Blair’s man hails peacemaker Bertie, but not some of his ‘green’ advisers

TEN YEARS on from that Good Friday, and despite Anglo-Irish relations never having been so good, it’s still a tale of three cities. London, Dublin and Belfast continue to inhabit very different mental worlds. Reactions to a newly-published account of the search for Northern peace by Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, are a case in point.

Across the water, almost all the attention was devoted to a couple of throwaway lines in the final pages of Great Hatred, Little Room about the need to keep lines of communication open between governments and terrorist groups.

If Powell had confined himself simply to Spanish, Palestinian and even Afghan examples, the British Establishment would have nodded sagely. The inclusion of Osama bin Laden’s outfit in the list of organisations that must be met with a political — as well as military — response caused all hell to break loose.