It snowed in Belfast in the early hours of the morning of Good Friday, 1998. I know because I was there and wide awake.
Sometimes journalists are lucky enough to be around when history is made, and they certainly don’t want to miss it if the chance arises. I was in a cold press room set up in the Castle Buildings at Stormont, where Northern Ireland’s political leaders and the prime ministers of Britain and Ireland were inching towards what became known as the Good Friday Agreement, and the hope at last of ending thirty years of bloodshed that had cost more than 3,000 lives.
On Maundy Thursday, the midnight deadline for a deal passed by. Martin Fletcher, our chief Ireland correspondent, and I kept updating our copy. In a 3 a.m. edition, we wrote that George Mitchell, the American chairman of the peace talks, was drawing up new proposals.
With final editions gone, most reporters decided to go back to their hotels or homes. But although ready for sleep, I decided against it, fearful that I would miss being there when a deal about which I had written for years was finally done. Not that I would have been able to do much if the story had broken at 6 a.m., but to me it mattered that I was there.
I hadn’t so much as a tube of toothpaste with me, so I merely decided to pretend that it was still Thursday and carried on. I sat in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the room and put my feet up on another. That was my bed and I didn’t sleep a wink because I was freezing cold. Battle honours should also be awarded to Adam Boulton, the utterly indefatigable and legendary political editor of Sky, who broadcast through the night without looking tired at all. At another all-night European Council summit in Nice two years later, which I covered, Boulton lay flat-out in the press area and grabbed a few minutes’ sleep between live broadcasts.
If the accord was one of the great achievements of Blair’s term of office, the advance towards peace in Northern Ireland was also one of John Major’s. He laid the groundwork with years of painstaking talks, and took the risk of allowing the covert talks with the IRA – without which peace could never have been reached.
But in April 1998, the crucial week had begun with doubts over whether enough progress had been made by Mitchell to justify Blair and Bertie Ahern, his Irish counterpart, going to Belfast to try to seal an agreement. It would need the late intervention of President Clinton to get it over the line.
Blair flew in on the Tuesday night after the Ulster Unionists flatly rejected the latest blueprint put forward by Mitchell. He arrived armed with one of his most quoted soundbites. ‘I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders,’ he said. But he was aware of the difficulties. ‘Maybe it is impossible to find a way through, maybe even with the best faith in the world we can’t do it, but it is right to try. I am here because I think it is my duty.’
By Thursday, the process set in motion by Major and Albert Reynolds five years before looked doable. Ahern, who had had to leave Stormont to attend his mother’s funeral, returned ready to compromise, declaring that a deal required everyone to move a little bit.
As the day wore on, there were hints of a deal getting closer and earlier in the evening there was a surreal development when Ian Paisley, the Democratic Unionist Party leader, stormed with his supporters into the grounds of Stormont to protest at what they called a sell-out by the mainstream Unionists, led by David Trimble.
Paisley was allowed to stage a chaotic press conference. This was the man who nine years later was to become First Minister of Northern Ireland, with Martin McGuinness as his deputy, after finally agreeing that his party – by then the largest unionist grouping – should share power with Sinn Fein. Nothing would have been further from his thoughts on Maundy Thursday, 1998, as he walked angrily from what was in his eyes the scene of betrayal.
By dawn on Good Friday, sleep-starved leaders were still looking for a breakthrough. During the day it looked at one point as though the whole thing would fall apart after members of Trimble’s party suggested their leader had gone too far. They resisted the idea of Unionists sitting with Sinn Fein in a new assembly if the nationalists had not renounced violence and the decommissioning of weapons had not started.
Blair’s assurances that the agreement meant that the IRA would start decommissioning arms straightaway were not accepted by Trimble’s party, and word went round that a deal might be off.
It was a call at around 4.15 p.m. by Blair to Bill Clinton that was critical in breaking the deadlock. After talking to Blair, the American president spoke to Ahern, Gerry Adams (the Sinn Fein president), Trimble and John Hume (leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party). Then suddenly, after thirty-three hours of non-stop talks, a deal was announced at just after 5 p.m. The two governments and eight political parties signed up to a new future. Blair, as we wrote in The Times the next morning, hailed a settlement that would give everyone a chance to live in peace and raise their children free from the shadow of fear. It was indeed a piece of history worth waiting for.
But like several of the other reporters there that day, my mind went back to late 1993 when Major and Reynolds got the peace process off the ground. In late November, The Observer had revealed that a secret communications channel had been running for months between the IRA and the Government, with Major’s approval. It was later to emerge that an informal channel had existed as far back as 1973 between the IRA and British intelligence.
It came in the run-up to an Anglo-Irish summit planned for months with the aim of forging a new Ulster peace settlement. Major defended the links and said it would have been unforgivable for the Government not to have used them. On the eve of Dublin, Major acted to assure the Unionists by saying that the British Government would never try to persuade the people of Ulster to leave the UK and join a united Ireland – dashing the Republic’s hopes that Britain might be persuaded in a joint declaration to accept the ‘value’ of the objective of a united Ireland.
I was in the press room at Dublin Castle that Friday as we waited for the leaders to emerge after eight hours of talks. There were serious differences at the meeting and it appeared that the atmosphere had been soured by the disclosure of contacts with the IRA. But they agreed that the negotiating process should continue at the Brussels summit the next week. Work continued on the joint declaration and Reynolds offered a written promise that Ireland would hold a referendum on its territorial claim to Ulster.
I moved on to cover the Brussels summit. Under the headline ‘Ulster given hope of peace before Christmas’, The Times reported on Saturday, 11 December that the two leaders would be meeting again in London the following week in the hope of signing a pact that they hoped would bring an end to IRA violence.
And so it came to pass. The following Wednesday, Major and Reynolds stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the Christmas tree in Downing Street and challenged the men of violence to put down their weapons. Major held out the prospect of Sinn Fein joining talks on the future of the province within three months if the IRA abandoned violence. He declared: ‘We cannot go on spilling blood in the name of the past.’ ‘Ulster holds its breath on peace accord’ was the headline on my report in The Times the next day.
Nicholas Watt, who was then The Times’s Ireland correspondent and covered the Dublin summit with me, wrote many years later in The Guardian about the full extent of the twenty-year secret back channel between the British government and the IRA. In October 1999, Watt reported that Margaret Thatcher gave her personal approval to secret talks between government officials and the IRA leadership in 1990. Nick, a superb reporter, is now BBC Newsnight’s political editor.
In one of her final acts before she was deposed as prime minister, she allowed her Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Brooke, to talk to republicans through a secret ‘back channel’ after MI5 advised the government that the IRA was looking at ways of ending its terrorist campaign.
In his memoirs serialized in that paper, Jonathan Powell, former chief of staff to Tony Blair, told how a Derry businessman and a series of MI5 and MI6 officers had risked their lives to allow the British government and the IRA leadership to communicate in private. Powell wrote:
It is very hard for democratic governments to admit to talking to terrorist groups while those groups are still killing innocent people. Luckily for this process, the British Government’s back channel to the Provisional IRA had been in existence whenever required from 1973 onwards.
Paisley attacked Major for the secret back channel when it was revealed in 1993. But Powell revealed in his memoirs that ten years later Paisley’s party established its own secret link to Sinn Fein, when the DUP won the assembly elections of 2003.
After the Downing Street agreement before Christmas 1993, there was still a long way to go until Northern Ireland could celebrate peace and its own power-sharing government. But it was a hugely important step on the way.