Go raibh míle maith agat, a Chathaoirligh. I thank you sincerely for the invitation. It is always an honour to come to the Seanad, address it and see all the Senators here.
In the human journey, anniversaries play a significant role. They serve as markers of memory, calling to mind an event, moment, person or group of people of significance to us personally or as a community. The exercise of recall serves many purposes – remembering, memorialising, honouring and reflecting – and it can also be a catalyst for renewal to resolve or redouble efforts associated with the person or event being recalled. Landmark anniversaries like decades or centenaries have even further significance in the outworking of memory. Twenty-fifth anniversaries undoubtedly sit in that category of significance. Whether we are talking about the life of a person, a marriage or an organisation, or even a country, reaching the quarter-century mark has an impact of special importance to us. Making it to 25 years carries a certain status. It speaks of viability, endurance, resilience, staying power and, yes, achievement. Of course, no human endeavour is perfect but arriving at the milestone of a score and five years deserves to be acknowledged and saluted. Senators can see where I am going with this. Those of them who follow these things have probably been noting that a fair degree of column inches and screen time - even, dare I say it, podcast hours - have been devoted to marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Of course, I admit straight away to some bias in the matter but I do not believe we have overdone it. It is right and proper that we should use the spring and summer of 2023 to focus on marking the seminal moment in Anglo-Irish history of 25 years ago. I say that for all the reasons I have just outlined as to why 25th anniversaries are significant in the human journey. I have already set out the caveat that no human venture is perfect but, allowing for that, the 25th anniversary of the agreement certainly ticks many of the boxes I have listed. The agreement has shown endurance, resilience and staying power, and, yes, it has shown achievement. For starters, it has delivered on its primary purpose: to stop the killing and achieve a stable peace. It is easy with the passage of time to forget how utterly awful and heartbreaking the previous generation had been on our island, particularly Northern Ireland. There were over 3,700 deaths and tens of thousands were injured, and the entire society of the island was blighted and held back by the darkness that enveloped it. To give just one statistic of context that came up in the numerous debates we had on the stations across the water, the vast majority of the deaths were in Northern Ireland. In per capita terms, that level of death in Great Britain would equate to over 130,000 killings. It was not just a matter of the savagery of the scale of the death, injury and destruction; it was also a matter of the sense of hopelessness it engendered, the sense that the seemingly endless cycle could never be broken and that we were all destined and predestined to accept our grim fate.
Somehow, in some way, through a combination of determination and resolve on the part of many, and, frankly, a modicum of good fortune, we found the means in the weeks and days of the spring of 1998 to bring the vicious cycle to an end, not totally but very substantially, and thereby set in train a new era of peace and stability in Northern Ireland and the relations between the North and South and between Ireland and Britain that we continue to enjoy to this day. As the autumn unfolded, what I would call an historic confluence of people and factors meant there was a choice – if not the choice of a lifetime, certainly that of a generation – to break the vicious cycle of violence and death I have mentioned.
In no particular order, those people and factors included: David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, UUP; John Hume and Seamus Mallon of the Social and Democratic Labour Party, SDLP, and all those other people in that party as well, like Senator Currie's dad, Austin Currie, who did so much work; Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin; and, from the other parties, John Alderdice, Monica McWilliams, David Ervine and Gary McMichael, among others. I also give a shout out to the Ministers supporting Tony Blair and myself, the legendary Mo Mowlam, Paul Murphy and, later, Peter Mandelson on the British side, and my team of the great David Andrews, John O'Donoghue, Liz O'Donnell and the then Attorney General, David Byrne. Further down the road of implementation, now Senator Michael McDowell sat with me through many fairly heated debates, of which I am sure information released under the 20-year or 40-year rule will eventually give the details, as well as Brian Cowen. The danger in listing people, of course, is the risk of leaving out important figures. There were certainly others who played a noble role, so I mention them all. In particular, I mention the dedicated officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Justice and the Taoiseach, who were excellent throughout the years of the discussions.
In describing the historic confluence, I spoke of people and factors. I just outlined some of the people involved, so what, then, were the factors? A crucial one was the passage of time itself. The 30 years or so of conflict led to a kind of fatigue and exhaustion. There were many participants in the conflict but none of them had achieved what would be called the upper hand. The paramilitaries had waged a savage campaign that had cost the lives of thousands of people, but they had not prevailed in their stated goals. By the same token, however, the British and Irish states had applied their fullest resources in tackling the subversive activities of the paramilitaries, but this security and justice response had not brought peace.
By the early to mid-1990s, a kind of uneasy stalemate had taken hold. It felt like a stalemate that was not going to be broken by military or security means. All this had, in turn, led to a gradual evolution of the policies of the two governments in addressing the conflict. For almost 25 years, the settled view of both governments, individually and collectively, was that there could be no truck with those waging or supporting violence and armed struggle. Political parties supporting the armed groups were excluded from engagement by the governments. The focus of both was entirely on the constitutional parties.
In truth, of course, secret outreaches to the paramilitary worlds were undertaken over the years by many governments, Irish and British. Looking back, I fully support the fact that such efforts were made, including on the part of my two immediate predecessors as leaders of Fianna Fáil, Charles Haughey and Albert Reynolds. It was Albert Reynolds who was to give that dial its most dramatic twist when he became Taoiseach in early 1992. He immediately made it clear that peace in Northern Ireland was his number one priority. Like my situation some years later with Tony Blair, he enjoyed a good relationship with his counterpart, John Major. They both agreed to explore what they could do together.
The Downing Street Declaration they signed jointly in December 1993 proved the decisive stepping stone towards the peace they both sought. It set out in clear terms the basis for a comprehensive process of negotiations and the principles that would need to be enshrined in the agreement. Critically, it opened the way for parties associated with armed groups to participate in the negotiations, but with one fundamental proviso: the groups had to end their campaigns of violence and commit to peace and democracy. In the summer of 1994, this led to the IRA ceasefire, which was followed in October of that year by a similar move by the loyalist paramilitaries. This was a historic turning point, without question, for which Albert Reynolds and, indeed, John Major, deserve great credit.
This was the spirit in which Tony Blair and I kicked off the process of inclusive talks in Belfast in September 1997. Again, it bears repeating that we were not starting from scratch but rather building on the foundations laid by our immediate predecessors, John Major, John Bruton and Albert Reynolds. A formal talks process had been under way since the summer of 1996, chaired by George Mitchell, but representatives of Sinn Féin were not at the table and, of course, the IRA ceasefire had broken down in February 1996. Thankfully, that ceasefire was restored after the change of government and the discussions we had had with Sinn Féin. To their credit, the loyalist paramilitaries maintained their ceasefires throughout. By the autumn of 1997, then, Tony Blair and I were able to work with George Mitchell in developing arrangements for the inclusion of Sinn Féin and the loyalist Ulster Democratic Party, UDP, and Progressive Unionist Party, PUP, in the talks.
This, of course, proved easier said than done. After some difficult conversations, the Democratic Unionist Party, DUP, and the UK Unionist Party, UKUP, withdrew from the talks on the arrival of Sinn Féin. To his credit, though, David Trimble and the UUP remained, supported by the UDP and the PUP.
I will say a word initially about the nature of the talks process itself. I would sum it up by saying that it was inclusive in terms of the parties around the table and comprehensive in terms of the issues on the table. By that, I mean that for the first time ever since the conflict began in the late 1960s, a negotiating process was taking place that incorporated the majority of the main players, including those connected to the combatants, and with all of the key topics requiring addressing on the table. That meant that if it was successful, the process had the best chance possible of being sustainable and enduring.
Around the table, there were two Governments and eight parties: UUP, SDLP, Sinn Féin, Alliance Party, UDP, PUP, Women’s Coalition and the Labour Coalition. In other words, there were ten delegations in all. When I say “delegations”, I mean big delegations. You have heard the phrase “It takes a village.” The talks process at times looked more like a mid-sized town. While that meant, at times, crowded corridors or rooms, in fairness, looking back on it, it also helped heighten the chances of whatever was agreed actually sticking.
In truth, the early months of this new phase of the talks through the autumn of 1997 and into early 1998 were not auspicious. The atmosphere was tense, suspicions were high and progress, if any, was painfully slow. George Mitchell’s patience was certainly being tried to the full. That Christmas was particularly bad. Billy Wright, the leader of the LVF, was killed in the Maze Prison and tension in Northern Ireland soared again. Delegates returned to the talks after Christmas even more down-beat than before they left.
Tony Blair and I kept going. We knew that the process was still the best chance for peace and in January we doubled our efforts. That month, we agreed between us what we called the Propositions on Heads of Agreement – essentially, the bare bones of what an agreement would look like and its key elements. That, in fact, became the agenda for the remainder of the talks and the task now, in effect, being to put flesh on those bones.
Now to the end game. It was kicked off, in fact, by a surprise development. Around 20 March, George Mitchell called a plenary meeting of the talks to announce that he was setting a deadline for the talks at 9 April, just a few weeks ahead. That certainly served to concentrate minds. From that moment on, there was a noticeable intensification of the talks. Business was being done but success still a long way off and major difficulties remained.
I will say a brief word about the shape of what was emerging based on the talks so far as the heads of agreement finalised in January was concerned. It was accepted that the following elements would have to be included and agreed. First was a section on constitutional issues, which would be the foundation platform for the entire agreement. Then, a section on institutions covering the three strands, that is, the three sets of relationships at the heart of the conflict: strand 1 dealing with relations within Northern Ireland; strand 2, between North and South on the island; and strand 3, between Britain and Ireland. The next section was material on rights and safeguards, highly important that the new dispensation we were seeking to build was to be a fair and equitable place for all. Then there was policing and justice, two crucial building blocks of any new agreement. The second last was tackling a range of issues, which would be summed up as things that have to do with the ending of the conflict, such as dealing with the arms question, prisoners and demilitarisation of society. Finally, there was the methodology for securing the endorsement of the people, North and South, for whatever was agreed in the talks, the result of which we celebrate today.
That all sounds very logical and orderly 25 years on. I can assure you that fleshing out the detail was anything but. The final week heading into George’s deadline of Thursday, 9 April dawned with many of the key issues still up in the air. The drafting process had been in overdrive since George’s announced deadline. That was mostly being conducted by officials of the two Governments in consultation with the parties and of course with George Mitchell keeping a close watching brief. It would be his task and that of his team to pull everything formally together. He told us that his intention was to circulate a first draft of a possible agreement ideally before the weekend of 4 or 5 April, but that did not prove possible; we just were not ready. Tony Blair and I were in constant contact. We were in London that week and over the weekend continued to be in contact. By Monday, we were able to get George enough material for him to circulate the first draft, which became known in the parlance as Mitchell 1.
It was then that all hell broke loose. Mitchell 1 had material on all of the ingredients I mentioned above and David Trimble and his colleagues were particularly taken aback by what the draft said in one of those, namely, the proposed strand 2 North-South arrangements. To be fair, they were at what I would call the maximum end of ambition from our perspective.
A large number of areas were included and it was proposed that these be taken forward on a North-South basis. Mr. Trimble and his team were having none of it. Deputy leader of the UUP, John Taylor, summed up his party's attitude in the immortal phrase that he would not touch the draft with a 40 ft barge pole. Mr. Mitchell's deadline week was starting swimmingly.
I have spoken publicly a number of times about a phone call I got from Paddy Teahon, Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach, as I left the church following my mother's removal. I took the call and Mr. Teahon, a straight-talking Kerryman, was of the view that if we did not see our way to scaling back very considerably the level of ambition on the North-South dimension, I did not need to bother coming up. It was a tough moment. I spent an hour and a half talking to both Mr. Teahon and Mr. Mitchell about how we could get out of this fix. I knew that there were no no-risk options open to me but I came to the view that, in order to save the talks and keep the possibility of agreement alive, I needed to move decisively in significantly scaling back the scope of strand 2. Very early the next morning, I travelled to Hillsborough where I met with Tony Blair and told him what I intended to do. He appreciated the move the Irish Government was going to make and agreed that we would then work with David Trimble, the SDLP and Sinn Féin to get agreement on our side's position and reassess where we stood. I then travelled back to Dublin for the funeral, returning later in the day to give the remaining period of talks my total attention.
Tony Blair and I were back in Castle Buildings and it was clear that we would not be leaving again until we had either agreement or a complete breakdown. The night of Wednesday, 8 April, was spent doing a major refashioning of a number of elements of the agreement, particularly the North-South element. Thursday, 9 April, dawned and we were all conscious that this was Mr. Mitchell's deadline. I have a feeling we were trying to avoid eye contact with him because we knew there was still a mountain of work to do but at least there was the first glimmer of momentum returning to the process.
By Thursday night, we had the shape of the proposed new North-South proposition. In essence, we agreed that there would be a formal ministerial institution. David Trimble had preferred that everything be kept on an ad hoc
basis but, in the end, accepted that there would be a North-South Ministerial Council that would be the formal channel for cross-Border co-operation between the new Northern Ireland Administration and the Irish Government. It was also agreed that the council would have competence in at least 12 areas of formal co-operation and that six of those areas would be taken forward by new implementation bodies operating on an all-island or cross-Border basis with the six others being implemented by means of existing bodies. The big compromise on my side was conceding that the identity, nature and scale of the areas of co-operation and the cross-Border bodies associated with them would be left to a further process of negotiation down the road, to be completed by 31 October.
That unquestionably represented a big scaling back on my part and on the part of the nationalist parties with regard to the level of ambition that was going to emerge out of the agreement. However, I felt we were doing the fundamental thing that I believe is necessary in any negotiations, which is to come to an arrangement that takes account of the reality and the perspective of the other side and seeks the balanced space in the middle. For his part, David Trimble appreciated the scale of the compromise. Poignantly, before he died last year, he told me that it was a big part of the reason, over the following 48 hours, when things were extraordinarily difficult for him within his own party rooms, he held out against those opposed to the deal and eventually gave his assent. Although we were over one hump, there were several more to go.
Before we come to those, I will briefly mention two other key areas where agreement was reached before Good Friday dawned. One was the arrangements inside strand 1, which related to relationships within Northern Ireland, that is, the effective deal done in a long meeting between the SDLP and the UUP on Thursday night, stretching into the early hours of Friday morning. As the two largest parties in their respective communities, the heavy lifting in getting agreement on the arrangements as to how power was to be shared within Northern Ireland fell to them. Of course, these arrangements were those two key words, power sharing. A system was going to be required at both legislative and executive level that had the assent and consent of both communities. In effect, that meant agreeing to share power. In the course of a few intense hours, tremendous progress was made and, by the end of the meeting at approximately 1.30 a.m. on the morning of Good Friday, agreement was reached between them on the shape of strand 1, which related to the institutions.
There would be a legislative assembly of 108 members, with executive authority to be discharged by a first and deputy first minister and up to ten ministers with departmental responsibilities. Safeguards were built in regarding how both institutions would work on a cross-community basis. It was an historic moment. I still remember the vivid excitement on the faces of John Hume and Seamus Mallon when they came into our delegation room to tell us the news. One further huge piece of the jigsaw had fallen into place.
The other key piece of the puzzle was already agreed by this point; it was the basket called "constitutional issues". I want to spend a few minutes on that now because it is critically important to everybody on this island. In many ways, this section of the agreement was always going to be the cornerstone - its foundation stone. Without a shared understanding of the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, because this, in essence, was what we were talking about, there would be no overall agreement. Again on this matter, we were building on a lot of important work that had been undertaken already in previous documents, in particular, the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 and the Framework Document of February 1995. That set out the key challenges involved and the principles that would need to underlie their resolution. The Framework Document had useful language in terms of summing up the prevailing situation and what the requirement of the new agreement would be in this regard. In other words, Northern Ireland was a contested space in terms of the allegiance and identity of its people. At the heart of the contestation were two fundamentally different and opposing political philosophies, namely, unionism and nationalism. In unionist doctrine, Northern Ireland was as British as Finchley or Yorkshire, and in the nationalist credo, Northern Ireland was as Irish as the Cliffs of Moher, and never the twain shall meet. History had shown that both sides were prepared to take to the gun to press home their case. That had happened in the decade or so leading to independence between 1912 and 1923 and again 50 years or so later.
A way had to be found to break that cycle and, as the Framework Document called for, a fair and balanced way. In the end, we reached agreement in principle on how that could be done several days ahead of George's deadline. For being able to do so, I pay particular tribute to the fine work of Martin Mansergh and some of the officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs. A formula was hammered out in which they made a very significant input which reflected the accommodation I just mentioned.
The accommodation was founded on the principle of self-determination by the people of Ireland, consent, the equal validity of two fundamental identities of union and unity, acceptance of the current status of Northern Ireland based on consent and a pathway to a united Ireland in the future, also based on consent. Other elements of an agreed way forward constitutionally would be a shared commitment to exclusively peaceful and democratic means, power-sharing within Northern Ireland, meaningful arrangements for North-South co-operation which would reflect the practical advantages of such co-operation and the relationship symbolically between the two parts of Ireland and, of course, further embedding the importance of relations between Ireland and Britain.
It was understood by Tony Blair that a fair and balanced accommodation of the constitutional question would require changes to the Irish Constitution and the UK constitutional legislation. There were two other elements to settling the constitutional status question. First, we had to crack the conundrum around, on the one hand, ensuring the birthright to Irish citizenship of nationalists living in Northern Ireland without imposing it on unionists who did not see themselves as Irish. The way we did this was by introducing the concept of entitlement as a kind of junction box. It would be the entitlement of everyone in Northern Ireland, as a birthright, to be part of the Irish nation. That way, nationalists would be able to exercise access to our citizenship as a birthright, while unionists who wished otherwise would simply decide not to exercise their entitlement and nothing was imposed on them.
This construct was incorporated into the eventual agreement in two ways. It was in the language of the proposed amendment to Article 2 of the Constitution and Article 1 of the British-Irish Agreement as follows: "[The two Governments] recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose".
The other key feature of the understanding on constitutional issues we arrived at was that whichever Government was exercising sovereignty over Northern Ireland, whether in the context of union or unity, would do so with rigorous impartiality as between the identity, aspirations and ethos of both communities.
In many ways, this part of the agreement has tended to be overshadowed by the focus on the institutions. Crucial as the latter are, without having reached the shared understanding together on the very thorny issues around the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, there would have been no Good Friday Agreement. While I am all for listening respectfully to the concerns of the unionist community around the Northern Ireland protocol and the Windsor Framework, I say, equally respectfully, to my unionist friends that honouring the balance of the Good Friday Agreement is a two-way street. I am sorry, but the starting point in the debate about the status of Northern Ireland today is not the Act of Union. It is the solemn agreement reached by the governments and the parties on 10 April 1998 and endorsed by the people on 22 May 1998. This is our opening space, and if we honour – I feel sure we will – what we did in 1998, we will find a way to settle our differences equitably today.
That was a bit of a digression from the narrative on the closing hours of the Good Friday Agreement, but it was important to make those points clearly about the constitutional question 25 years on and put them on the record of the Seanad, which I know understands why I needed to make them.
We got to the early hours of Good Friday morning and agreement in principle on strands 1 and 2 and the constitutional question was in the bag. We had also reached understandings on how to tackle policing and justice, two of the agreement's critical building blocks. On policing, and given the significant issues involved, it was felt that the best way to proceed, akin to the formula agreed on strand 2, was to put in place a subsequent programme of works to tackle the detail. This would take the form of an independent commission, which was tasked with making recommendations on the future of policing arrangements in Northern Ireland, including means of encouraging widespread community support for those arrangements. The latter became known as the Patten commission. I will take this opportunity to thank Chris Patten and his colleagues, including Dr. Maurice Hayes, a former Member of this House, for their magnificent work in their report, which led to the establishment in 2002 of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI. While the service has had its challenges over the years, there is widespread agreement on all sides that, on the whole, it has done, and is doing, a fine job. Without question, policing, which was long a source of considerable controversy in Northern Ireland, has been transformed and is one of the great success stories of the Good Friday Agreement.
In that spirit, I send my best wishes and those of everyone else in the Chamber to Chief Inspector John Caldwell and his family.
