusion at St. Andrews but in the end it hardly mattered. The prime minister had his deal, albeit one he had been among the last in government to believe in. On May 8 at Stormont the IRA Army Council sat a few feet away from Mr Blair at the ceremony which re-instated devolution. They were also, though they were not to know it, a few days away from the electoral humiliation at the hands of the Irish people. Irony of ironies, Tony Blair left office leaving the union stronger than when he entered it.

Paul Bew, Professor of Irish Politics at Queen’s University and Northern Ireland editor of Parliamentary Brief, sits in the House of Lords as Lord Bew of Donemore.