Reynolds rightly claims the peace dividend — before losing the plot
Nor has it been simply a matter of what he did or didn’t do — over Larry Goodman, over the X case, over Harry Whelehan.
Frankly, some seemed to question whether he was ever the right sort of person to lead modern Ireland. Not to put too fine a point on it, there was something about him that some, not least in the media, found irritating. A lot of people, including some in Fianna Fáil, didn’t regard the one-time dog food manufacturer as “one of us”.
It is encouraging then, from Reynolds’s point of view, and not a little surprising, that his new memoirs, Albert Reynolds: My Autobiography, have been generally rather well-received. It helps that there is some new material in there and new (less than flattering) insights, especially about his relationship with his predecessor, Charlie Haughey, and his replacement as leader, Bertie Ahern. And, by and large, the critics have been happy, whatever his other faults, to give Reynolds full credit for the first IRA ceasefire of August 1994.
I have no intention of doing otherwise. Reynolds provides new colour and texture to the story behind that momentous day. It wasn’t the end of the murder and mayhem but it was certainly the beginning of the end. The IRA doesn’t deserve our thanks for stopping something they should never have started but, to the extent that Reynolds helped them see sense, we should be eternally grateful.
Reynolds in office was a different kettle of fish from Haughey when it came to the North. Free of any Arms Trial baggage, he was viewed by all sides as a fair broker. He realised “nothing would work unless we treated the unionists with the same consideration (as nationalists)”. And peace was his primary focus, if not his only one. As he admits, for him the two were inseparable: “I held the unity of the country to be a noble objective and I was determined to see it realised.”
Reynolds also puts to bed some longstanding myths. First, as someone familiar with the border region, he knew, “not all (Northern) nationalists wanted to leave Britain and unite with the South”.
Second, contrary to received wisdom at the time, he accepts the then British prime minister John Major was his own man on Northern Ireland, not the pawn of the Ulster Unionists, on whom he occasionally had to rely for votes in a finely balanced House of Commons. Major’s precarious majority “never affected his decisions”.
Reynolds is candid too about his difficult relationship with John Hume who, time and again, appears to have made his job of dealing with London and keeping unionism even half on board more difficult. “If Hume or Adams had hoped their agreement would move things forward they were wrong: it did the opposite.”
In relation to contacts with unionism, Reynolds provides more detail about the involvement of then Church of Ireland primate Robin Eames and then UUP leader Jim Molyneaux than I have ever seen in print before.
And although he generally enjoyed a good relationship with Major, the Longford Slasher let his anger show when it was revealed that while contact with the IRA was a political sin in Dublin, the Brits had no such qualms and had been talking to them for years without relaying the fact across the Irish Sea: “I raged and raged — I chewed his bollocks off and he took lumps out of me.”
Albert also appears to confirm that while the British state might have had its so-called ‘securocrats’, shady intelligence figures apparently determined to scupper the chances of agreement, the Irish state had its own fifth column — nationalist diehards in the Department of Foreign Affairs who weren’t above acting beyond their own authority to secure as “green” a settlement as possible.
The then Taoiseach had to rein them in and, in fairness, the key document that convinced Sinn Féin-IRA that there were better ways than bombing and shooting, the Downing Street Declaration released by Major and Reynolds in December 1993, was highly original and sophisticated.
The right of the whole island to self-determination was qualified by the absolute right of the people of the North to withhold their consent to unity. The rhetoric of the so-called Hume-Adams agreement had been preserved but the process they envisaged was stripped of its effective political meaning. The Brits were to become facilitators of agreement, not persuaders for Irish unity.
Over the next nine months, Reynolds’s ruthless side came in handy as he bullied and cajoled the Provisionals. In a rare example of either government being prepared to move on without Adams & Co, he told them: “If they don’t do this right, they can shag off.”
So far, so good. Sadly, the book is let down by the final chapter dealing with his life out of office. Not to have a single good word to say for John Bruton is mean-spirited. Reynolds quotes Martin McGuinness as saying he was a better Taoiseach than Bruton. What kind of endorsement is that? Why include it? Reynolds makes matters worse for himself by omitting any reference whatsoever to the part Bertie Ahern played. Instead, he simply states baldly: “On 10 April 1998 the Good Friday Agreement, almost identical in terms to the Downing Street Declaration and the Framework Document put together by John Major and myself several years previously, was finally ratified.”
This takes the biscuit. Reynolds’s memory really is failing him: the Framework Document was John Bruton’s baby. Reynolds was well and truly out of office by then.
AND he goes on to trot out the old canard that IRA decommissioning was never meant to be a means of testing the Provos’ sincerity. This argument — that the British state had somehow conned the IRA into calling a ceasefire only to have “preconditions” inserted into the process after the event — doesn’t add up. Adams had been complaining for months before the 1994 ceasefire that the British had been demanding decommissioning.
Indeed, it was actually Albert Reynolds’s own government that had first been so insistent on the decommissioning issue. On the day the Downing Street Declaration was published, the then Tánaiste, Dick Spring, stressed the importance of paramilitary groups handing over their weapons. “Questions were raised on how to determine a permanent cessation of violence,” Spring noted in the Dáil. “We are talking about the handing over of arms and are insisting that it would not be simply a temporary cessation of violence to see what the political process has to offer,” he asserted.
That the IRA ceasefire did indeed break down in February 1996 confirmed that anxieties about the lack of the word “permanent” in the original ceasefire statement were far from unfounded.
Reynolds’s book will be remembered for his allegation that Bertie Ahern stitched him up over the presidency in 1997. But his own memoirs confirm that Reynolds had lost the plot by then. It seems Ahern did us all a favour.
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