April 2023 marks the 25-year anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. It remains one of the few successful conflict resolutions anywhere, inspiring subsequent peace processes all over the world. As the head of the Irish delegation at the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in Belfast, David Donoghue experienced first-hand the complex, delicate, often frustrating series of negotiations that drew the Troubles to an end.
His book about this, One Good Day offers a personal perspective on the drama of the negotiations by someone who was at the centre of action, alongside all the key players, from Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams and John Hume to Bill Clinton, Bertie Ahern and Mo Mowlam. Here is an extract from One Good Day:
WHAT KIND OF agreement were we setting out to achieve? Our Government’s view was quite clear.
It would have to be broadly on the lines indicated in the Framework Document. That is, a comprehensive agreement covering structures within Northern Ireland, North/South institutions and East/West structures as well as balanced constitutional change, measures to protect rights and a range of other provisions.
We expected that the structures within Northern Ireland would involve an Assembly with an Executive which would exercise powers devolved from Westminster and would operate on the basis of cross-community agreement.
For the North/South component, we envisaged a Ministerial Council which would bring together Irish Government ministers with their Northern counterparts. This body, established under Westminster and Oireachtas legislation, would have delegated ‘executive’, ‘harmonising’ or ‘consultative’ functions. It could carry out its work through a number of subsidiary agencies (which in due course we termed ‘implementation bodies’). And there would be a supporting secretariat.
The East/West structures would involve a standing Intergovernmental Conference established under a new British–Irish Agreement. This would carry forward the role which the Irish Government already had under the Anglo-Irish Agreement, while excluding the policy areas which would be devolved to the presumed new Assembly. This conference would also keep the operation of the new agreement under review and – a very important point for nationalists – intervene if any of the new institutions were not functioning properly.
These new institutions would be accompanied by human rights measures and reforms in areas such as policing, security policy and the economic and cultural domains. There would be constitutional change in both jurisdictions; in our case, this would involve the amendment of Articles 2 and 3 to implement the commitments we had made in the Downing Street Declaration.
The agreement which emerged from the negotiations would be put to both electorates, North and South, for approval in referendums held on the same day. John Hume had long advocated this approach. In this way, the Irish people, North and South, would be exercising their right to self-determination for the first time since 1918. This was a point of critical importance for the republican movement.
Sinn Féin saw the all-Ireland general election in 1918 as the last occasion on which the people of Ireland had been able to carry out an act of self-determination. They had done so and it had yielded clear support for Irish unity. In the Downing Street Declaration, we had, of course, accepted that the exercise of this right was subject to the principle of consent.
We saw consent as a two-sided coin. On the one hand, we accepted that there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland without the consent of a majority of the people there.
‘No going back’
But on the other, nationalists in Northern Ireland had not consented to the latter’s existing status and their consent would have to be obtained for whatever new arrangements were agreed in these talks. There had to be an entirely new beginning across the three core relationships. The future in Ireland would have to be based on agreement between the two main traditions rather than on domination of one by the other, whether through force or otherwise. There could be no going back to the injustices of Stormont majoritarian rule.
With substantive all-party negotiations finally launched, the Framework Document was the key point of reference for the Irish Government. We saw it as the road map for the settlement we all hoped to achieve.
The British Government were in principle of the same view.
While the document had been agreed with us by the Major Government, Blair and his ministers had no difficulty with its contents. However, they worried more about their ability to sell the document to unionists, given the UUP’s unrelenting hostility to it. In private, the new Government would assure us of their complete commitment to the Framework Document; in public, they preferred to equivocate about it.
We found it odd that a new Government with a very comfortable majority at Westminster should find it necessary to distance itself publicly from this text. It had, after all, been agreed with us by a minority Conservative administration that had been wholly dependent on unionist support for its survival. While the UUP had not liked it then and still did not like it, the document was in fact carefully balanced between unionist and nationalist sensitivities.
We also warned that the constitutional changes flagged in it were predicated on the balancing provisions being delivered in their entirety.
Mo Mowlam was conspicuously lukewarm about the Framework Document. It was ‘a useful basis for discussion’, she acknowledged in Strand Two on a number of occasions. But it was only one possible way of balancing the various concerns – and she was ready to look at any others which might attract support.
Differences over the relative weight to be given to the Framework Document were to become a significant fault-line in the negotiations. The Irish Government, the SDLP and Sinn Féin insisted on absolute fidelity to it and were supported by most of the smaller parties. The UUP and the loyalist parties, on the other hand, opposed the document and received tacit support from the British Government.
Overall, the Irish and British Governments functioned well together as the motor of the negotiation process. We succeeded in agreeing a series of joint positions over several months which gave direction and impetus to the talks. To the Irish Government, it was clear that a steering role of this kind was not just desirable but essential. The talks would rapidly run into the ground without this. The key protagonists were very unlikely to move of their own accord off their opening positions. They would do so only if put under pressure by one or other Government. The two Governments had to take charge and to create a context in which compromises and trade-offs would eventually become possible.
This responsibility, however, was viewed with a certain hesitation in London. The new Government preferred the posture of ‘neutral’ bystander, waiting passively in the wings to see whether the Irish Government, the UUP and the SDLP could agree something among themselves, especially in relation to Strand Two. And, even though Blair had declared that his Government were ready to be ‘persuaders for agreement’, they were reluctant to accept that they might have any role to play in encouraging unionism towards agreement with nationalism.
There was also a tendency in parts of the British system to ignore the logic of all-party talks and to see an agreement reached between ourselves, the UUP and the SDLP as the primary objective.
This was clearly influenced by the UUP’s deep-rooted reluctance to contemplate sharing power with Sinn Féin. NIO officials would claim from time to time that the Irish Government was working with undue zeal on behalf of Sinn Féin in the talks and that the SDLP’s interests were being neglected. This was a familiar unionist mantra. We were, of course, highly active in the support we were providing for SDLP interests, notably in Strands One and Two.
But the British colleagues were going along with a unionist script which sought to marginalise Sinn Féin and to disrupt the prospect of broad nationalist consensus in these talks.
The SDLP and Sinn Féin did differ on some fundamental aspects.
In Strand One, the SDLP were active participants, contributing in detail to the negotiations on the future internal arrangements for Northern Ireland. However, Sinn Féin largely stayed away, unwilling to imply any acceptance of the legitimacy of Northern Ireland as a political construct.
Both parties had a keen interest in Strand Two but the SDLP engaged more closely with the detail, including the legal foundation for the North/South bodies and the policy areas which the latter would cover. Sinn Féin’s major interests in the talks were less the detailed institutional arrangements and more the need for generous prisoner release arrangements, serious reform of policing and the administration of justice, ‘demilitarisation’ of security policy and action on a range of equality and identity issues.
This, then, was the broad context in which the all-party talks got under way.
One Good Day by David O’Donoghue, published by Gill Books, is out now.
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