Few twentieth-century Irish politicians have aroused such powerful passions as Charles Haughey and none whose political legacy has been so fiercely argued over, even during their lifetime. If Ireland had a Richard Nixon figure, then it was Haughey. Once banished into the political wilderness, tarnished with allegations of gunrunning, Haughey made an extraordinary comeback, rising to become leader of Ireland’s largest political party, Fianna Fail, and on three occasions Irish prime minister, or taoiseach. Like Nixon’s, his years in office were dogged by scandal and controversy until finally he was driven out of office and hounded by disclosures and allegations of corruption and venality. But just as the passage of time and reflection caused Nixon’s period to be reassessed, so Haughey’s role in the Northern Ireland peace process, a story never before fully told until now, may well place his own stewardship in a different light.
Charles Haughey had never met Gerry Adams, but the men were not entirely strangers either. They first started talking to each other, albeit indirectly, during the 1981 hunger strikes when Haughey was taoiseach and trying to negotiate a settlement of the prison protest with the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The go-between was an old friend and confidant, Padraig O hAnnrachain (O’Hanrahan), whose Fianna Fail credentials were impeccable. A County Clare man, O hAnnrachain had been recruited by de Valera in the 1950s and became the great man’s private secretary. In the days of Lemass and Lynch, he headed the Government Information Service, and was responsible for ensuring that the taoiseach got the best media coverage possible. Discreet and affable, O hAnnrachain, who died in 1988, was trusted by Haughey to handle the secret phone calls to and from Gerry Adams during the turbulent spring and summer of 1981. Had Adams wished, he could have destroyed Haughey with a judicious leak about their dialogue, but the contact was never revealed and trust between the men grew.
Five years later Haughey was no longer ensconced in Government Buildings in Dublin, but he was still the leader of Fianna Fail, despite the best efforts of rivals to unseat him. In August 1986, a few months before he was once again elected taoiseach, Father Alec Reid came to see him at Kinsealy, the splendid Georgian estate owned by the Haughey family on the northern outskirts of Dublin. It was the start of a dialogue that would culminate just nine months later in an extraordinary offer of an IRA cease-fire from Gerry Adams and later in the creation of a strategy that enabled the republican leader to coax, direct, and otherwise persuade his followers to take a path that would lead to the ending of the Provisionals’ long war against the Northern Ireland state.
BY THE TIME the Provisional IRA Army Council ordered the second cease-fire of the peace process, in July 1997, a decade or so after Father Reid’s journey to Kinsealy, it seemed, as one erstwhile loyal fan put it, that “the pathological anti-Haugheyites” had won the argument about Haughey’s place in Irish life.1 The former Fianna Fail taoiseach had been mired in one of the worst corruption scandals ever to hit Irish politics, and it seemed that it would be this rather than the achievements of office that would shape history’s judgment of him.
It was the Provisional IRA that was indirectly responsible for Haughey’s plight. Back in October 1981 the IRA was strapped for cash, and so the Army Council authorized the kidnapping of Ben Dunne, one of Ireland’s wealthiest and most flamboyant supermarket tycoons. It was a risky operation, for it was sure to attract the anger of the Irish political establishment, but despite that the IRA went ahead. The task was given to the IRA in South Armagh, and it went about the kidnapping with typical flair and careful planning. Just north of the Border at Jonesboro the IRA staged a fake car accident, and when Dunne stopped to give aid, armed men pulled him from his car. He was held for a week and then released into the hands of a local journalist. Both Gardai and the Dunne family denied reports that some £300,000 was paid to the IRA for Dunne’s life, but the suspicion persisted.
Whatever the truth, the experience scarred Dunne and in no small measure contributed to a serious cocaine habit, which finally surfaced eleven years later in a bizarre incident at the Grand Cypress hotel in Orlando, Florida, when the supermarket boss threatened to jump from the seventeenth floor. Other members of his family were appalled and angered, in particular his sister Margaret Heffernan, who ordered an investigation into the financial affairs of their supermarket chain, Dunnes Stores. The probe re vealed secret payments to Charles Haughey and led directly to the government of the day setting up a tribunal to inquire into the former taoiseach’s past financial dealings.
Further investigation by the tribunal established that Haughey’s expensive lifestyle, which included not just his ownership of Kinsealy but also an island retreat off the County Kerry coast, had been bankrolled by a small group of wealthy Irish businessmen. The tribunal calculated that the businessmen had donated £8.5 million in the seventeen years since 1979, when Haughey first became taoiseach. Ben Dunne, who gave some £2 million, turned out to be the single most generous donor. Although no evidence was ever produced at the tribunal to suggest that Haughey had returned favors to the businessmen while in office, the suspicion lingered and was strong enough for many in Irish public life, the media in particular, to consign him forever to the rogues’ gallery of Irish politics.
It was difficult, in watching the pursuit of Haughey, not to be aware that many of his enemies fell upon him with the sort of glee and venom that characterizes the patient hunter who at long last has cornered an elusive prey. For years significant sections of political life and the media in the Republic had held Haughey responsible for the creation and birth of the Provisional IRA, and there were some who had long hoped for the day when he would be brought low. It is, though, one of the great ironies of the peace process that no single Irish politician did more than Haughey to start the Provos on the path that eventually resulted in the cease-fires.
His contribution was twofold. The first was that many of the political ideas on Northern Ireland developed during his time as Fianna Fail leader were incorporated almost wholesale into the strategy worked out by Adams and Reid. In many important ways the strategy was Haughey’s, not theirs. The second contribution was that by the time he left office in 1992, the theology of the peace process had been fully worked out, and the completion of the enterprise was then only a matter of internal management and negotiation. Whatever about Haughey’s role as midwife to the Provos, there is no doubt that he was in there at the beginning of their end.
The story begins at the start of the Troubles. When the violence flared in the summer of 1969, forty-four-year-old Haughey was the ambitious minister for finance in a badly divided Fianna Fail government led by the former Cork hurling star Jack Lynch. The street violence in the North would make those divisions worse and finally propel the Southern state into what one experienced commentator later described as “arguably the most serious political conflict since the Civil War.”2 Lynch’s cabinet was riven by personality differences and by competing ambitions, but these coincided with a deep ideological fault line. Lynch had been won over by the influential Irish civil servant Dr. T. K. Whitaker to a much more moderate policy on Irish reunification than normally was Fianna Fail policy. It was one that stressed the need for unionist consent to change,3 a view echoed later by constitutional nationalists in the North and in particular by John Hume, the leader of the SDLP. The approach implied that partition was not the sole responsibility of the British and that an attitude of confrontation with the government in London or the unionists was unlikely to be productive. Whitaker preached the need for slow, gradual, peaceful change, a breaking down of barriers between unionist and nationalist, Protestant and Catholic, and Lynch agreed.
Not everyone in Fianna Fail accepted the Whitaker-Lynch analysis. For large sections of the party the violence of 1969 signaled an opportunity to complete the unfinished business of 1919–21 and to make right the wrong that had been done to Irish sovereignty by the imposition of partition. The principal spokesman for this viewpoint in Lynch’s cabinet and the Fianna Fail party was Neil Blaney, the minister for agriculture, whose base in County Donegal was adjacent to riot-torn Derry. It was perhaps no accident that Blaney hailed from a part of Ireland that had suffered most from the partition settlement, for the Border meant that Derry lost its natural hinterland while Donegal was stranded between two states and often felt abandoned.
Haughey seemed an unlikely member of the Blaney camp, but he did have excellent family credentials. He was born in Castlebar, County Mayo, in 1925, although his parents were both Northerners who had left Northern Ireland not long after partition. They hailed from the County Derry village of Swatragh, and his father, Sean, joined the local unit of the IRA at the outbreak of hostilities, becoming adjutant of the Second Derry Battalion. Like most Northern IRA men, he sided with Collins after the Treaty, but he appears not to have actually fought in the subsequent civil war.
By 1922 he had risen to be Brigade OC of the Second Northern Division, but then the family moved to Mayo, where Haughey Sr. took a regular commission in the new Irish army. The young Charles Haughey did not follow his father’s footsteps into the IRA, but he did the next best thing and joined Fianna Fail. An accountant and lawyer by training, Haughey was first elected to the Dail in 1957 and four years later was promoted to the post of minister for justice. Within a month he had dealt the final blow to the IRA’s dying Border Campaign, when he introduced special military courts to try republican activists. The secretary to his department, Peter Berry, later credited him with having made the move that “broke the back of the organisation.”4 That and the fact that only once before the crisis of 1969 had Haughey mentioned Northern Ireland in a speech5 led many to conclude that he held no noticeably strong views on the national question. Haughey had made a bid for the Fianna Fail leadership when his father-in-law, Sean Lemass, retired as taoiseach but withdrew when Lynch was adopted as the compromise candidate acceptable to most tendencies in the party. But such was the impact of the violence of August 1969 in the Republic that the leadership question seemed ready to be reopened.
The violence forced the Lynch government to make some sort of response; the television scenes of blazing Catholic houses and refugees flooding across the Border had roused public opinion in the Republic. Lynch managed to resist efforts to send the Irish army across the Border but agreed to set up a special cabinet committee to relieve “the distress” suffered by Northern nationalists, whose control he placed in the hands of his enemies, Blaney, Haughey, and another cabinet hawk, Kevin Boland. As minister for finance, Haughey was charged with administering a fund of £100,000 to spend on the North, a considerable sum in 1969–70. Haughey and Blaney also liaised with Captain James Kelly, an officer in Irish military intelligence who was mixing with Northern republicans and nationalists on behalf of the government.
From these circumstances came two extraordinary allegations. One was that Haughey, Blaney, and others, including a senior Belfast IRA man, John Kelly, had tried to import weapons from Europe to supply defense committees in Belfast. The allegation was all the more staggering given the size and quality of the arsenal supposedly involved: 200 submachine guns, 84 light machine guns, 50 general-purpose machine guns, 50 rifles, 200 pistols, 200 grenades, and 250,000 rounds of ammunition, enough to equip a battalion of the British army.6 Since the defense committees were under the sway of either the Official IRA or, in more cases, the new Provisional IRA, it meant the weapons were headed for republicans who would not hesitate to use them, and not necessarily in a defensive mode.
Haughey, who along with Blaney was later sacked by Lynch when the affair became public, was charged with conspiracy to import weapons. The subsequent hearing, known simply as the Arms Trial, was one of the most sensational in Irish history, but it ended with Haughey’s acquittal, while the charge against Blaney was dropped at an earlier stage. Although spared shame and imprisonment, Haughey was banished to the Fianna Fail equivalent of a political Siberia. John Kelly was similarly acquitted.
The other allegation was that, along with Captain Kelly and Blaney, Haughey had conspired to foment a split in the IRA with a twofold aim: to neutralize or weaken the politically radical and increasingly violent Gould-ing leadership in Dublin, while creating an instrument in the North that would be more amenable to Fianna Fail control. Cabinet papers of the day that have recently been published acquit Haughey of this particular charge; they reveal that this was a policy agreed upon by all Lynch’s ministers in April that year, long before the August riots. The papers show that the Department of Justice had recommended a policy of dividing the IRA’s rural conservatives from the urban radicals and that the cabinet endorsed this. Even so, the working out of the policy put Haughey and Blaney at the center of the scheme, almost as if it was their private, freelance plan.
In the wake of the Arms Trial, Haughey was dispatched to the political wilderness, but he turned this into an opportunity. He cultivated the grassroots and discovered that the rank and file responded well to a tough republican rhetoric. In 1977 Fianna Fail won a thumping majority in the general election, unseating the strongly anti-IRA Fine Gael–Labour coalition. Lynch was obliged to include Haughey in his cabinet, making him minister for health and social welfare. Within two years Lynch was gone, forced to quit by a series of by-election reverses, and Haughey narrowly won a hard-fought leadership contest with the retired taoiseach’s preferred successor, George Colley.
The day after his election as Fianna Fail leader, on December 7, 1979, Haughey signaled a new assertive direction regarding Northern Ireland matters, an end to Jack Lynch’s tractable approach to London. Not only did the new Irish leader flag a more confrontational line with the British, but he hinted that the way forward was for the two governments to bypass the unionists altogether and deal directly themselves with a shared problem. The government’s line, he announced, would revert to the traditional Fianna Fail program that called on the British to encourage Irish unity and to declare their commitment to implement “an ordered withdrawal” from the North.
His first Fianna Fail Ard Fheis, in February 1980, gave an opportunity to signal the changes in a way the ordinary grassroots would more readily understand. Haughey was piped into the Royal Dublin Society’s auditorium, not far from the British embassy in affluent Dublin 4, by a trade union band to the air of “A Nation Once Again,” the hymn of nationalist Ireland. He followed that with a speech that for the first time rejected the traditional goal shared by the British and the Irish governments of securing an internal settlement. Northern Ireland, he told the wildly cheering delegates, had “as a political entity, failed and… a new beginning was needed.”7
ACCOMPANIED BY cabinet colleagues, Haughey traveled to Downing Street for talks with the new British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in May 1980. This teapot diplomacy, so named after the silver-plated gift that Haughey brought as a present for Thatcher, launched the Anglo-Irish approach to Northern Ireland. Although it was to culminate five years later in the Hillsborough agreement, the diplomacy also contained the germs of ideas that would re-emerge during the peace process dressed in Sinn Fein garments. In a Dail debate after the Downing Street summit, for example, Haughey obliquely introduced the idea of an all-party conference if the British were to make a declaration expressing their interest in ultimate Irish unity. “If that interest were declared,” he told TDs, “we could then start working together, the Government here, the British Government and Irishmen of every tradition in the North towards a solution which will guarantee permanent peace and stability.”8
The proposal for an all-Ireland conference was hardened up between 1983 and 1984, during sittings of the New Ireland Forum in Dublin, a body set up by constitutional nationalists to meet what was widely perceived to be the burgeoning threat from Sinn Fein’s growing electoral strength in the North and its alarming potential to cause political instability in the South.
In his contribution to the forum report, Haughey made clear that in his view the way to achieve unity would be for Britain to respond positively to proposals for an all-party conference at which unionists and nationalists would thrash out the institutional details and constitution for the whole island. Sinn Fein could attend, but only if the IRA ended its violence and the party renounced violence. This was one of the central proposals contained in the later secret British correspondence with Adams. It had been borrowed wholesale from the Fianna Fail leader and made British policy, at least in the private diplomacy with the Sinn Fein leader.
But that was not all. During one private, unreported session of the forum in October 1983 Haughey produced a formulation on the crucial issue of unionist consent whose ambiguity was later borrowed almost entirely by Gerry Adams. Its significance was that it opened the door to a reinterpretation of the consent principle that would allow Adams to accept the unionist right to self-determination and thus to accept, if only in a de facto sense, the existence of the Northern Ireland state. In his address to the forum, Haughey said, “As regards the veto—the constitutional guarantee [to unionists]—we should make a clear distinction on consent. Consent is only applicable to arrangements on a new Ireland. But consent by the Unionists to British action to find a solution is not required.”
By the end of 1984 Haughey had articulated three of the principal features of what would eventually become the Sinn Fein peace strategy. His denunciation of Northern Ireland as a “failed entity,” his call on the British to declare their interest in seeing Ireland united, and his proposal for an all-Ireland constitutional conference were all vital ingredients in the mix.
But it was Haughey’s assertive style with the British that gave his politics the color that Adams and Reid needed. In 1982, for instance, he had refused to endorse Britain’s military expedition against the Argentinean invaders of the Malvinas, or Falkland Islands, and when the SS Belgrano was sunk he reasserted Irish neutrality at the United Nations, much to the fury of Mrs. Thatcher and the delight of Irish republicans, of the Provisional as well as the Fianna Fail variety.
His opposition to an internal Northern Ireland settlement was given tangible expression that same year when he appointed the SDLP deputy leader, Seamus Mallon, to the Irish Senate, even though British law barred Mallon from sitting in the locally elected Stormont Assembly at the same time. An embarrassed British administration was forced to expel Mallon from its own parliament. He publicly accused the Duke of Norfolk of being a British spy and regularly lambasted the Fine Gael leader Garret FitzGerald for a weak-kneed attitude to the Thatcher government, on one occasion accusing him of colluding and secretly collaborating with the British on security matters.
A year after the Hillsborough agreement had been signed, Haughey was the first mainstream politician to complain that the deal had not only failed in its declared objective of improving the lot of Northern Nationalists but that “the position of Nationalists in the North has, in fact, seriously worsened.” Whatever the private thoughts of Gerry Adams and his closest colleagues about the Hillsborough deal, this was an echo of what they too were saying in public.
By December 1986, two months before Haughey was to take power for the fourth and last time, Adams was able to tell Fianna Fail’s newspaper, the Irish Press, that he regarded the taoiseach-to-be as “a genuine Nationalist.”9 Haughey’s role during the 1981 hunger strike—an accessory along with Fine Gael’s Garret FitzGerald “to the legalised murder of ten true and committed Irishmen,”10 according to the IRA prisoners’ statement at the end of the protest—was forgotten.
Haughey’s forceful brand of Irish nationalism appalled significant sections of Irish political society, but it was precisely this quality that allowed Adams and Father Reid to contemplate advancing the fledgling peace process in the mid-to late 1980s. Haughey was the right man, in the right place, at the right time. Had any other recent Fianna Fail leader, from Jack Lynch onward, been taoiseach at this time, it is likely the project nursed by Adams and Reid would have been stillborn.
HAUGHEY’S LEADERSHIP of the Irish government and his forceful brand of nationalist politics made possible the next seminal moment in the Irish peace process, one kept a tightly guarded secret until now by all the participants, not least because once again, as with the secret British diplomacy, it signaled not just the private desire of Gerry Adams for an end to the IRA’s violence but his willingness to accept a settlement that fell short of what most republicans would find acceptable, from the Army Council to the Volunteers on the streets of Belfast, Derry, and South Armagh.
So it was that sometime in the second week of May 1987, the editor of the Irish Press, Tim Pat Coogan, delivered a lengthy written message from Father Alec Reid to Charles Haughey, containing Gerry Adams’s terms for an IRA cease-fire. It was a remarkable document whose message said not just that an opportunity existed to call an IRA cease-fire but that if the enterprise was handled properly, the proposal brought by the Redemptorist priest on behalf of the Sinn Fein leader could mean taking the gun out of nationalist politics forever.
As Reid explained the initiative, it became clear that he was communicating not just on his behalf or on Adams’s but on behalf of the Irish Catholic Church as well. The enterprise, he explained, had been endorsed by the Redemptorist order in Ireland and by other senior church figures, most notably Cardinal O Fiaich, who would give political cover to Haughey if the dialogue were ever publicized. It had been developed after lengthy thought and debate, Reid said, which involved church figures talking widely to key figures in the nationalist and unionist communities. The message the church had received, he said, was the same from everyone. As the body with the required resources, influence, and access to power centers, it should and would try to get this peace initiative under way.
Since the church’s aim was primarily to bring the IRA’s violence to an end, it had made a priority of approaching Gerry Adams, Reid explained. Adams also had told them that the church could play an important role in finding the ways and means of ending the armed struggle but that there was no chance of persuading the IRA to do this unless there was unrestricted dialogue with fellow nationalists aimed at formulating a strong political alternative to the armed struggle involving all Ireland’s nationalist parties. Only in that way, Adams had told them, could the peace initiative succeed.
This was the kernel of the Reid-Adams initiative: the creation of a pan-nationalist axis whose political clout would be greater than the IRA’s and sufficiently strong to persuade the hard men of the organization to lay down their weapons. For this reason Haughey was being approached in his capacity as Fianna Fail leader, Reid explained, not just because he was taoiseach. The dialogue, if it ever happened, would initially be between Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail, with the church acting as a neutral host and facilitator. Even the start of such a dialogue, Reid suggested, would be sufficient to influence the course of the armed struggle, and once it was under way, he believed, the IRA would respond and cooperate positively.
Sinn Fein, he said, had consistently told him that republicans would fully cooperate with the church in the search for what became known as “the alternative method” to armed struggle. They, or rather Gerry Adams, had also given a number of pledges, should the dialogue start. Adams would not insist on any preconditions either officially or unofficially and promised that all their dealings would be treated in the strictest confidence; there would be no question of Sinn Fein’s leaking embarrassing details for political advantage. The peace initiative would be given the highest priority by the Sinn Fein leader, the necessary resources and energy would be devoted to it, and Sinn Fein promised to “engage constructively”11 with anyone the church decided should be involved in the dialogue.
Reid went on to tell the Fianna Fail leader that Sinn Fein would accept any settlement that came out of a properly structured process, even if it fell short of its stated aim of achieving a socialist Ireland. The goal of the IRA’s armed struggle, he had been told, was not the creation of a thirty-two-county socialist republic; rather, it was to establish the right of all the Irish people to decide their own political future in free negotiations, the so-called right of national self-determination. The goal of socialism was a political one that Sinn Fein would pursue by political methods only.
This was an important and revealing concession. The move to the left during the 1970s had been constructed by Adams and his allies in Cage 11 as part of a strategy to capture the movement. By 1987, however, the need to make an alliance with Fianna Fail dictated a compensating move in the other direction—socialism would be discarded in the interests of advancing this new Adams strategy. The underlying message to Haughey and others involved in the process was that pragmatism would determine the flow of events, not dogged adherence to political ideology.
Adams did have certain bottom lines in negotiation, however, Reid explained. The most crucial was that nationalists and unionists should be able to negotiate their political and constitutional future free of dictation from the British, and as long as this principle was honored, Sinn Fein would be content with whatever shape the agreed settlement took.
It was at this point that the Reid-Adams enterprise dovetailed with the secret British correspondence with the Sinn Fein leader. The British had told Adams that while physical withdrawal from Northern Ireland was out of the question, they would promise not to interfere or dictate the terms of any settlement reached by unionists and nationalists; they would withdraw politically, in other words. It was all very Jesuitical, but by the late spring of 1987 Adams was approaching Haughey with the very same idea and sought his cooperation in making this a public and formally acknowledged policy of the British government.
Adams wanted the British to implement this promise, Reid said, in a practical fashion by declaring in some convincing way their willingness to set aside section 75 of the Government of Ireland Act (1920), the legislation that formalized the partition settlement. This section gave the British parliament supreme authority over Northern Ireland, in effect saying that Britain could veto the wishes of the people of Northern Ireland even if their representatives reached political agreement. As long as a majority favored staying in the union, this was not an issue, but theoretically it could be used to thwart a vote in favor of Irish unity.
This was to be the revised and reinterpreted version of British withdrawal, the centerpiece of the Reid-Adams initiative: a declaration of constitutional disinterest and a promise not to dictate or influence the outcome of the all-party talks. If the British withdrew the legal claim of veto over the people of Northern Ireland, in other words, then Sinn Fein would be content to view this as the culmination and realization of the IRA’s goals, for which, by that time, it had waged some seventeen years of killing, shooting, and bombing.
In practice, Reid said, Sinn Fein would accept a promise from the British to repeal the offending section of the 1920 act after agreement had been reached in negotiations between unionists and nationalists, not before. The traditional republican model for British withdrawal foresaw the all-party conference happening once the British had at least declared their intention of leaving Northern Ireland. In Adams’s new version, the conference would happen first, and then the British would make good their declaration.
The Sinn Fein leader had added an important qualification to all this, Reid told Haughey. The British did not have to withdraw immediately or even in the foreseeable future. In fact Sinn Fein wanted the British to remain, and would insist that they did, in order to oversee the practical details of implementing any agreed settlement.
Then came the central message from Reid to Haughey: if the British agreed to do this, the IRA would declare a cease-fire. The IRA’s long war would come to an end, and in a much more definitive fashion than any of the short-lived and doomed cease-fires of the 1970s.
Once representatives of nationalist and unionist opinion were able to meet freely without a British veto hanging over their heads, then, as far as Sinn Fein was concerned, all options for a settlement of the national question would be on the table. Sinn Fein would at that point abide by negotiating arrangements that would guarantee unionists their heritage and culture in accordance with their right of consent and the right of consent of the Irish people as a whole. This was Gerry Adams’s way of recognizing the integrity of the Northern Ireland state and of opening the way to Sinn Fein eventually helping to govern it.
IT WAS AN EXTRAORDINARY offer. The Reid-Adams principle married the separate and conflicting concepts of all-Ireland and Northern Ireland–based self-determination, and in practice that would mean accepting the outcome of separate referenda held in the two divided parts of Ireland, albeit on the same day, which is precisely what happened in the weeks following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998, eleven years after the astonishing offer to Haughey was made. Traditional republican theology held that self-determination had to mean the Irish people voting as one unit; in the message from Father Reid, Adams was saying that he would accept two separate votes and, crucially, that they would have equal value. If the North voted differently from the South, then he would accept this. It was setting established republican dogma on its head, and substituting heresy for orthodoxy.
Although senior republicans like Gerry Adams continue to deny to this day that they have conceded the right of a majority in the North to maintain the link with Britain, in practice the unionist majority,12 the subtle, ambiguous formula devised by Father Reid and the Sinn Fein president meant that they had. Sinn Fein, under Adams, was a little like a team of soccer players who strongly object to the offside rule but agree, nevertheless, to play in the cup final.
There was an important sense in which the proposal was based on fantasy. It assumed that the British would want to frustrate the will of the people of Northern Ireland, even if they did vote themselves into a united and independent Ireland. It was clear from a variety of public statements over the years of the Troubles that they would do no such thing. They had said as much in 1973, before the Sunningdale agreement, and again in 1985 when the principle of consent, both for the union and against it, had been written into law when the Hillsborough Agreement had been signed by Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald. But the great achievement of Adams and Reid was that they had fashioned a wording that enabled Sinn Fein to join the ranks of constitutional nationalism while preserving the outward aspects of the party’s traditional uncompromising brand of republicanism. As an instrument for keeping the Pro visionals united and the rank and file unaware of the true implications of the peace process, it was almost perfect.
All this was a preamble to the core proposal that Reid had brought from Belfast. It was for what the rest of the world would soon call a pan-nationalist front, an alliance of Irish nationalist parties, North and South, that would try to agree a common policy on the North. What this meant, said Reid, was that the three principal parties—Fianna Fail, the SDLP, and Sinn Fein—must agree at a minimum to press the British to remove their right of veto from the Government of Ireland Act.
Reid outlined two ways in which the enterprise could be advanced. Either the church could host face-to-face talks between Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail, whose confidentiality the church would underwrite, or the church could mediate between Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein in a bid to devise ways in which direct dialogue between them could begin.
There was one immediate problem with the Reid-Adams proposal. It was not entirely clear in what circumstances the IRA would declare a cease-fire. Reid seemed to outline two scenarios for an end to armed struggle—one when the British agreed to remove their veto from the Government of Ireland Act, the other when the pan-nationalist alliance was formed. It was clear that the chronology outlined by Reid-Adams envisaged the latter happening first, but just when would the IRA cease-fire start?13 It was a loose thread in an otherwise finely woven garment.
This, in its essentials, was the blueprint of the Irish peace process, and with variations and amendments, and not necessarily in the order originally envisaged, it was the plan that was eventually implemented.
It would be quite wrong to say that with this message from Alec Reid the peace process was full-fledged, but its shape had been sketched out, a road map of sorts indicated, and the parameters of the historic but still secret ideological compromise that Gerry Adams was prepared to make clearly identified. There was a great deal of distrust to overcome, much of it caused by the IRA’s post-Eksund campaign of violence. Like the British, the Haughey government noted the gulf between what Gerry Adams and Alec Reid preached and what the IRA practiced.
At the time, according to one informed source, it never occurred to Haughey or his advisers to ask Adams if he had the backing of the Army Council for the initiative. Like the British, they assumed Adams would never take such a dangerous course unless he had the informed support of his leadership colleagues. Had they known that the process was, at this stage, as much a secret from the IRA leadership as it was to everyone else, the Reid enterprise might well have suffered an early and precipitate ending. But as it was, the question was never asked.
The process was full of difficulties, not least the need to overcome Irish and British government doubts about the IRA’s real intentions. One great obstacle was Margaret Thatcher. Few of those involved believed that movement along the lines sketched by Reid-Adams would be possible as long as she was British prime minister, as one of Haughey’s key aides, Martin Mansergh, was to write later: “I was always fairly clear that there was little hope of an end to belligerence in Ireland while she remained British prime minister.”14 He and everyone else would have to wait until November 1990 before she left the political stage. But the important point about Father Reid’s overture to Haughey was that it contained an unmistakably strong signal that Adams knew where he wanted to go, and even if the how was still a little hazy, the ending of armed struggle by the IRA was clearly now on the agenda.
Faced with two options by Father Reid—one of direct dialogue with Adams, the other indirect dialogue facilitated by the Redemptorist order— Haughey chose the safer and, as he had in 1981, chose to talk to Adams indirectly. With the history of the Arms Trial hanging over him, Haughey calculated that the risk of exposure was too great and that the slightest leak could destroy him. He kept the Reid approach secret from cabinet colleagues and particularly from his coalition partners, the Progressive Democrats, who were led by his deadly enemy, Des O’Malley, a determined foe from the Arms Trial days.
Haughey’s decision caused the first crisis in the enterprise. Adams made a desperate plea to Haughey for face-to-face meetings, but to no avail, as one well-informed source told the author. “Adams was looking for [face-to-face talks] on the basis that if he was going to go to the IRA—and he said he would go to individual active-service units if necessary—he would have to be able to tell them that he had looked Haughey in the eye and that Haughey had assured him that this would be the policy of the Irish government.”15 Cardinal O Fiaich even offered a room at Maynooth College, Ireland’s principal seminary, where the two men could meet discreetly. But the proposal was too risky, and Haughey declined. The prospect of a speedy IRA cease-fire receded.
Known as An Sagairt, the Irish word for priest, in the code language worked out by Adams and the Redemptorist priest, Reid had come to see Haughey armed with a detailed, worked-out strategy, which he called “A Concrete Proposal for a Political Strategy for Justice and Peace.”16 Spread over three documents, “A Concrete Proposal” drew together all the various strands of the secret discussions between the Reid group, Sinn Fein, and the British, as well as the ideas developed by Haughey.
One paper set out the six fundamental principles that would underpin the strategy. Two of these crucially redefined the principle of Irish national self-determination to embrace the need for unionist consent. The idea behind Reid’s proposal was that if the project went ahead, then the three nationalist parties would agree to subscribe to the principle. The real significance of this is that it meant that Sinn Fein and the IRA would agree to abide by something that republicans had traditionally abjured and waged war to resist. Another key principle encapsulated the new definition of British withdrawal. By agreeing to this, republicans would formally abandon the IRA goal of ejecting Britain from Northern Ireland by force.
A second document suggested twelve “stepping stones,”17 as they were called, toward an agreement among Irish nationalists on a peace strategy.
These were as follows:
• An agreement in principle that there should be a joint Nationalist strategy
• An agreement in principle that peace can only come with the free, independent and democratic consent of the Irish people
• An agreement in principle that the aim of the strategy should be to design and create a New Ireland with a new Constitution
• An agreement in principle that the Irish people as a whole should design this new Constitution in unfettered dialogue amongst themselves
• An agreement that the Irish people consist of two traditions, Unionist and Nationalist
• An agreement in principle that consent must be two-fold in nature, requiring agreement from both Unionists and Nationalists
• An agreement in principle that this two-fold consent can only be achieved by political dialogue
• An agreement in principle that the framework for dialogue would be a Constitutional Conference that would sit on a semi-permanent basis until final agreement about Ireland’s future had been reached. Membership of the Conference would be through direct election and it was hoped that both Unionist and Nationalist parties would attend. The British, the Irish government, Sinn Fein, other Irish Nationalists and the Unionists would agree the arrangements for the Conference.
• An agreement in principle that the British would withdraw from the central decision-making process in Northern Ireland
• An agreement in principle amongst Sinn Fein and the other Nationalist parties that they would agree to try to persuade the British to make a declaration containing five points:
(i) That they will set aside the 1920 Government of Ireland Act when agreement is reached in the Constitutional Conference;
(ii) That they will say they have no selfish interest in remaining in Ireland
(iii) That they will facilitate the Constitutional Conference;
(iv) That they will not interfere in or dictate to the Conference;
(v) That if there is an agreement then the British will implement it in law.
• An agreement in principle that an advisory committee representing the leadership of the main Nationalist parties be set up to examine how best to implement and propagandise this strategy and win support for it in Ireland and abroad
• An agreement in principle, although couched in more discreet language, that Sinn Fein would try to win approval for the strategy from the IRA.18
All twelve “stepping stones” would in time be incorporated into the peace process, though with variations and modifications. The British declaration, for instance, became a British-Irish joint declaration after it grew clear that the British would make no promises about the fate of the Government of Ireland Act until the Irish agreed to amend articles 2 and 3 of Eamon de Valera’s 1937 constitution, which formally expressed the Republic’s territorial claim over Northern Ireland.
The leaders’ advisory committee would, in later documents, become first a nationalist “Convention,” which would advise on the steps necessary to achieve democratic self-determination, and then finally the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, set up in Dublin after the 1994 IRA cease-fire. An entirely nationalist body, the forum was designed to introduce Sinn Fein to the civilities of constitutional politics.
The problem of how Charles Haughey should proceed with the dialogue with Gerry Adams yet keep him at arm’s length was a difficult one, but the solution was eventually found in the structure of the strategy itself. Reid and Adams wanted to involve the main Northern nationalist party, the SDLP, and in particular its leader, John Hume, in the enterprise, and it was through Hume that Haughey’s difficulty was overcome.
At the same time that Reid had sent his lengthy message to Haughey, in May 1987, he dispatched a similar document to the Derry office of the SDLP leader. Hume responded cautiously. He had done one favor for Reid before, according to Tom King, when he had pressed the then NI secretary to give a private assurance of Britain’s neutrality to Adams, but the Reid letter was the first formal request to Hume to involve himself fully in the process.
Hume met Reid several times, first in June 1987 and then in August and again in September, before agreeing in December 1987 to meet Adams. Like the Fianna Fail leader, Hume was cautious about supping too close to the Provos. As all this was happening, Haughey was putting together his own alternative to the face-to-face dialogue demanded by Adams. The proposal was simple: he would suspend his direct involvement and instead nominate John Hume to represent him and to act as a sort of go-between for the Irish government. This would solve the problem of having to meet Adams directly while preserving the initiative. Adams protested angrily, but he had little choice. He agreed, on one condition, to which Haughey readily assented: the communication line between him and Haughey through Father Reid would remain active, while Haughey would promise to reinvolve himself if and when necessary.19 There was another condition that Haughey insisted upon. The dialogue between him, Reid, and Adams was to be kept hidden from the SDLP for fear that it would be leaked and Haughey ruined. Hume was deliberately not told about the contacts and for long afterward believed that his subsequent meetings with Adams marked the start of the peace process. In retrospect this was a key moment, for it gave the peace process an identity it did not entirely deserve. Thereafter the process would be known as the Hume-Adams process, and with that the SDLP leader was set on the path that would eventually lead to a Nobel Peace Prize and international acclaim. The choice of Hume as Haughey’s representative had an unexpected bonus. The SDLP leader’s association with the Reid-Adams enterprise gave it a level of acceptability it otherwise would have lacked, especially in the Republic, where Hume’s standing was exceptionally high. Haughey began the Irish part of the peace process, but Hume gave it respectability.
It was at this point that Haughey brought in his talented Northern adviser, Martin Mansergh, a former diplomat in the Department of Foreign Affairs whom Haughey had made his principal point of communication with Northern parties. There then began a partnership that was to last for more than a decade in which the Redemptorist priest would carry written and oral messages between Adams in Belfast and Mansergh in Dublin, who would in turn analyze and pass them on to his political master, Haughey at first and, in later years, Albert Reynolds and then Bertie Ahern.
Much to the anger of the unionists and the great surprise of the rest of the world, the first of a series of talks between Sinn Fein and the SDLP took place on January 11, 1988, at Clonard Monastery. It was the public working out of the secret agreement arrived at by the nationalist leaders. For two hours Hume and Adams discussed and agreed arrangements for wider negotiations involving delegations from each side. The meeting had been requested by “a third party interested in creating political dialogue,” the two men said in a veiled reference to Alec Reid. As always the Redemptorist’s role would remained cloaked in shadow.
In March the delegations met at the Redemptorists’ retreat house, St. Gerard’s on Belfast’s Antrim Road. Adams was accompanied by three key allies—Danny Morrison, a fellow Army Council member and director of publicity for both the IRA and Sinn Fein; Mitchel McLaughlin, a veteran Sinn Fein member from Derry; and Tom Hartley, a former Sinn Fein press officer from West Belfast and a driving force behind the bid to politicize the Provisionals. It was a carefully balanced delegation. Adams and Morrison represented the Army, but the image presented by McLaughlin and Hartley to the outside world and certainly to the SDLP was of figures who had spent their republican careers entirely in Sinn Fein with no or next to no involvement in IRA matters.
Hume came with his own top team: Seamus Mallon, his County Armagh-born deputy; the university lecturer Sean Farren, one of Hume’s closest confidants; and Austin Currie, a somewhat independently minded figure from County Tyrone who could trace his political genesis back to the old Nationalist Party. There were five more meetings that year, in March, May, June, July, and September. One meeting was a private head-to-head between Hume and Adams; otherwise the party delegations were involved. Haughey agreed to send Mansergh and a junior TD, Dermot Ahern, to low-level meetings with Sinn Fein, which took place in the Redemptorist house in Dundalk with Father Reid present. Two such meetings happened, one in May, the other in June.
With hindsight the curious feature of the talks is the extent to which they were conducted in public. In sharp contrast to the secret diplomacy that had occurred from 1982 and 1983 onward, each session of the 1988 Sinn Fein–SDLP talks was known about almost as soon as it had taken place, courtesy of detailed briefings to the media. After the first meeting, both Hume and Adams readily agreed to be interviewed by the author and other journalists. Adams, for instance, used the interviews to call speculation that a cease-fire was on the agenda “mischievous and erroneous” and denied that Haughey knew about the meeting beforehand or that Hume had come armed with what he termed “concrete proposals.”20 In April documents that had been exchanged by the parties were leaked at a high level to the author and published in the Sunday Tribune.21 In September, when the talks officially concluded, both sides made their respective papers public, and these were reproduced in full in the Irish Times.22
The structure of the talks raised questions about the reason for the publicity and whether more would have been achieved had the two parties kept their dialogue secret, as they very soon did. Not least of the advantages of maintaining secrecy was that both Hume and Adams would have avoided the very extensive unease that emerged in their respective parties as a result of the publicity surrounding the meetings.
The Sinn Fein–SDLP talks did, however, make one significant achievement; activists in both parties became accustomed to the notion that once deep and bitter enemies could sit around the same table and talk. The dialogue also managed to introduce into nationalist and republican political discourse many of the key concepts and language of the peace process. Seen as a conditioning process, the 1988 talks between the SDLP and Sinn Fein make a great deal of sense.
ALMOST AS SOON AS the public talks ended, the private dialogue between Adams and Hume started, and this continued in secret for five years, until one Saturday morning in April 1993, when Gerry Adams and Father Alec Reid met John Hume in his house in Derry, on the edge of the Bogside and in circumstances that almost guaranteed that someone would see them. They were spotted and the story was made public. A statement subsequently issued by the two men used the precise language of Reid’s “Concrete Proposal.” They were engaged, they said, “in a political dialogue aimed at investigating the possibility of developing an overall political strategy to establish peace and justice.”23
Although hopes were high that progress could still be made, the reality was that the year 1988 had seen the process falter. The promise of an IRA cease-fire held out in Father Reid’s first messages to Haughey and to Hume in the spring of 1987 had not been fulfilled. The intensity of the IRA’s military campaign was such as to deter the British from taking any more risks, while in nationalist Ireland the conviction grew, as Martin Mansergh was to say later, that the Provisionals still had some distance to travel. “Both the SDLP and Fianna Fail,” he wrote, “formed the view separately that northern republicans were not then ready to end their campaign, and that the primary aim of any continuing dialogue was to end their political isolation and build a broad front.”24 Neither party was prepared to accept that outcome, he added.
ALTHOUGH CONSIDERABLE progress had been made in advancing the theology and in shoring up the political foundations of the peace process, the truth was that Adams and his supporters still had an enormously long way to go before they could persuade, maneuver, or cajole the IRA to accept a cessation. None of the mainstream nationalist parties were aware that the Army Council had been kept in the dark about much of the process prior to the talks with the SDLP or that the details of the Reid-Adams proposals were still a secret to all but Adams and his close advisers. It had taken Adams and his supporters in the Provisionals five years to overthrow and remove the O Bradaigh–O Conaill leadership and to move the Provisionals into electoral politics. It would take a lot longer to end the armed struggle.
The peace process did not quite end when the SDLP and Sinn Fein concluded their public dialogue. Not only did Hume and Adams continue to meet regularly and in secret—the first meeting, at the invitation of the Re demptorist superior in Ireland took place in the order’s Dublin house within weeks of the official ending of the dialogue—but in October an extraordinary event by the standards of 1988 took place at a private conference in the German town of Duisburg in the Ruhr valley.
Four of Northern Ireland’s senior politicians were there. Peter Robinson, the shrewd, ascetic deputy to the Reverend Ian Paisley, represented the hard-line DUP; Jack Allen, a gregarious publican from Derry, came from the largest unionist group, the Ulster Unionists; Austin Currie came from the SDLP; and Gordon Mawhinney, the deputy leader of Alliance, represented the moderate, middle-of-the-road liberals. The weekend conference had been organized by Irish and German churchmen in an attempt to get peace talks going back in Belfast. The meeting had the blessing of the party leaders, and hopes for a breakthrough were high.
What made the gathering doubly significant was the attendance of Father Alec Reid, who participated as the representative of Gerry Adams, albeit an unofficial one. All the participants knew beforehand that he was to be there as someone familiar with the views of Sinn Fein, and so did their party leaders. His presence kept the unionists in terror of discovery for months afterward. At that time, talking to Sinn Fein was possibly the most unforgivable sin in the book, and even being in the same room as a surrogate figure like Reid would have caused an outcry.
At that stage the prospect of participating in political talks did not concern Sinn Fein or Gerry Adams—the IRA’s raging war ruled that out. But Reid was there to give the unionists a highly important message, as one account of the weekend conference recorded:
Alec Reid spoke of the two traditions and how essential it was to enter into a dialogue with the right spirit. It was a Republican tradition to use violence but if we do [sic] enter dialogue he was certain that we would find that they were not so difficult. In his view the Republican Movement must be dealt with—it represents the views of the Nationalist people. They are pursuing the right of the Irish people to determine their own future and would pursue that right by political means if given reasonable opportunity.25
As a political event the Duisburg conference was a sideshow, but its significance was twofold: the Sinn Fein leadership was signaling a willingness to join the mainstream, while the readiness of unionists to accept Father Reid showed that they were not entirely appalled at the prospect. Everyone knew that if Sinn Fein wanted to become constitutional politicians, the IRA’s campaign had to end.
The peace process hadn’t stopped, but it had slowed down, and further movement was spasmodic. Hume and Adams met only four times in 1989, as the IRA’s post-Eksund “Tet offensive” worked its way through failure and one setback after another. In February 1989 Haughey made another bid to advance the “stepping stones” strategy when he told the Fianna Fail Ard Fheis that an end to the IRA’s violence could dramatically change things. Using language that could have been taken wholesale from the Reid document, Haughey said that such a development
would open up, as it did in the New Ireland Forum, the possibility for a broad consensus among Nationalists on how to achieve political stability based on justice. Our efforts, supported by a large majority of Irish people everywhere, could then be constructively directed to persuading our Unionist countrymen that their future lay with us in a partnership of equals and in convincing the British government that the future of Ireland could and should be left to all the Irish people to decide for themselves.26
This was the Reid-Adams formula for national self-determination, almost word for word.
Later that year Hume incorporated Reid’s twofold consent formula into a practical proposal, suggesting to his party conference in November that any political settlement agreed by the Northern parties and the two governments should be put to the whole Irish people in twin referenda, held in the separate jurisdictions on the same day. Such a proposal, which Hume had first floated way back in 1981, would mean, he said, that from a nationalist/republican viewpoint “for the first time the people of this island would have expressed self-determination on how we live together.”27 It would also remove, at a stroke, the basis for the IRA’s opposition to the 1921 settlement, rooted as that was in the fact that the unionists had flouted the principle of all-Ireland self-determination.
It was around the same time that the Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Brooke, chose to make his neutrality speech, directing it at Gerry Adams and his allies from the heart of his constituency in Westminster. Such a public declaration had been the missing part of the secret British correspondence, but now Brooke was rectifying that omission. Offering Sinn Fein a full political role in Northern Ireland’s affairs if the IRA’s violence ended, Brooke tackled two of the issues raised in Alec Reid’s “stepping stones” document. “The British Government,” he said, “has no selfish strategic or economic interests in Northern Ireland; our role is to help, enable and encourage. Britain’s purpose, as I have sought to describe it, is not to occupy, oppress or exploit but to ensure democratic debate and free democratic choice.”28 Reid had said the British would need to declare their neutrality and agree to sponsor a dialogue with which they would not interfere. Peter Brooke had delivered. Slowly the “stepping stones” were being laid.
ALTHOUGH THE PEACE PROCESS was moving forward, its speed was not much faster than a glacier’s, and nearly everyone agreed on the reason for that. As long as Margaret Thatcher was British prime minister, Adams could never deliver the IRA leadership or grassroots. IRA supporters would condemn even the suggestion of a deal with Thatcher as surrender. Nor could the participants be confident that a declaration of the sort outlined in the Reid-Adams proposal from Thatcher’s lips would carry any weight in the Provo heartlands. The hatred between them was just too deep. Suddenly, three weeks after Brooke’s “neutrality” speech, the logjam was removed and the glacier picked up speed. An internal Tory Party crisis forced Thatcher to resign, and with her went the last, great obstacle to an IRA cease-fire.
Thatcher’s departure revived the process. Her successor, John Major, was by and large an unknown quantity on Northern Ireland, but in its way this was an advantage. The fact that he carried no political baggage on the Northern Ireland issue meant that he could, if he wanted, be more flexible and even imaginative in his approach. There was also an important change in the bureaucracy. At the Northern Ireland Office, John Chilcot became the new permanent secretary. A former British Home Office official, Chilcot had little difficulty buying into the theory of the peace process and quickly grasped what Adams was attempting to achieve. He constructed his own pipeline into the process via John Hume, and through that contact Chilcot would also get to know Adams’s mind. Along with his talented deputy, Quentin Thomas, and the British cabinet secretary, Sir Robin Butler, the three officials were to make up the British negotiators during the tortuous road to the 1994 cease-fire.
Despite Thatcher’s fall and Brooke’s neutrality declaration, progress was still painfully slow. In Dublin the process had stalled. Haughey and Hume distrusted Adams’s motives, made suspicious by his failure to deliver on earlier promises of an IRA cease-fire, and the talking had slowed down. Neither man was aware at that stage that Adams’s foray into the peace diplomacy had been undertaken without the Army Council’s knowledge or approval and that his every step had to be carefully measured. By 1990 the Redemptorists wanted to withdraw Father Reid from the process amid fears about his health, but Haughey had urged them to persist and they relented.
Finally, in the early part of 1991, Haughey was spurred to action. He assembled his own team of Irish civil servants to spearhead a new initiative, choosing to extend knowledge of the peace process beyond his private office. Dermot Nally, an experienced diplomat whose involvement in Northern Ireland matters went back twenty years, headed the team. He was secretary to Haughey’s cabinet, the Irish equivalent of Sir Robin Butler. Despite his distaste for the Department of Foreign Affairs [DFA], Haughey decided to include two of its senior officials, Noel Dorr, who headed the DFA, and Sean O hUiginn, a senior official in the Anglo-Irish division whose remorseless logic would irritate the British and earn him the sobriquet “The Dark Prince.” O hUiginn, from Boho in County Mayo, had been the first Irish joint secretary to the Anglo-Irish secretariat. Opposite him, representing the British, sat Mark Elliott, the Foreign Office official whose trips to Derry were so secret only manuscript records were made of them.
In the autumn of 1991 Hume and Adams produced the first draft of a model joint British-Irish government declaration incorporating, inasmuch as they affected the British, Reid’s “stepping stones.” Mansergh and O hUiginn made changes, and when John Major traveled to Dublin for his first Anglo-Irish summit in December 1991, Charles Haughey handed him a copy of this document, known as “Draft 2.”
According to its terms the British would say that they had no “selfish, strategic, political or economic interest” in staying in Northern Ireland and that they wished only to see the Irish people live together “in unity and harmony.” Dublin would accept that Irish self-determination was subject to Reid’s twofold consent principle and agreed to set up a permanent convention that would advise on ways to exercise self-determination.29 This would convene whether or not the British agreed to put their name to the declaration. Thus began the complex and often tortuous intergovernmental negotiations that would lead in a mere two years to the Downing Street Declaration.
HAUGHEY’S OFFICIALS had prepared a lengthy list of speaking points, sixteen in all, to present to Major in an effort to win the British premier over to a fundamental reappraisal of Northern Ireland policy. These dwelt on the financial, human, political, and social costs of a conflict that seemed to be unending and that ultimately was in the interests of both governments to resolve and stabilize. Although each politician knew more about the secret peace process than he was prepared to admit, there was only one veiled reference to the clandestine diplomacy that had been going on in the background for over five years. “There are factors working for progress,” said one account of the exchange. “There is a strong tide of public opinion in favour of peace in both communities in Northern Ireland and in Ireland as a whole. The futility and horror of violence must surely become more evident even to its proponents with every passing year and we know that at least some of these elements are reflecting on this.”30 Haughey’s arguments succeeded, and Major agreed to initiate a comprehensive internal review that the two leaders would consider in the early part of 1992.
The meeting between them never took place. An old scandal concerning the tapping of politicians’ and journalists’ telephones resurfaced, and in early February 1992 Haughey was forced to resign. Albert Reynolds was chosen by the Fianna Fail parliamentary party to succeed him, and a day later the group of British and Irish civil servants charged with considering the new initiative met at the Cabinet Office in London. Butler, Chilcot, and Thomas told their Irish counterparts there could be no further movement on the initiative until after that year’s British general election. Various problems were raised by the British, not least their unwillingness to talk directly to the Provisionals and the difficulties of selling the language contained in “Draft 2” to the unionists.
Those on the British side were less than forthright with the Irish officials about their own lengthy dialogue with Gerry Adams, and made no mention of their complete familiarity with the concepts and language that permeated “Draft 2.” The British said they wanted an assurance of an end to violence before committing any more resources to the project. But there was a way ahead, they said. It lay in a British declaration of neutrality and an assurance by the Irish concerning the principle of consent in Northern Ireland. The meeting ended with agreement on those points and on a strategy to deal with any leaks to the media of John Hume’s role as an intermediary. But it was a doubtful, uncertain meeting; no one quite knew what the political landscape would look like in a few weeks’ time.
As it turned out, Albert Reynolds embraced the peace process with enthusiasm and John Major survived the British general election. Haughey had fully briefed the new taoiseach on the state of play, and Reynolds had immediately agreed to keep Martin Mansergh on his staff. Alec Reid’s visit to Government Buildings in Dublin increased, as did the number of meetings between Hume and Adams. In December 1993, after months of exhausting, often frustrating negotiations with the Major administration, the Downing Street Declaration was finally unveiled by the two leaders to a curiously mixed reception in Northern Ireland.31 While unionists were relaxed about its contents, rank-and-file Provisional supporters were bewildered. Some feared that their leaders had been drawn into a deadly trap from which there could be no escape; none suspected that the declaration had emerged from the secret initiative launched by their own leader.
The reason for their confusion was contained in the declaration’s paragraph 4, which incorporated Alec Reid’s consent principle, although none of the IRA’s supporters who read it could have been aware of that. “The British Government,” it said, “agree that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish.”32
The declaration was an astonishing document and one of the seminal pieces of Anglo-Irish diplomacy. The fact that it elevated the principle of consent and dictated that this had to be a cornerstone of any Northern Ireland settlement was secondary. The two governments had long agreed on that. What made the Downing Street document exceptional was that it was modeled on ideas and concepts evolved, initiated, and developed in a secret dialogue whose instigator was the head of the political organization pledged to overthrow the principle by gun and bomb.
In June 2006, after a lengthy illness, Haughey finally succumbed to the rigors of prostate cancer and died at his home in Kinsealy where some twenty years earlier he and Father Reid had met to begin the peace process. Haughey’s supportive role in the peace process at its most vulnerable and crucial period—at its birth—had rarely been acknowledged in Irish public life, perhaps because it conflicted so starkly with the dark image that his political enemies and many in the Irish media preferred to project. But at his graveside Haughey’s protégé and successor as Fianna Fail leader and taoiseach, Bertie Ahern—once famously described by Haughey as “the most clever, the most cunning, the most devious of them all”—paid an overdue tribute to the role Haughey had played in ending the Troubles in the North: “His courageous decision to open a secret channel of communication with the Provisional leadership paved the way to the banishing of the bomb and bullet, North and South, in our time.”33