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Perhaps it was Blair who felt the hand of history on her shoulder. But the Northern Ireland peace deal could not have happened without politicians of all shades, and old enemies, doing everything they could to end decades of violence, writes Andrew Grice. "The Good Friday Agreement would not have happened without Tony Blair at the helm" It was Tony Blair's finest moment. On Good Friday 1998, he struck a historic deal that brought peace to Northern Ireland after three decades of sectarian violence.
Of course, the former prime minister did not act alone. The Good Friday Agreement, which has become a model studied by peacemakers around the world, required enormous commitment and sacrifice from many others, including Unionist and Republican politicians in Northern Ireland; Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA and the Irish government. Community played an important role, whether it was churches and clergy in a country divided between Protestants and Catholics, or groups like the Women of Peace.
An unexpected deal was made possible by a combination of circumstances and people. Both the IRA and the British Army had reached the same point, acknowledging a stalemate: while both could prolong a bloody conflict that had claimed more than 3,500 lives, neither could win militarily.
But the deal would not have happened without Blair leading the way and becoming the first incoming prime minister since Gladstone to make Northern Ireland a top priority. Putting in so much time and energy was perhaps surprising for a leader whose other great achievement was winning three elections. There was no vote for him in the province, when a failure would spell a detrimental start to his premiership.
"It was a very personal triumph," recalls one of Blair's cabinet allies today. "Tony designed it, ran it and ultimately brokered a deal that transformed Northern Ireland and ended armed conflict. It doesn't get any bigger than that.
Blair enjoyed the challenge. Mo Mowlam, his Northern Ireland secretary, who was instrumental in getting Sinn Fein to join but lost the trust of unionists in the process, said Blair had a "Jesus complex". But a former Blair aide told me that his optimism and confidence that he could solve intractable problems "was a weakness for Iraq but a strength for Northern Ireland."
Blair's allies admit that his conservative predecessor, John Major, deserves more credit than history has given him. In 1993, the Provisional IRA sent him a shocking message: “The conflict is over but we need your advice to end it. We want a ceasefire without prior notice to start a dialogue that leads to peace.
Major attempted to make a breakthrough but failed amid continued IRA attacks on the mainland. “He blazed the trail for Tony,” recalled another former Blair aide. “It changed the paradigm of military defeat for the IRA. He recognized that a new approach was needed.
In opposition, Blair took a bipartisan approach, abandoning traditional Labor support for a united Ireland. He did not criticize Major's mistakes, but was eager to learn from them; Major failed to quickly bring Sinn Fein into all-party talks after an IRA ceasefire in 1994 and raised the dismantling of IRA weapons as a precondition for Sinn Fein's participation.
How did Blair and his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern, with whom he had linked up when both were in opposition, succeed where so many others had failed? Their mutual trust was a key ingredient. They belonged to a new generation without the historical baggage of tensions that went back to the 16th century and that weighed so heavily on their predecessors. A British civil servant working in the province at the time recalled: “The locals saw Blair as different, like a breath of fresh air. He was young, energetic and offered hope. For the first time, “the British” did not look like a colonial ruling class from a bygone era. »
Mo Mowlam (left) with Gordon Brown in 1998. She served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland during the Good Friday Agreement talks.
Blair raised his eyebrows as he traveled to Northern Ireland for his first speech outside London after his landslide victory in 1997. His priority was to reassure unionist parties, saying "my agenda is not a united Ireland" and that probably no one in the room I would see. one in your life. After that, he never took a break, so he would keep the momentum going towards a deal.
However, success was never guaranteed, until the last minute. He took what Blair's chief of staff and indefatigable negotiator, Jonathan Powell, called "constructive ambiguity", especially in dismantling the IRA. Sinn Fein and the unionists must have thought that any agreement supported their position. If Sinn Fein had been forced to accept a delay, there would have been no deal. If Blair had told the unionists that he had given up hope of being demoted, they would have withdrawn from the talks; he constantly struggled to contain them.
Blair argued that decommissioning was not the biggest problem because the IRA could give up its weapons and acquire more at a later date. He focused on the question of "consent", proposing that Northern Ireland's status could not be changed without the support of its people, a difficult concession for republicans.
The general lines of the eventual agreement were not new. For some participants, it echoed the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, which aimed to establish shared executive power in Northern Ireland and a cross-border council of Ireland, which unionists suspected they dismissed as an embryonic island government.
Blair took over the three-part deal discussed under Major: a Northern Ireland executive and assembly; north-south cooperation on the island and east-west cooperation between the British and Irish governments and between the two islands. There was also dismantling, prisoners, police, security and human rights. Although a May 1998 deadline had been set, it once again appeared that the talks were not advancing quickly.
A loyalist mural is seen on a wall in West Belfast, Northern Ireland, earlier this month.
There was little optimism in the air when Blair arrived in Belfast on the Tuesday before Good Friday, dismissing advice from officials not to bother. Ahern wasn't sure either and George Mitchell, the former US senator who chaired the cross-party talks, warned Blair there was no prospect of a deal. A trade unionist gave the meeting a 5% chance of success. Powell was instinctively more optimistic, but he didn't know why.
Upon arrival, Blair, unprepared, delivered one of his most famous sound bites, while trying not to. He told media on hold: "A day like today is not a day for sound bites, we can leave them at home, but I feel the hand of history on our shoulder in this regard, I'm really sorry." His assistants Alastair Campbell and Powell laughed out loud. "It just occurred to me," he told them afterwards.
The gloomy, claustrophobic buildings of Stormont Castle, with their maze of corridors, were not the ideal setting for what became a marathon negotiation. "It stank of sweat and stale food," Powell said. With the reporters camped out, the only place attendees could get some fresh air was in a walled courtyard; they were going around in circles, thinking it was like a prison. Blair "got strong on bananas and horrible sandwiches," recalled one adviser. After Tuesday night, few of those involved got much sleep for the next two nights. At one point, Blair discovered Ulster Unionist MP Ken Maginnis asleep in his bed at Hillsborough Castle, the residence of the Northern Ireland secretary. John Holmes, Blair's private foreign secretary, has fallen asleep at an office desk in his suit.
The first crisis during a three-day roller coaster ride had to do with the north-south relationship. Les unionistes d'Ulster, directed by David Trimble, étaient sous la pression du Parti Unioniste Démocrate (DUP) rival et radical, directed by Ian Paisley, who boycotted the pourparlers mais s'est présenté pour s'adresser aux médias et dénoncer Trimble comme a deal. Trimble was furious with the project and demanded concessions from Dublin and Ahern shortened a long list of north-south cooperation.
Tony Blair, US Senator George Mitchell and Bertie Ahern after signing the agreement
At one point, Blair lost his temper with the Irish over the north-south corps, but an eventual breakthrough paved the way for an agreement on decentralized government. So Sinn Fein became the barrier to a deal. Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who had joined the Provisional IRA when they were young, did a "good cop, bad cop" routine: Adams never said he would reject the deal, but McGuinness said he couldn't. recommend it. Blair recognized that they needed to bring hardliners into their movement; history has shown that failure to do so could cost them their lives.
Bill Clinton, the US president, stepped in to try to keep the deal alive: On Thursday, he stayed up all night and called Adams three times. Compromises were found on policing and the Irish language. But then the controversial issue of the release of terrorist prisoners became a late stumbling block. Blair privately assured Adams that he would advance his release from two years to one, a token that was never cashed, and agreed to meet with Adams after Easter to show he was in for the long haul. .
Just as a deal seemed possible, in the early hours of Good Friday, the talks ran into new problems over north-south arrangements. Blair, exhausted, summoned Ahern, Trimble and their delegations. "The Irish hold their own and Trimble was extremely rude to Bertie [Ahern], who almost beat him up," Powell wrote in his fascinating book on the deal, Great Hatred, Little Room. Blair successfully pleaded with Trimble, but another snag hit when the deal was finalized on Friday morning. Blair gave in to a Unionist demand to close a civil service building housing an Anglo-Irish secretariat.
Campbell, Blair's communications director, told waiting media that a deal had been reached, but it had not. In fact, all hell broke loose when the parties received a revised text at noon. Trimble had not prepared the ground with his delegation; it had (wrongly) judged that Sinn Fein would not live by the principle of consent. Blair was desperate and pleaded with unionists to "look at the big picture". Not about to fail, he sent Trimble a follow-up letter making it clear that Sinn Fein would be thrown out of the executive if there was no break. It worked - just.
Sinn Fein deputy leader Martin McGuinness with Gerry Adams behind him in 1994
With the deal finally done, Blair and Ahern spoke to the media. Standing next to her quote, Blair said: "Today I hope that the burden of history can finally begin to be lifted from our shoulders."
Blair was able to enjoy her unexpected triumph. But it turned out to be a beginning, not an end. As a former minister told me: "People forget today, but the Good Friday Agreement was stillborn." Little did Blair know that it would take another nine years of arduous negotiations to get the executive and assembly up and running. Trimble and John Hume, leader of the Nationalist Social Democratic Labor Party (SDLP) won the Nobel Peace Prize. But Trimble paid a heavy price for his courage. He lost his seat in the House of Commons, resigned as leader of the Ulster Unionists, and his party was eclipsed by the DUP. One unintended consequence, an irony given Blair's obsession with the center, was that extreme parties flourished on both sides of the divide, while moderates lost support as politics in the province became polarized. The SDLP was overtaken by Sinn Fein.
Surprisingly, it was the DUP's Paisley who became Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, with McGuinness his deputy, a highly unlikely combination who liked each other and were nicknamed 'the laughing brothers'. On the day they were sworn in in May 2007, Blair said it was time for the province "to free itself from the shackles of history". Two days later, he announces his resignation. Like Major, Blair probably deserves more credit for bringing peace to Northern Ireland than he received, but the lives he saved there were undoubtedly dwarfed by those lost in Iraq.
The story is far from over today. The DUP suspended the assembly and executive in February last year in protest of Northern Ireland's protocol on post-Brexit trade deals. A previous hiatus lasted three years. This prompted calls to reform the Good Friday Agreement to prevent the DUP and Sinn Fein from holding such a veto and to recognize the growing support for the non-sectarian Alliance party. Change will probably come one day, but it won't be easy; this would require cross-community support.
Despite such flaws, the Good Friday Agreement has stood the test of time, a reminder of the power of politics to do good when politicians of all shades, and old enemies, try every nerve.
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