A Thinking Man

There were some events that I just never expected to happen during my lifetime - the ending of Apartheid in South Africa and the decline of Communism in Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example. Thankfully, sometimes seemingly impossible things do happen, though I never thought the ‘Irish Question’ would ever be resolved.

Throughout my teenage years and adult life I have lived with the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Bloody Sunday, the hunger strikes, the murder of Lord Mountbatten, the attack on Margaret Thatcher in Brighton, the mortar attack on the Cabinet Office, the ’shoot-to-kill’ policy, the Omagh Bombing were all events that made a particular impression on my consciousness living on the other side of the Irish Sea.

For one, horrible six month period the Irish War invaded my family life. A close relative served in the Paratroop Regiment on patrol in Northern Ireland. Since returning he has dined out on many of the stories he can tell about working undercover in the bandit country of South Armagh, but even he would admit that the experience has left him psychologically scarred. And during that time the whole family lived in incredible tension, afraid to watch the explosive violence in News Reports, and dreading the knock on the door that might inform us of his capture, injury, or death.

Jonathan Powell’s Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland is an inspiring, if at times, frustrating book. After a period as a diplomat in America and then as a negotiator involved in the handing over of Hong Kong to the Chinese, the author was recruited by Tony Blair to become his Chief of Staff. Regardless of his ‘day job’, for 10 years he became the de facto manager of the peace process for Blair. His book describes the detail of that tortuous process - first achieving the Good Friday agreement, and then years later, making it happen. Most of us could never imagine Rev. Ian Paisley (Dr ‘No’), staunch Unionist, sitting in government with Martin McGuinness, former IRA terrorist/freedom fighter - now not only do they work together, they also play together apparently (Scottish Country Dancing).

The book often surprised me, opening up windows of new understanding, and exposing my superficial grasp of events that I have lived through. I never really understood the full extent of the difficulty that the main protagonists had in moving. Adams and McGuinness both faced death threats from militants in their own organisations for ’selling out’. Trimble, and later Paisley, also faced incredible opposition and rancour - the courage to try to move forward ultimately cost Trimble his political career. The negotiators on both sides wanted peace years before it happened. The time it took was about the difficulty it took to persuade their respective movements to follow them. Parts of the IRA wanted peace but could not bring themselves to do anything that would look like surrender to the British. The Unionists who wanted peace had to overcome the hurdle of convincing their followers that they were not compromising safety.

I was surprised too at the amount of negotiations and the time costs. I had naively assumed that most of it was done by civil servants and the likes of Powell, with Blair and Ahern turning up for the photo shoots. It is clear that both British and Irish Prime Ministers were heavily involved on a regular basis and that there were hundreds of behind the scenes meetings at Downing Street and in Dublin. The facts that both Prime Ministers got on so well, that both were determined to see peace and were prepared to move on previously held positions, and that both were prepared to devote so much time to the process were key factors in the ultimate success. It was also a revelation to learn that the Northern Ireland Office was occasionally an irrelevance and sometimes a hinderence to the process and often had to be necessarily side-lined in order to break deadlocks.

There were several incidents of delicious humour. For example, John Reid and David Trimble were both described as men who could start an argument in an empty room, so that when ‘negotiating’ with each other, they occasionally had to be held in their seats by bystanders. There was the occasion when John Major stormed out of his office (the Cabinet Room) after being accused of lying by Ian Paisley. Major hoped Paisley would go away, but he stayed there for most of the day, meaning that the Cabinet Room could not be used for the rest of the day. Moral of story - if you are going to storm out of an office, make sure it isn’t your own. When McGuinness got Powell’s watch fixed after it had broken in Belfast, Powell had to get the security forces take it apart on its return to check for bugs and tracking devices, and then had to pay a jeweller a lot of money to get it put back together again.

The book is detailed. The author was there and was given access to government papers in writing the book. At times the process was numbingly tedious, and the constant see-sawing and repetition of the negotiations can seem predictable (which they were). Two things made these parts of the book readable for me. First, the author often gives a framework to enable you to rise above the detail to see the patterns of things taking place. You soon come to recognise the Sinn Fein style of negotiating for example - sound interested, appear to agree to everything, then at the last moment, completely back-track and make more unreasonable demands. Secondly, this is a book about people in the process written for the general reader, not a book about the detailed documents for the historian. Ironically, if I have a criticism of the book it is to do with the lack of detail. Despite the mass that is there, I would have liked to have seen more about some of the detailed content of the documents under discussion, even if only in appendices.

The last chapter alone is worth the cost of the book. Powell stands back and does an excellent job of bringing together the strands of analysis that he has hinted at throughout the account and tries to answer the question: “Why did the process succeed now, when it had failed at other times?” His answer is long and fascinating. Let me just briefly list some of the factors he mentions to whet your appetite.

• The commitment of two prime ministers (Blair and Ahern) with no particular political axe to grind over Northern Ireland other than wanting peace. Since Gladstone, the only other British Prime minister to really devote time to Northern Ireland was John Major, and Powell acknowledges the debt that the success of the process owed to some of his work.
• Timing. Adams and McGuinness were in their fifties and didn’t want to go on seeing young men being killed in a military struggle that could never succeed. Paisley nearly died in hospital and came out convinced of the need to solve the problem before he eventually left the scene. The new generation of British Military Commanders accepted that there could never be a military solution.
• 9/11. After 9/11 the IRA terrorism seemed weak and out of date. Also some Irish Americans no longer seemed so willing to support ‘freedom fighters’ overseas.
• Economy. The economic transformation of Southern Ireland meant that it no longer looked like an impoverished country run by the Catholic Church that seemed such a disaster and threat to the North.
• Talking. Talking and talking and talking to your enemies, even when it is politically painful, even when atrocities and criminality were continuing despite your talks.
• An almost messianic belief that peace was possible.
• An ability to offer the real prize of self-determination for the protagonists. Nobody in Northern Ireland on either side wanted the country run by the British. Peter Hain, a Northern Ireland Secretary, cannily put up water rates and abolished the 11-plus examination at a crucial time in the negotiations to help the people and Northern Irish politicians realise that they did really want to get rid of British rule and regain control of their taxation and education system. It was a prize worth struggling to achieve.

I commend the book to you.

Tags: Bertie Ahern, book review, David Trimble, Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley, IRA, Ireland, John Major, John Reid, Jonathan Powell, Lord Mountbatten, Margaret Thatcher, Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, review, Scottish Country Dancing, Sinn Fein, Tony Blair, Unionism, Unionists