Solving The Troubles Of Northern Ireland. - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, June, 2001 by J. J. N. McGurk

The Northern Ireland Peace Process: Ending the Troubles? Thomas Hennessey. Gill & Macmillan. Dublin. [pound]19.99. 256 pages. ISBN 07171-2946-2.

As special adviser to the Unionist Party and as someone having full access to documents, many not in the public domain, Dr Hennessey was in a particularly strong and privileged position to give us this account of the genesis and development of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. Though densely packed with official papers the narrative is never dull and for the specialist in constitutional niceties the challenge in reading is almost as subtle as a cryptic crossword. By adopting a chronological approach he cuts a clear swathe through a tangled mass of documentation, itself the result of equally complex negotiations often conducted in the extremely difficult period of political and sectarian violence.

The book begins with a lucid synopsis in nineteen pages of the period from the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, that apparently firm plank in the Unionists' platform, to the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, or should it be disagreement? Dr Hennessey then summarises the next two decades of peace negotiations which may be headed in Seamus Mallon's felicitious phrase, 'Sunningdale for slow learners'. From 1986 which marked turmoil for the Unionist Party and confusion for constitutional nationalists Part II covers the years subsequent to the Anglo-Irish Agreement while in Part III the author deals with the 'Endgame?' negotiations, from December 1997 to March 1998. The tentativeness inherent in the question mark here and in the title will not be lost on anyone who follows contemporary politics.

The British and Irish governments launched an agenda for talks, Propositions on Heads of Agreement, which was published on 12 January 1998, and which set out for the first time an outline agreement. Angry reactions, particularly from Sinn Fein but also from the UUP and the SDLP, as to, the possible effects these would have on constitutional issues and on the rights and safeguards for Unionists and Nationalists, followed. The talks were thrown into jeopardy not only over the questions of decommissioning, policing and criminal justice and the release of both Republican and Loyalist prisoners but more immediately by the senseless killings in January 1998. Against this background Senator Mitchell imposed a deadline of 9 April for the ending of negotiations.

The final section 'Agreement and Disagreement: the Belfast Agreement', sees Dr Hennessey describing in detail the Mitchell document, the emphasis therein of the North--South Ministerial Council and its frosty reception from many in the UUP and UDP who indulged in 'walk-out stunts' from the talks. David Trimble faxed a warning letter to Tony Blair that he could not recommend the Mitchell proposals to his party, hinting that they had in fact been duped, and that the Irish Government in Dublin had learned nothing in the twenty-five years since Sunningdale. The tightrope which Mr Trimble treads even yet with his opponents within and outside his party is delicately told.

In a well considered analysis Dr Hennessey sees the emergence and development of the peace process as the eventual meeting of two separate political streams viz the inter-party talks of the British and Irish governments with the constitutional parties of Northern Ireland and, secondly an international dialogue begun by John Hume which helped to shift the Republican movement from violence into the democratic political arena. He sees the end result of these mergers in the Belfast Good Friday Agreement, itself a compromise, but demonstrates that politics may still be the art of the possible. The obvious heroes in the Peace Pantheon are illustrated on the dust cover: Hume, Trimble, Adams, Blair and Ahern. Surely in the shades lie other blessed peace-makers: Reynolds, Brooke, Mayhew, Mowlam, Mitchell and Mallon. The personalities in the Northern Ireland peace process certainly gain our admiration in their efforts to end the violence which has left a legacy of victims since 1969.

By the early 1990s it was obvious to the Republican armed movement, and frequently pointed out by Gerry Adams since 1988, that violence would not achieve the long-term goal of Irish re-unification especially in the senseless killings of locally recruited members of the security forces. Dr Hennessey's book makes clear what an uphill struggle peacemaking has been and, indeed how defensive, precautionary and fragile it remains. Without the paramilitary ceasefires of August and October 1994 and the IRA renewed ceasefire in July 1997 and without the political good-will and trust necessary to forge substantive negotiations in September 1997, the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 might never have occurred.

This is important contemporary history illustrating that in the most notably turbulent corner of the island of Ireland, where so many contrary streams of history have converged, democratic peace-making is not only possible but is the only alternative for the two communities to co-exist in the same political and geographical entity.