The day my gold fountain pen made history

By any standard Good Friday 1998 was one of the most memorable days of my professional and personal life. At the time I was Head of Political Affairs Division in the Northern Ireland Office. My involvement for more than six years in the complex process that led to the Belfast Agreement had given me grounds for optimism. But my firm belief that a deal would be struck originated much earlier, almost a quarter of a century earlier in fact, when I served as Assistant Private Secretary to the first Chief Minister of a power-sharing administration in Northern Ireland, Brian Faulkner.

  I drew my hopes for peace from my direct experience of that sophisticated and committed Unionist politician and his able and jovial Nationalist deputy Gerry Fitt. Watching them working together with their executive colleagues convinced me that political accommodation between the people of Northern Ireland, and within the island of Ireland, was more than an aspiration; it was inevitable. What I didn’t know then was how long and bloody the path to achieving it would be. As the late evening of 9 April slipped into early the morning of the 10th a curious serenity descended upon the common areas of Castle Buildings. But that calm belied the intense negotiations going on behind the closed doors of ministerial and party offices. There was a distinct whiff of success in the air, mixed with the stench of possible failure, and an overarching sadness that so many friends, colleagues and fellow citizens had suffered tragic and violent deaths along the way. Three memories of the occasion are particularly strong. The first involves two British officials who shared a table with me in the canteen. Given the lateness of the hour conversation was flagging until someone casually mentioned hobbies and pastimes. My companions soon discovered they were both Oxford graduates who shared a passion for oriental languages. One was teaching himself Japanese while the other was half way through a distance-learning course in written and spoken Korean. For the next hour I was entertained by their amusing exchange of wisdom, wit and verse. If proof was needed of the intellectual capacity, determination and very necessary sense of the ridiculous in the government’s support team, this was it. My second, less wholesome, memory is of strolling down a corridor around dawn in search of my umpteenth cup of coffee when I was accosted by a senior Ulster Unionist with whom I was usually on very good terms. ‘How could you do it?’ he roared. ‘How could you let them all out after only two years? We might just have been able to sell five years but two’s outrageous, an unmitigated deal breaker.’ With that he stomped off. He was of course talking about the proposal on prisoner releases that was at the heart of the negotiations. Although privately I had always thought prisoner releases would be a natural consequence of the end of hostilities I had some sympathy with his view that two years erred on the light side. In the event he was wrong about that: in the document ratified by his party a few hours later it was two years, albeit linked to the controversial and, as it turned out, protracted issue of decommissioning. My third memory is more personal. When agreement was finally reached in the late afternoon the first act of the two governments was to endorse it with a treaty of their own signed by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern. Apparently treaty convention dictates, or at least dictated in 1998, that each signatory should sign with a fountain pen rather than a newfangled alternative. Moments before the signing ceremony was to begin, the expert lawyers realised only one such pen was available and an urgent call went out for anyone who could provide a second. Even ten years ago fountain pens were something of a rarity but I always carry a gold Shaeffer, inscribed with the figure 20, which my wife gave me on our twentieth wedding anniversary. As a Northern Irishman who has spent a lifetime in the service of the Crown, I could only smile when I saw my pen in the hand of the taoiseach, not the prime minister, as they sat down at the table. In an instant the pen, and the anniversary it celebrates, became a small part of Irish history.

  Chris Maccabe is British Joint Secretary of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. He is also Political Director of the NIO in Belfast.