Dame Veronica Sutherland former British Ambassador and current Principal of Lucy Cavendish College Cambridge

REFLECTIONS ON THE PEACE PROCESS AND ITS PARTICIPANTS

Introduction
In considering where to start my reflections on the Peace Process and its participants, my mind went back to that momentous moment on Good Friday, 10 April 1998. It was then that Senator George Mitchell, Chairman of the all-party talks on Northern Ireland, announced that all those involved in the negotiations had agreed to put violence behind them and support a political solution to their differences. The Good Friday Agreement had been concluded. It was the high point of the Peace Process, certainly in my time in Dublin. After so many painfully long hours of discussion and negotiation, the relief and excitement of that moment were palpable. I shared that sensation, and would now like to try and capture something of it. I would also like to describe some of the extraordinary events which led up to the Agreement, talk about some of the people involved and say a little about future prospects for the Peace Process. Of course, it is over five years since I left Dublin, so these are personal observations, rather than an up-to-date analysis of developments, or a comprehensive review of the Process whose origins are complicated and whose end is not yet in sight.
Personal Background
Let me first explain my own involvement in these events. Before coming to Dublin in 1995, I had spent thirty years in the Diplomatic Service which had taken me all over the world, but particularly to countries in mainland Europe, Africa and Asia. I had been responsible for following political and economic events in Denmark, running the British aid programme in India, negotiating to preserve the principle of freedom of the press as British delegate to UNESCO, and supporting British businessmen and other visitors when I was Ambassador in three countries in francophone West Africa - and much else besides.
These experiences are not obvious qualifications for the undeniably sensitive post in Dublin, but then few diplomats will have direct experience of Irish affairs. In any case, previous service in Dublin or on secondment to the Northern Ireland Office in Belfast is not necessarily an asset: in Ireland you can too easily be labelled as prejudiced in one direction or another.
For the British diplomat, Dublin is different from any other post in the world. At a practical level, Ireland is our nearest neighbour and the only country which has a land border with the UK. At an emotional level the relationship is extremely complex and cannot be easily defined. British visitors may find that Irish attitudes to them combine a genuine affection and respect with a legacy of suspicion and mistrust resulting from the perceived iniquities of the former colonial power, and focussing in recent years on the problem of Northern Ireland.
Thus in one sense the British Ambassador in Ireland takes on the role of representative of the traditional enemy, deemed to be the root of all Ireland's troubles over the centuries. You are daily reminded of the difficulties and dangers by the permanent presence of Irish bodyguards - all charming people. And you ignore potential problems at your peril. I remember telling Dick Spring, who was then Foreign Minister, that I had decided not to drive in Ireland as I would be sure to have some accident and could just see the headlines - "British Ambassador kills cat". "Oh no", said Spring, "it would be British Ambassador kills IRISH cat".
But I do not want to make too much of this, for if working against such a backdrop sounds daunting, I also found it extremely rewarding. For what I observed in Ireland is that traditional affection is replacing traditional mistrust. I was surprised to find how closely the Irish follow developments in Britain, from football and soaps to politics. And whatever reservations Irish people may have about the Royal Family as an institution, the question I was most frequently asked here was not about the Euro, the war in Bosnia or a united Ireland, but when the Queen would be visiting Dublin. Moreover, at a personal level my husband and I were warmly welcomed wherever we went and made many friends whom we still visit regularly.
When in 1995 we set out for Dublin, I had the words of the then Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, ringing in my ears: "do what you can to make the relationship between the UK and Ireland more normal". By this he meant that my main task should be to try and ease the tensions which had existed for so long between the two countries: my focus should be on the bilateral relationship, rather than - as had sometimes happened hitherto - on direct involvement in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Thus, during my time in Dublin I devoted much personal effort to promoting an easier atmosphere in which business between the two governments could be done. I interpreted this remit widely, to include not just high profile occasions but also visits to much smaller enterprises such as schools and community projects. Indeed, I took my cue from President Mary Robinson who told me that her staff had had to accustom themselves to the fact that even the most insignificant invitation should be brought to her attention I regarded such activities as directly relevant to the Peace Process, the overall purpose of which is, after all, to foster a better understanding amongst all those involved.
In parallel, events in the North and intergovernmental discussions on them occupied much of my time. I was in close, indeed daily contact with the small group of people responsible for the negotiations. I was fortunate to be part of a central episode in Irish history.
I was also fortunate in the timing of my arrival in Dublin. With ceasefires recently declared by the main paramilitary groups in the North, the prevailing mood was one of euphoria. This mood was captured in a much-quoted verse from Seamus Heaney's poem The Cure at Troy:
History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
I enjoyed this euphoria while it lasted, and the several high profile visits which came in its wake. The Prince of Wales paid the first semi-official visit to Ireland since Independence by a senior member of the Royal Family, and spoke in this very room. To the relief of those of us organising the event he was cheered wherever he went - not a foregone conclusion. President Clinton, who was perceived as having helped to secure the IRA cease-fire, was given a hero's welcome. So too, perhaps more surprisingly, was the then Prime Minister John Major. He remarked rather sadly that he seemed more popular overseas than at home.
Historical Background
But behind all this, the fact remained that the underlying tensions between Britain and Ireland over continued British jurisdiction in the six counties of Northern Ireland were unresolved. Some might say that the origins of these tensions are buried deep in history, perhaps as far back as the 12th century. But for to-day's purposes, it is enough to go back to Irish Independence in 1922 when partition was set in place.
Sadly, partition often brings more problems than it solves, and so it was in Ireland. The arrangement could have worked only if the Protestant Unionist majority in Northern Ireland had been prepared to treat the Catholic Nationalist minority in a manner which the nationalists perceived to be fair and equitable. Alas this was not so, and you are all familiar with the terrible bloodshed over the years of the Troubles which later ensued, a cause for shame on the part of all those involved.
In spite of brave attempts in the 1970s and 1980s to bring hostilities to an end - most notably the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 - none succeeded, and it was not until the early 1990s that a combination of developments opened the way to real progress. The end of the Cold War reduced Northern Ireland's strategic significance to both the UK and the NATO Alliance, enabling the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to announce in 1990 that the British Government had no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, over 20 years of membership of the European Union under its various guises gave the Irish Government greater confidence in its dealings with the British. So too did Ireland's extraordinarily rapid economic expansion. Then, leaders of the Republican movement, under pressure from John Hume - who was even then refining the thinking behind the Peace Process - had begun to accept that violence was not the most effective way to achieve their ends. Nor should the impact of the election in Washington of an American President with a close interest in Irish affairs be underestimated. But above all, it was the arrival of two new Prime Ministers, Albert Reynolds in Dublin and John Major in London, with fresh ideas, which ensured that the moment was seized. Both were pragmatists, friends from their days on the European Finance Ministers circuit, determined to rid their countries of the disfiguring blot of terrorist violence. But their task was far from easy.
The Parties
First among their difficulties were the entrenched positions and historic grievances of the parties involved. Even if you will be familiar with these, and at risk of oversimplification, it is worth glancing at them to illustrate just how hard it would be - and indeed remains - to make progress. Essentially there are four main groups: the unionists, the British Government, the nationalists and the Irish Government.
The majority unionist community were fierce supporters of the British crown whose distrust of both Catholicism and Irish culture ran deep. Their worst fear was government from Dublin and they were intensely suspicious of anything emanating from there, not least because of the territorial claim to the North enshrined in the Irish Constitution of 1937. At the extreme end of the unionist spectrum Dr Paisley fulminated with the fire of an Old Testament prophet against the iniquities of Rome. More extreme still were the loyalist paramilitaries, guilty of some of the worst atrocities of the Troubles.
Successive British Governments, and particularly Conservative Governments, had had a long and close association with the Unionists. However, so relieved were the British in 1922 to have, as they thought, solved the Irish problem, that for many years they effectively abdicated authority over the territory, and thus failed to take any steps to rectify Unionist mismanagement of the nationalist minority. In the light of subsequent events this was short-sighted. For many years the British relationship with the Irish government was an uneasy mixture of suspicion and incomprehension in the face - in British eyes - of tacit Irish government support for IRA activities. It is no secret that Margaret Thatcher had little sympathy with the Irish.
On the other side of the divide, the nationalists in the North felt that Independence had left them abandoned against their will on the wrong side of the partition boundary. They were reluctant subjects of an alien monarch under an unsympathetic government which put them at a permanent disadvantage. Their dream was a United Ireland. They found political expression in the Social Democratic and Labour Party under Gerry Fitt and then John Hume. At the extreme end of the nationalist spectrum were the republicans with their variety of paramilitary groups who believed that violence would eventually force the British out of Ireland. They overlooked the fact that some 1 million inhabitants in the North perceived themselves to be British.
At Independence Irish nationalists looked to the Dublin Government for support, but here too they found little encouragement. Their dream of a United Ireland may have been shared in the South, but successive Irish Governments accorded only a low priority to Northern Ireland, and tried instead to make the South a really Irish Ireland, thus further alienating the majority community in the North, who perceived the Dublin Government as having reneged on their agreement to partition in the 1920s by including the territorial claim in the Irish Constitution.
Launch of the Peace Process
This then was the scene when John Major and Albert Reynolds stepped onto the stage. Their determination to make progress bore early fruit: the Downing Street declaration of December 1993. In this short key document the British formally acknowledged for the first time that the Irish people North and South were entitled to self-determination of their own future, thus diluting the British claim to absolute sovereignty in the North. The Irish government, for its part, conceded that any steps towards Irish unity could be taken only with the support of a majority in Northern Ireland, thus compromising their territorial claim in the 1937 constitution. These developments paved the way for the ceasefires announced the following year by the two main paramilitary groupings. A new phase of the Peace Process had been launched. The mood of euphoria which then erupted as I have earlier described was not surprising.
But it was sadly short-lived. Problems soon surfaced. To many people in the South it seemed that earlier obstacles to the establishment of all-party discussions leading to the signature of a comprehensive settlement of the Northern Ireland problem had been swept away by the Downing Street Declaration and the ceasefires. They could not understand the delay. Everyone knew what was needed.
Such optimism was however misplaced in the face of Unionist refusal to sit down with those whom they still saw as terrorists with their own private army. Thus was born the decommissioning debate which bedevilled much of my life in Dublin, as I tried to persuade my Irish colleagues that the Unionist position had validity, and moreover that there was no way the British Government could force the Unionists to negotiate directly with Sinn Fein before they had put their weapons beyond use.
Impasse ensued. It was eventually overcome, temporarily at least, by appointing Senator George Mitchell as Chair of the International Body on Decommissioning to see if he could resolve the issue. His solution was that decommissioning should not be a precondition for the start of negotiations. Instead he set out six principles of democracy and non-violence to which all those who wished to participate in the negotiations would have to sign up.
This might have broken the log-jam, but another setback ensued. No sooner had he finished his report than, on 9 February 1996, Canary Wharf was blown up. In the words of Gerry Adams, the IRA had not gone away. The ceasefire was at an end. It was a very dark moment - certainly my darkest in Dublin.
Negotiations
It took 18 long months and a change of Government in both countries before the IRA ceasefire was reinstated and the path to negotiations reopened. The simultaneous arrival of two new Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, injected much needed dynamism into the situation. And at last, in September 1997, talks started in earnest under the Chairmanship once again of George Mitchell.
It is worth pausing here to say a little about the main participants, and especially the Prime Ministers, involved in this long process. One thing that struck me about almost everyone I met was just how much time and effort they were prepared to devote to the affairs of Northern Ireland. In London both John Major and Tony Blair were prepared to burn the midnight oil studying the minutiae of the complicated documents which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement. In the case of John Major this was particularly surprising, given his slender majority and his problems over Europe and the Balkans. If he had had the opportunity I am sure he would have liked to tread the same path as Tony Blair towards the Good Friday Agreement. On the Irish side, similar considerations applied to John Bruton. As for Blair and Ahern, they struck up an immediate rapport, still evident to-day. On both sides they were supported by some of the most energetic ministers and ablest civil servants I have ever worked with. But for all of us, negotiating with those in the North who held entrenched positions was a tough task.
The talks took place occasionally in London or Dublin, but mainly in Belfast. This is one of the reasons why neither I nor my opposite number, the Irish Ambassador in London, was directly involved. After all this was not an international treaty, but a hybrid mix of domestic legislation and bilateral agreement. I attended only two sessions in the daunting surroundings of Dublin Castle. It was not an edifying experience. The participants were more interested in rehearsing past grievances than in negotiating new arrangements for the governance of the North. Certainly I much admired the saintly patience of George Mitchell.
Given such tactics it was hardly surprising that when the parties met in early April 1998 to bring negotiations to a conclusion, much last-minute work remained to be done. While I hold no brief for the veracity of Gerry Adams, his recent book (called incidentally Hope and History) gives an accurate account of the febrile atmosphere in Stormont Buildings at that time, at least as described to me subsequently by my own colleagues: no sleep, little food, exhaustion all round.
Adams is also right in saying that it was the two Prime Ministers, supported by a tiny group of officials, who eventually produced a document to which all involved in the negotiations could put their signature. Interestingly none of the officials concerned came from Northern Ireland. Over the months they worked behind the scenes to broker deals amongst those who could not easily communicate with each other. I well remember an occasion when Bertie Ahern had taken Tony Blair off to open a new branch of Tesco's, while in the road outside Blair's Private Secretary was on his mobile phone to David Trimble discussing a tricky negotiating point.
So it was that at the eleventh hour the Good Friday Agreement was born. The relief was enormous. In the light of the roller coaster of events leading up to it, I think you will understand why.
Implementation
I left Dublin not long after the Agreement was signed, and did not therefore witness a great deal of the effort devoted to implementation. However, George Mitchell was clearly right to observe that this was likely to be as difficult as negotiation. So it has proved. The Agreement has clearly had important successes, not least on the territorial dispute between the two Governments. This has finally been laid to rest, and Bertie Ahern certainly played a blinder in obtaining a 94.4% vote in favour of altering the Irish Constitution to replace the territorial claim to the North with an article aspiring to an eventual United Ireland.
But in other areas progress has been patchy, for while intergovernmental institutions have been established, the crucial issue of devolved government in Northern Ireland remains unresolved. Sadly the Assembly, set up with high hopes, has been suspended more than once, most recently following evidence of continued paramilitary activity, from Columbia to Belfast, and remains so.
Future Prospects
What then are the prospects for the future? There are those who believe that conflict resolution in Northern Ireland is impossible, and that the territorial and cultural imbalances between the Unionist and Nationalist communities, exacerbated by the Troubles, will ensure that deep divisions will always remain. After all, in logic there can be no resolution between those who cling to the continued existence of a United Kingdom including Northern Ireland, and those who strive for a United Ireland. Such people hold that the Good Friday Agreement is bound fail.
The reasons for such pessimism are not far to seek, particularly from the Unionist point of view. They perceive the Agreement as representing inevitable progress to a United Ireland, the level of decommissioning as wholly inadequate and violence continuing at an unacceptable level. Many Unionists had expected much better than this. Meanwhile Sinn Fein, who are avowedly pro-Agreement, feel they receive insufficient recognition for the enormous distance they have travelled away from the violent past of the IRA.
Personally, I am sufficiently realistic to know that the result of the elections last November may have sounded the death-knell for the present phase of the Peace Process. Nor can the recent findings on paramilitary activity be ignored. It may yet be that pragmatism will prevail and that Sinn Fein and the DUP will find some way to work together, but for the time being this does seem unlikely. However I also believe that, whatever the outcome of the current impasse, the practical achievements of the Peace Process and the Good Friday Agreement so far cannot be ignored. As a recent Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has said, they have increased prosperity, revitalised society, safeguarded rights, and above all saved lives. It remains the template for the political process in Northern Ireland.
Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, at a very fundamental level perceptions have been altered. Indeed it is encouraging that there is now discussion about the possibility of establishing some kind of reconciliation commission. This is a sensitive issue, but carefully handled might be helpful in healing wounds.
Moreover, the positions of the various parties which I outlined earlier are shifting, albeit slowly. In the North, the Ulster Unionists and Sinn Fein have been talking, admittedly so far without success, but who ten years ago would have believed such a dialogue possible? Within the Island of Ireland, antagonisms are diminishing, even if there still seems to be some reluctance on both sides to try and understand the traditions of the other. I was often surprised that when I was here in Dublin people would tell me that they wanted to see a United Ireland, but when I asked when they had last spoken to a Unionist it was clear that this was a new idea. Nevertheless there are those on both sides of the border who are working to improve understanding, and such attempts appear to be on the increase: I have been much encouraged for example to learn of the work of the Centre for Cross Border Studies.
As for the relationship between the British and Irish, and particularly between the two Governments, I believe this to be on a more solid basis than ever before. Working together, whatever the many differences which arise, demonstrates just how close our interests really are. The practice of sharing problems and solutions is now so deeply engrained that it is difficult to believe that the relationship could ever degenerate into the mutual recriminations of the past.
Given the current uncertainties, it is impossible to make any firm predictions about the future of the Peace Process. I like however to think that there are enough people in both Ireland and Britain who perceive that the route plotted so far does provide clear pointers to the way forward. Maybe he Agreement which enshrines these pointers will need amendment; maybe more radical changes will be necessary. But given the distance that has been travelled so far, I believe that it will prove possible, as has happened hitherto, to overcome the inevitable crises and setbacks. Whatever the outcome in the longer term , and whether or not Northern Ireland remains in the United Kingdom or is eventually subsumed in some version of a United Ireland, I do believe that progress will over time be eased by increased honesty, tolerance and understanding amongst the parties involved. We must certainly hope so, for only then will hope and history rhyme.