We may be back to 'angel papers' to give wing to the peace process

HUMPTY Dumpty said it in rather a scornful tone: "when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less."

It was ever thus in the peace process. The more important language was, the more important it became that each side using the language could be the arbiter of its own meaning.

In the days when I was involved in the peace process (and I imagine it's still the same), when either government wanted to float an idea they would sometimes write it down on a paper to be given to the other side. Only these pieces of paper had no status whatsoever.

Irish government officials used to call them non-papers, and the British applied the quaint term 'angel paper' to theirs.

They were a bit like the letters we used to write to Santa as kids. We'd write them out carefully, but what was transmitted was only the sparks flying up the chimney.

Occasionally, ideas were agreed, and resulted in new language, signed off by both governments. Once that happened, the language became a term of art, incapable of being further developed, but still open to different interpretations.

But the right language - the language that both governments could agree with and offer to others - was always difficult to achieve. I can remember a long debate, in the course of negotiations between the two governments on what would become the joint framework document, over the phrase "parity of esteem and equality of treatment."

The phrase was an Irish one, designed to reflect the equality of the two traditions in Northern Ireland. But the British government couldn't agree with the use of the word 'equality,' insisting instead that the appropriate word to use was 'equity.'

The two words represented at the time a fairly fundamental difference in outlook, even if it was not immediately apparent. Equality was easy to define and understand, but equity means, at best, fairness and even-handedness. Or, as one of the negotiators put it at the time - "equality means you get what you need; equity means you get what you deserve."

In the end, neither government would drop its insistence on their own preferred word. The solution to that problem, which bedevilled discussions over several meetings, was to drop both words. The joint framework documents were agreed, in the end, with the phrase "parity of esteem and treatment."

Although everyone was happy with the outcome, we kept the Oxford English Dictionary at hand, because it defined parity as equality! Given the importance of language therefore at every stage of the peace process, what are we to make of the different approaches to language that have emerged since the comprehensive proposals documents were published last week?

Did Gerry Adams and the Taoiseach shake hands on the release of the McCabe killers? Adams says they did, the Taoiseach says they didn't. There is no paper, not even an angel paper, on the subject, although the Taoiseach referred to handwritten notes that supported his position in an interview on Sunday. Effectively, we are asked to believe one of the principals in these discussions, rather than the other.

Now Gerry Adams says he was never in the IRA, so even though Bertie Ahern is nobody's model for frank speech at all times, I have no difficulty in deciding who I should believe in relation to the McCabe killers.

But it is still entirely unsatisfactory that Adams should be able to use the absence of any paper, or any agreed language, to bolster his position.

And what of Ian Paisley's speech in Ballymena, in which he referred to the requirement for the IRA to don sackcloth and ashes? Or more to the point, what of the republican reaction to that speech? Close students of the peace process would have known that they had two options.

If they were ready to make a deal, they would have dismissed that speech as being typical of a man used to speaking in biblical terms about his enemies. The fact that they chose instead to turn it into a demand for humiliation meant that they simply weren't ready, for whatever reason, to proceed.

AND they went on to prove that, by their insistence that the demand for a photographic record was a further attempt to humiliate them. Where did that come from? It seems to be readily accepted that the IRA will only disarm in its own way and in its own time.

But every international agreement on disarmament, even the historic nuclear reduction agreements made between superpowers, all depend on verification methods and confidence-building. Agreements between NATO and the Warsaw Pact on arms reduction specifically provided for inspections, and for the right of inspectors to take photographs and videos for verification purposes.

In all probability, of course, the reluctance to allow visual images of decommissioning arises from the fact that such images might be used to identify embarrassing locations rather than anything else. There is no other real reason why the IRA should object to them. And that's why one has to conclude that the reason the deal wasn't done was because they weren't ready to do the deal.

There are two possible reasons for this. One is the existence of continuing dissent within the republican movement - that would explain why Adams is so desperate to secure the victory of the release of the McCabe killers. The accusations he and others have been hurling at the Taoiseach (the democratically elected Taoiseach, don't forget) serve no other purpose other than to appease their own hard men.

The other reason, just as relevant, is that Sinn Fein and the DUP have another agenda, which is to target additional seats in the British general election.

Whatever the demands of the peace process, it is shameful that the two governments have played into the hands of the parties of the extreme in relation to their electoral ambitions.

It is not that long ago since John Hume and David Trimble shared the Nobel peace prize for their efforts in leading the peace process. Now the parties they led are being utterly marginalised by the way the governments have taken that process on.

Not only have they been largely excluded from the central negotiations, it seems that some of the institutional proposals in strand one (which deal with the Assembly and Executive) are designed to trap them into a situation where they must support a DUP first minister and a Sinn Fein deputy first minister, or else be excluded from the Executive altogether.

In other words, once the governments decided that an agreement between Sinn Fein and the DUP was the only game in town, they effectively decided to abandon the UUP and the SDLP to their fate. Both of those parties have made an immense contribution to peace in Ireland.

Their contribution to democracy on the island of Ireland throughout thirty years of savage violence was even greater. Are they now to be picked off in the Westminster elections by parties that still cannot bring themselves to sign up to the end-game?