Latest push for peace could be the best chance in 85 years

IN the past there have always been people in the wings who have had a vested interest in destroying the various peace initiatives.

This week Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern were talking as if the current process has been going on since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, but in reality it has been going on for much longer, because Good Friday Agreement was really Sunningdale for Slow Learners.

This process to bring about a power-sharing executive has been going on for over 33 years. The first effort was undermined by an unholy alliance between loyalists and provos, who each wanted to wreck the agreement.

The whole thing was then totally undermined by a change of governments in Britain. It seems that every time a British government comes to grips with the issue of Northern Ireland, it is undermined and thrown out, and the next crowd have to learn all over again. What would happen now if the Blair government collapsed and the Conservatives got in again? The first real effort to do something concrete about partition was back in 1921, when Lloyd George tried to encourage the unionists to accept devolved government from Dublin. The stick then was that if they did not accept it, with guarantees for their own protection, they would lose nationalist territory.

The traditional Irish interpretation has been that the British reneged after leading Michael Collins to believe that the South would get Fermanagh, Tyrone, south Down, south Armagh and Derry city, if the North did not agree to come within an all-Ireland parliament. The truth is that Lloyd George was ousted, but there was considerable treachery on the part of the South, and this kind of thing has a folk memory in Northern Ireland.

Collins deliberately stirred things up in the North. As the forces of the Provisional Government were armed with British weapons, he had their existing weapons smuggled to republicans in the North, and one of the men who did this gunrunning was Johnny Haughey, Charlie’s father. Collins even had troops sent across the border to attack Belleek in Co Fermanagh. He lied to the British that they were republicans, but the British soon learned the truth. In June 1922 Collins had Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson murdered in London, and it was this that ignited the spark that started the civil war here.

If Martin McGuinness or Gerry Adams were behaving like that today, what would we be saying? Yet we said nothing about the earlier treachery.

Eamon de Valera was not any more honest in his dealings. He always said the partition issue prompted him to get him into politics, and that it was the single issue about which he was most concerned. Yet he was the first person to say in the Dáil that they might have to accept partition. Otherwise, he warned deputies during a private session in August 1921, they could end up like the American Indians - “wiped off the face of the earth”.

During the treaty negotiations he advocated that if they could not get what they wanted, they should try to put the blame on Ulster. This was patently dishonest.

During the treaty debate, de Valera introduced his own alternative, which included the treaty’s partition clauses verbatim.

Partition had nothing to do with the treaty controversy, or the civil war that ensued. Yet for years afterwards, de Valera pretended it was all about partition. It was not until the end of the 1960s that the records of the secret sessions of the Dáil were released. The irony of that controversy was that it was ultimately de Valera who proved Michael Collins had been right.

Cumann na nGaedheal people liked to blame de Valera for the civil war. The government ordered that he should be brought to trial as quickly as possible after he was arrested in Ennis in August 1923. But the attorney general reported that the only evidence he could find against the Long Fellow was an inflammatory letter he wrote to the secretary of Cumann na mBan. Can you imagine how the people of this country would have reacted if the government had only charged him with inciting Cumann na mBan - of all organisations! De Valera unquestionably overplayed his opposition to the treaty in 1921. He admitted to a private session of the Dáil that the difference between him and Collins was so small that the British would not fight over it, while Collins said the difference was so small that it was not worth fighting over, so they fought a civil war here instead.

THERE were rights and wrongs on both sides, but unfortunately people were conditioned to think that one side was right and the other wrong. Some people ask what this has got to do with today. “Old stuff doesn’t count,” they’ll say. But it does. Sure, they are still arguing about 1690 in the North.

Charlie Haughey took a leaf out of de Valera’s book in trying to wreck the Anglo-Irish agreement in 1985. Of all the things Haughey did, that was the most despicable, because he was playing politics with people’s lives.

Haughey voiced his strongest objections to the constitutional implications of the agreement. He vehemently denounced the first article, affirming “that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would only come about with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland”. This, he said, was “in total conflict with the Constitution and in particular, Article 2”, which then claimed sovereignty over the whole island. “From our point of view it gives everything away,” he argued. “It confirmed the status of Northern Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom and it confirmed that there would be no change in the status without the consent of the Northern unionists.”

That clause seemed like a sop for unionists, but Garret FitzGerald had astutely anticipated Haughey’s criticism by taking the wording from the communiqué Haughey and Margaret Thatcher issued after their first summit meeting in May 1980.

Haughey suddenly had to explain why the very words he had used five and half years earlier should now mean something different. If those words constituted a sell-out, then it was he who sold-out in May 1980.

Unlike the Sunningdale agreement, nobody tried to oversell the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. FitzGerald could have called a general election and might have routed Haughey, but that would have meant playing politics with the agreement.

To his eternal credit, he resisted the temptation.

One of the main aspects of that agreement was the decision to establish an Intergovernmental Conference, comprising of representatives of the Dublin and London governments, to consider matters relating to the administration of Northern Ireland. Garret described this as “almost joint authority”.

Tony Blair seemed to be quietly warning this week that the people of Northern Ireland have a choice to make in the next seven months - they can agree to govern themselves, or they will effectively be governed by joint authority from London and Dublin.

There is no Paisley, or Adams, or Haughey, or anybody on the British side waiting in the wings with a vested interest to undermine the current process in order to pick up the pieces. That’s why this is the best chance of real progress towards an overall settlement, not just in the last 30 years, but in the last 85 years.