Paying over the odds for peace in Northern Ireland

Since its release, Jonathan Powell’s ‘insider’ account of the Northern Irish peace process has caused plenty of controversy. Many have taken issue with the suggestion from Tony Blair’s former chief-of-staff that the Northern Ireland peace process proves that governments should be prepared to talk to terrorists.

Powell’s argument is in many ways a compelling one. After all, who truly does not believe that ‘jaw-jaw’ is better than ‘war-war’? Who can seriously question the assertion that Northern Ireland today is a better place than it was twenty, fifteen, or even ten years ago? And can anyone really dispute the fact that it is the peace process that has brought the province to this point?

But in the recognition of these ‘objective truths’, there is also another question, one that Powell almost wholly ignores in his book Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland:  are things in Northern Ireland as good as they could have been? In attempting to answer this, it is necessary to consider the central premises upon which Powell and Tony Blair operated.

 Here there is some confusion. On more than one occasion, Powell states that the government’s aim was to ‘build out from the centre with an agreement between the UUP and the SDLP’, yet equally he makes it all-too clear that the emphasis lay in a different place entirely; the government wanted to make sure that it ‘got Sinn Fein into the talks’, while persuading Unionists not to walk away (p.17).

There is an intellectual incoherence here  based on the obvious contradictions between these divergent objectives: the impulse to build upon the moderate centre ground versus the desire for an all-inclusive peace. It is clear from the unfolding of events over the last decade which aim won out. It is just as obvious who the principal ‘fall-guys’ were: the constitutional nationalists of the SDLP. In the second scenario they are noticeably absent from Powell’s radar.

In response, Powell would no doubt point to what he saw as the SDLP’s unwillingness to move without Sinn Fein. Indeed, he describes this as a ‘problem that was to bedevil us throughout the process’. Yet, this raises the question of those instances where the SDLP was evidently prepared to step forward and where the party did take a decisive leap even without the backing of their republican counterparts.

As Frank Millar pointed out to a Policy Exchange seminar on the Troubles earlier this year, such a moment arrived in the late summer of 2001 when, after the Weston Park negotiations, the SDLP decided to endorse the PSNI. In so doing, it was joined by the Catholic Church.

With the Irish Government already supportive, this meant that the entire gamut of Irish nationalist opinion, with the exception of Sinn Fein, was now backing the new policing dispensation in Northern Ireland. Republicans were obviously isolated — ‘themselves alone’ in more ways than one. This was confirmed by the almost-simultaneous arrest of three IRA men in Columbia and the 9/11 attacks on America by al-Qaeda.

At that point, as Powell himself acknowledges, a resumption of IRA violence became all but impossible. At the same time, republicans had unmistakeably been found in default. The question is, therefore, why was pressure not applied to Sinn Fein then? And why was the issue of republican support for the police, in the context of a broader consensus having been reached on the matter, not made the sine qua non of political rehabilitation?

In the event, it was as if, to reapply Churchill’s famous adage, when the smoke cleared from the 9/11 attacks the ‘dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ re-emerged once more. The feet of Sinn Fein were not held to the fire and the peace process was allowed to drag on for a further five and a half years.

This occurred despite the fact that the British government had the measure of the people with whom they were talking. In this respect, Powell’s book offers much valuable information about the negotiating style of republicans: they regularly floated ideas only to withdraw them, they often appeared to be simply playing for time and they sometimes seemed to negotiate just for the sake of negotiating.

Again, though, the question arises: why were they allowed to act in such a fashion? Why, as Powell himself admits, were republicans repeatedly permitted to deliver ‘10 per cent less than was necessary’ (p.219)? Why did the British government engage in what he tellingly describes as ‘sordid deals’ (p.197)?

The answers to all such questions can be found in what Powell admits was the other great strategic objective of the British government: the desire to safeguard republican unity. Sinn Fein was not only to be brought in and placed at the heart of an inclusive peace process, but it was to do so at the head of a united republican movement. In this regard, it is instructive that Powell recounts how, at the very first meeting between the British government and Sinn Fein leaders, discussion turned to the imperative of avoiding the creation of an ‘Irish Hamas’ (p.16).

This issue crops up again and again and reflects the goal upon which republican and government minds were as one: the need to preserve republican unity. As Powell states, ‘Adams and McGuinness were determined to carry the whole movement with them… we were in the same position… the British government had an interest in a united Republican movement’ (p.25).

The fact is that in time this became the key strategic objective for the government in the process. And aware of this, republican leaders constantly played to British fears over a possible republican split. Powell’s book makes clear how frequently Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness drew on this trump card with suggestions that their leadership might be overthrown or that a new IRA might emerge. In response, concession after concession came the way of republicans in order to shore-up the supposedly vulnerable Adams-McGuinness leadership.

It was this that destroyed the moderate parties. The needs of the SDLP were utterly sidelined by those of Sinn Fein, thereby reducing the party to irrelevancy, while the UUP’s inability to alter the terms of trade in the peace process led to its displacement by the DUP. And the rise of the Sinn Fein-DUP hegemony over their respective communities set the stage for the deal that was finally concluded in May 2007.

Did it have to be this way? Perhaps. It might be, as Powell speculates, that an alliance between the ‘extremes’, who had ‘no one left to outflank them’, was inevitable. Yet one should not ignore the crucial role played by the British government. The political environment that exists in Northern Ireland today is a direct product of the approach adopted by the government to the peace process — this truth should give anyone who wants to learn from the Northern Ireland example pause for thought.  

  Dr. Martyn Frampton is author of ‘The Long March: The Political Strategy of Sinn Fein, 1981-2007’ and ‘Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country’ (with John Bew and Inigo Gurruchaga) due later this year.