Ten years on, and no regrets

Like circling vultures, the DUP were very quiet for most of Easter Week, ten years ago in 1998. Indeed, a quick scan of copies of The Irish Times reveals not a single mention of Ian Paisley or Peter Robinson until 11 April, the day after the Good Friday deal was done. Perhaps, like most of the public according to the polls, they believed that the Mitchell Talks would go the way of so many previous initiatives.

Did I know we were going to do good business when I arrived at Castle Buildings, Stormont four days earlier on Monday 6 April 1998? It’s probably fair to say that I knew we could: I had received strong signals from the SDLP that they were serious but would the two governments hand a veto to Sinn Fein?  In some ways, that would have been the easier course for Ulster Unionism. In the 1997 general election, our policy to at least explore the possibilities and try to head off another London-Dublin imposition had been massively endorsed: ten UUP seats to the DUP’s paltry two. Still, if the overdue document from the Senator was a rehash of Frameworks, our electorate would have understood a polite ‘No’. The alternative scenario I could envisage was much more fraught with danger: a paper that was constitutionally sound but dressed up to look like a republican Easter bunny. Gerry Adams might have still been saying publicly, and privately, that there would be no Assembly. However, some UU colleagues were scarcely less naïve, expecting an adjudication on the merits of the unionist and nationalist ‘cases’ as outlined in stupefyingly tedious detail over the course of two years, rather than a best guess as to what both sides could just about tolerate. The Mitchell draft still came as a shock. Promised the previous Friday, it finally arrived very late on the Monday night, long after some colleagues had gone home. Whether you were one of those who saw it on the Monday night, or not until the Tuesday morning, turned out to be significant.  David Trimble gave me a copy and I took it to read alone in one of the DUP’s rooms that we had colonised following their walkout in 1997 upon Sinn Fein’s admittance.  It started off rather well. The constitutional carapace was as expected: the Irish territorial claim nullified in return for the Government of Ireland Act which no longer had any practical effect but was still on the statute book — a unionist win.  Strand one, the internal governance of Northern Ireland, merely proposed options. Familiar ground for both us and the SDLP, I didn’t foresee great problems hammering something out here.  Strand two, North-South relations, was highly detailed but opaque at the same time. Where did authority lie? Westminster or Stormont? It wasn’t immediately clear. What I did know was that the screeds of cross-border bodies were enough to make even the mildest unionist want to vomit.       Some compensation came in strand three, East-West relations, even if the ‘Council of the Isles’ was very obviously the North-South Council’s destitute relation.  But then the tears began to roll down my cheeks: radical reform of a police service I believed had been a force for good; an acceptance that the IRA and the loyalists were politically motivated, not just criminals as we had been told time and again by British governments; decommissioning only tenuously linked to political progress; a vast array of communal rights; Northern Ireland’s Britishness reduced to just a cultural tradition.  I was upset, angry. Hadn’t we taken risks? Was this our reward? I felt, as generations of unionists had before, betrayed by my government, lied to. I slipped away home without speaking to anyone. The next morning, those who had left early the previous evening saw the document themselves for the first time. They were, for the most part, enraged. I sought out Trimble. He knew he had a major problem on his hands. ‘You know they’re doing their nut in there?’ He did. ‘I’m sure you’ll have to reject it but I have been thinking about it overnight...’. ‘Get to the point,’ he snapped.  ‘It’s just that, while it’s an absolute crock of s***, it is an improvement on Frameworks. It’s not a blueprint for a United Ireland. There’s no mechanism there, no Council of Ireland. There’s a unionist veto. We can negotiate this up.’  ‘Well I know that and you know that but we might be the only ones. Go and tell our colleagues, for heaven’s sake,’ he shot back through gritted teeth. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. I tried to gather as many reactions as I could. By and large, those who had seen the draft the previous evening were open to reason, prepared to negotiate. Those who had only seen it on the Tuesday were blinded by their emotions. They wanted a ‘No’ that meant ‘No’, rather than a ‘No’ that meant ‘No to this draft’. That basic division perpetuated throughout the last week of the talks. Trimble broke the cardinal rule of never going to see both governments at the same time, but all those months and years of wooing Tony Blair paid off. The prime minister apparently told the taoiseach that without concessions on strand two, the British government would call the talks off and blame Dublin, possibly knowing that Senator Mitchell was clear the draft was impossible for a unionist leader to sell. Alastair Campbell confirms as much in his memoirs. Bertie blinked. ‘I have just witnessed the ritual humiliation of an Irish prime minister,’ David chortled when he arrived back in the UUP office.  Some were elated but others were not prepared to ditch our policy of a European parliament-style system of committees in favour of a traditional Cabinet system of administration at Stormont now that the sting had been taken out of strand two. With the linkage between decommissioning and office so weak, Sinn Fein would almost certainly have ministers. But I knew where I stood. Short-term pain was worth long-term gain: constitutional stability and a normalisation of relations on the island. When David went upstairs to give his assent I was right behind him. No regrets.

  Dr Steven King was a UUP negotiator during the Stormont Talks of 1996-98 and subsequently Political Adviser to David Trimble, First Minister. He is now a columnist with the Irish Examiner and a director at the thinktank Policy Exchange.