Prepare for a surprise - DUP may be the party to do a deal with SF

NORTHERN IRELAND politics has had a busy August. The word processors and wordsmiths of the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin have been particularly busy.

In the last three weeks, Danny Morrison had articles published on this page, Gerry Adams and Peter Robinson have penned articles for the Irish Times, Nigel Dodds contributed a piece to The Guardian and Martin McGuinness’s thoughts were given a full page in the Irish News.

This exchange of op-ed pieces was the backdrop to a session at the Parnell summer school in Avondale last Friday morning when the four main Northern political parties had the opportunity to give their current perspectives on the peace process.

Jeffrey Donaldson was the Democratic Unionist speaker at the event.

Donaldson is best known here in the Republic as a thorn in David Trimble’s side when he was in the Ulster Unionist Party. However, last November he defected to the Democratic Unionist Party where he is now ensconced as one of the DUP’s negotiators.

At the Parnell school, Donaldson re-iterated that there are four particular issues which need to be addressed in the talks. In summary, the DUP is seeking the following: full decommissioning of IRA weapons to be dealt with “conclusively”; the IRA and the associated “architecture” of paramilitary violence to be disbanded; Sinn Féin to “sign up” to the new policing arrangements; and, finally, some relatively uncontroversial alterations to the machinery of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive.

Earlier this month, Gerry Adams called for the early devolution of political responsibility for policing and security from Westminster to a minister in the Northern Ireland Executive answerable to the Assembly.

On this point, Donaldson reiterated that the DUP has no objection, per se, to the devolution of such powers but that it could only be done after a period when the restored executive was bedded down and IRA decommissioning and disbandment were in train.

By contrast, Adams wants a timetable for the devolution of policing responsibility to be set out in advance.

Although he emphasised that his party was not planning for failure, Donaldson seemed to be dampening down expectations about a breakthrough.

Warning against a “September is the last chance” stance, he argued that if the deal doesn’t happen in September, but that progress has been made, then the governments shouldn’t pull the plug.

Second to speak at the Parnell summer school was the SDLP’s Eamon O’Neill. His was a now familiar SDLP refrain that the essential elements of the Good Friday Agreement must be preserved (although there can be some alterations to the furniture and fittings). Clearly frustrated by being sidelined, the SDLP is throwing cold water on the prospects of any real accommodation emerging between the DUP and Sinn Féin. He implied that in the white heat of negotiations, both parties would be found wanting.

The third speaker was the Ulster Unionist Party negotiator Alan McFarland who also had much cold water to throw around. The UUP had nearly destroyed itself, he said, in trying to make the Good Friday Agreement work and had paid an electoral price. There was a tone of frustration in his voice and a tinge of anger at Donaldson in particular as he accused the DUP of having nicked the UUP’s clothes.

McFarland was particularly dismissive of what he called the “Billy Backwoodsmen” of the DUP whom he predicted would stage a grassroots revolt if a deal with Sinn Féin of the type implied in the recent Robinson and Donaldson overtures was to materialise.

The final speaker was Sinn Féin’s new Dublin MEP Mary Lou McDonald. There was some overlap between the issues she listed as now important with Donaldson’s list but there was not much other agreement.

In summary, Sinn Féin is seeking full participation by all parties in the institutions; wants the issue of policing and justice “to be addressed”; and wants the issue of demilitarisation dealt with. Sinn Féin also has a “human rights, equality and anti-sectarianism” agenda to be addressed.

Although McDonald told us that Sinn Féin is “up for a deal in September” she offered no real insight as to whether further decommissioning or ultimate disbandment would be forthcoming from the IRA. When pursued on this aspect by Morning Ireland’s Áine Lawlor, who was chairing the session, McDonald’s main response was that “unionism is not and never will be the appropriate mechanism through which republican guns can be dealt with.”

Issues like the disbandment of the IRA, McDonald said, were complicated and do not lend to simplistic soundbites She accused some southern commentators of an obsession with the need to disband the IRA. She claimed that the rest of us here in the Republic don’t understand the sense of oppression and harassment felt by some nationalist communities in the North whose lives are still blighted by the apparatus of British security.

CALLING on the DUP to talk directly to Sinn Féin, McDonald said such engagement was necessary to ensure a “sufficiency of trust”.

Interestingly, in subsequent questioning Jeffrey Donaldson told us that in late 2002 he was told by the police that, even though his then party, the Ulster Unionists, were sitting in the executive with Sinn Féin, he himself was being targeted by the IRA. His point was that this did not do much to engender trust.

There was of course an air of déjà vu about the Parnell Summer School session. Indeed, a southern audience could be forgiven for the sense that we’d heard it all before.

However, although the issues appear the same, the context of the current round of exchanges is different - very different.

The main difference is that the entity involved on the Unionist side this time is the DUP and not David Trimble’s UUP.

The DUP’s emergence as the biggest unionist party in last November’s Assembly elections, many assumed that the peace process would be indefinitely stalled. Given the need for majorities in both communities to support initiatives within the Good Friday machinery it had been assumed that all was doomed.

What’s taken some southern commentators - and indeed some officials of both governments - by surprise has been the diplomatic and conciliatory tone in which the DUP is now putting its case. It may be no more than a change of tone, but it could it be that it is actually a real shift in policy.

Here in the Republic, our impressions of that party have been conditioned by decades of intolerant, at times offensive, utterances from the Reverend Ian Paisley.

In the coming months, we may need to be careful that such conditioning does not cause us to miss (or too easily to dismiss) some of the subtleties of both the change in leadership and the change in positioning within the DUP.

If the DUP does step up to do a deal with Sinn Féin to finalise the peace process, then they’ll be akin to the last person to try to twist the lid off the beetroot jar - If they do succeed, observers will wonder whether they succeeded because of their own strength or because they are benefiting from the earlier exertions of others.