The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (47 page)

In Northern Ireland itself Sinn Féin, having been barred from the deliberations of the forum, now rejected the Agreement too. The leadership of the SDLP, on the other hand, could justly feel pleased with the new arrangement: the party’s long-standing political philosophy was branded on the fabric of the Agreement. But for Unionists, the Agreement was wholly unacceptable. Their supporters were once more urged on to the streets – and several days later, a crowd some two hundred thousand strong gathered in central Belfast. This time, however, to no avail: just as Thatcher had declined to bend in the face of pressure from the hunger strikers, so now she refused to concede to Unionist demands. The Treaty remained in force, and there was a surge in loyalist killings. The attitudes of such groups towards the RUC now underwent a fundamental shift: tasked as it was with maintaining the peace in a changing province, the force and its members became the target of loyalist attacks, and many police families were forced to leave their homes as a result of loyalist intimidation. Paisley’s DUP showed its willingness to probe the limits of constitutionality by consorting with the loyalist fringe; the party’s deputy leader, Peter Robinson, even staged an ‘invasion’ of the Republic, which led to his spending a night in a County Monaghan police cell.

By the early 1990s, however, it was evident to all observers of the Northern Ireland scene that the cycles of violence, revenge killings, bombings and destruction of property held no prospect of ultimate victory for any side; this was a war that was ultimately unwinnable. As early as 1988 Hume and his Sinn Féin counterpart, Gerry Adams, were engaged in secret exploratory talks in a west Belfast monastery. Hume, whose courage and political vision formed a consistent thread running through the years of the Troubles, understood that without the presence of Sinn Féin, any negotiation process on the future of Northern Ireland would be ultimately pointless. There was a great deal at stake for both men: Hume knew that, by drawing Sinn Féin into the constitutional mainstream, he risked the sidelining of the SDLP itself (as indeed subsequently happened); Adams, though eager to pursue a constitutional path – his party had, for example, already abandoned its policy of abstention in the Dáil – also understood the peril that might come from a split in the ranks of Sinn Féin. The talks continued in fits and starts, in the face of scathing criticism and against a background of continuing violence; and at length they bore fruit, with Adams conceding that the principle of consent must underpin the future shape of Ireland.

Late in 1993 the British prime minister, John Major, declared explicitly what everyone already knew to be the case: that Britain had no ‘selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’. The Irish government signalled a willingness to look again at its long-standing territorial claim on Northern Ireland; while American pressure, in the form of direct contact with the new president, Bill Clinton, also played its part in thawing the province’s long political freeze. In August 1994, the IRA declared a ceasefire: it was broken in spectacular style in February 1996 with a deadly bomb attack on London’s financial district; but resumed in July 1997, in the face of a fresh political climate in both London and Dublin. New and stable governments were in place in both capitals; in the White House, Clinton remained engaged in this new political push to secure peace in the province; and a process of intense and often deeply fraught negotiations began.

The result was the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement, concluded in April 1998, and hailed by many as signifying the end of the Troubles. The principal Northern architects of the accord were the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP; and the result of their talks envisaged a new power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland, together with an assembly and a number of new cross-border bodies to regulate everything from transport to internal waterways. Certain clauses provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners and the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons – but these were left deliberately vague, a reflection of the fact that on some issues common ground could simply not yet be found. The Republic agreed to relinquish its territorial claim to the North: and the following month, the accord was ratified in referenda north and south of the Irish border – in the former by 71 per cent of the electorate, with the Unionist vote split; in the latter by a full 94 per cent of those who voted, though on a turn-out of a mere 55 per cent. The Republic had now given up definitively its constitutional aspirations to Irish unity.

The Agreement was an immensely complicated document, locked and interlocked so as to provide balance and parity of esteem between the two communities in the North. It was also an imperfect document: for one thing, the province’s sectarian divide – to many commentators, its abiding curse – became the very keystone of the proposed new dispensation; the executive and assembly were predicated on the notion of two camps bound into a working relationship. For another, those manifold issues ‘parked’ for the time being would eventually have to be addressed – and in the years that followed they were addressed, not always successfully. The IRA, for example, insisted on decommissioning its arms at its own pace – regardless of the political difficulties this created for the Ulster Unionists. For example, the assembly was suspended – ‘our weak-kneed parliament / which, unlike Rome, we gained in a day / And then lost, spectacularly, several days later’ – and suspended again; and as election followed election, the Ulster Unionists and SDLP were elbowed into the political shadows by Sinn Féin and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party.
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The SDLP had, over a period of years, allowed itself to be outflanked and outspent by its younger and more nimble nationalist rivals, who could boast a host of activists at grass-roots level; Unionist opinion, meanwhile, had never in any case been solidly behind the Good Friday Agreement; and the question of arms decommissioning, combined with the replacement of the RUC in 2001 by a new Police Service of Northern Ireland, proved to be pills too bitter for many Unionists to swallow.

Ian Paisley had bitterly opposed the Agreement from its inception – but in the slow unfolding of history he ended by embracing its terms, and a long and vitriolic public career culminated in May 2007 with his appointment as the province’s First Minister. The DUP may have specialized in appealing for decades to the margins of Unionism, but it possessed a pragmatic wing too: now that the Ulster Unionists had been vanquished, the DUP could focus on winning over the moderate, middle-class ‘garden centre’ Unionists, who had in the past disdained the party. In addition, Paisley unexpectedly revealed his own pragmatic side: he was now nearly eighty-one years old; his health was delicate; and he very much wished to crown his career by climbing to the summit of Northern Ireland politics. Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness – who had formerly held a central position in the IRA – was his deputy: the duo became known as the ‘Chuckle Brothers’, their improbably cordial relationship observed unsmilingly by many in Northern Ireland. Shortly after his appointment to the top job, Paisley travelled south for a symbolically significant conducted tour of the site of the Battle of the Boyne: this had recently been remodelled as a lavish visitor attraction, complete with a formal walled garden, a ha-ha and an interpretative centre; the vista from the battle site was completed with a distant glimpse of the iconic modern bridge carrying the new Belfast to Dublin motorway over the river valley.

By 2010, Northern Ireland had reached a tentative equilibrium. The findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry were recognized as profoundly significant, though also inevitably imperfect. It was tacitly understood, for example, that the notion of the prosecution of British soldiers was highly fanciful; rather, the inquiry had been an element in that greater arrangement of checks, compromises and balances that had come to define political progress in the province. Dissident terrorist activity – carried on, for example, by the Real IRA, which consisted of members who had broken away from the IRA following the pre-Good Friday ceasefire – remains a persistent feature of life. And there are other issues: the continuing segregation of education and to a large degree of housing too; and the abiding disaffection of a large Protestant underclass that perceives itself to be abandoned by mainstream politicians. Northern Ireland continues to be a profoundly unusual society, and one poised between a disturbing history and a future as yet uncharted.

The outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland had immediate political consequences in the Republic. As violence erupted north of the border in 1968, the Southern government had briefly contemplated sending troops to the aid of the nationalist population; in 1970 two Fianna Fáil cabinet members, Neil Blaney and Charles Haughey (who of course would later become taoiseach), were arrested on suspicion of arranging funds for the importation of arms into the North and sacked from the government. (Charges against Blaney were later dropped, while Haughey was acquitted.) Yet notwithstanding such sensational facts, the Northern violence was only fitfully on top of the political agenda in the Republic. Events in Northern Ireland sometimes spilled south – as in the case of the 1974 loyalist bombings of Dublin and Monaghan.
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And yet the situation in Northern Ireland increasingly became background noise, for the Irish state had a range of other issues with which to contend.

The accession of the Republic to the EEC in 1973 had been greeted enthusiastically, but at first it appeared to have little perceptible effect: the public finances remained an intractable disaster, the economy stayed firmly in the doldrums, and high-spending economic policies pursued in the late 1970s merely exacerbated the country’s problems. Governments came and went in rapid succession, unemployment spiralled, inflation rose spectacularly and emigration remained the stark reality for many citizens. These persistent economic issues were finally addressed from 1987, when a programme of cuts in public spending and tax – backed by both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – helped to bring a sense of stability to the public finances.

Starting in the late 1960s, the Republic began to undergo a slow process of social change. The introduction in 1967 of free secondary education, combined with increasing links to Europe and to modern media and the growth of the women’s movement, all contributed to the development of a more progressive and liberal civil society – and led inevitably too to a medley of challenges to the Catholic-inflected assumptions that had formed the basis of social policy in earlier decades. In 1968, for example, the Church had restated its firm opposition to artificial contraception, which remained formally banned in Ireland; in 1971, however, opponents of this legal ban took the ‘contraceptive train’ to Belfast to buy these forbidden articles and carry them openly back to Dublin, in the process underscoring the absurdity of the existing law.

In 1978 Charles Haughey – now back in the government as minister for health – enabled a change in the regulations on birth control: married couples were finally permitted access to contraceptives, though only with the permission of a doctor; it was an ‘Irish solution to an Irish problem’. In the eyes of many critics, of course, it was no solution at all; but by the mid-1980s the conditions relating to availability of contraceptives had been further liberalized. Lobbying on the issue of gay rights, meanwhile, had been ongoing since the 1970s: and in 1993, following a key decision on the issue by the European Court of Human Rights – it ruled that Ireland’s criminalization of homosexual relations breached the European Convention – the government moved to decriminalize homosexuality.
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In addition, new laws permitting divorce were narrowly passed, after a good deal of public handwringing, in a referendum held in 1995.

This altering social climate was encapsulated in the election of Mary Robinson to the presidency in the autumn of 1990. In 1969 Robinson had been elected to the Senate for the Trinity College constituency; and in the intervening years she had become visible in challenging, among other issues, the bans on contraception and homosexual relations, and the legality of the ‘bar’ placed on married women in the civil service. In political terms, such activities had certainly done Robinson no favours – she had consistently failed, for example, to be elected to the Dáil – and so her elevation to the presidency following a long and closely argued campaign was regarded as a significant moment in Irish politics. Robinson commented that the women of Ireland – ‘mná na hÉireann’ – had propelled her into office, and her words had a certain resonance: for when during the campaign a senior figure in Fianna Fáil had questioned her commitment to her family and children, it (together with political scandals involving Fianna Fáil itself) led to a swell of support for Robinson that helped to carry her across the finishing line. Robinson went on to carve out a highly successful term as president, and in the process to breathe new life and relevance into what had become a moribund public office.

The renewal of the Irish presidency in these years threw into sharp relief the declining standards of probity in other areas of Irish public life. The career of Haughey, taoiseach at various times from 1979 to 1992, epitomizes this decline. An energetic administrator and notable patron of the arts, Haughey lived the life of a country squire, complete with a large estate in north County Dublin, a private island off the Kerry coast, a yacht and expensive tastes in wine, restaurants and bespoke Parisian shirts – and all ostensibly paid for from the relatively modest salary of a public servant. It was evident, of course, that Haughey had additional sources of income: later investigations would make clear that his income in these years in fact ran into the millions, for the most part donated by a number of individuals, including prominent businessmen. Haughey was also found to have deposited assets in undeclared bank accounts, and to have appropriated for his personal use  250,000 from a fund that had been raised to enable a party colleague to undergo a liver transplant in the United States. Haughey’s corruption was echoed in a tangle of other episodes involving members of the country’s elite: for example, assistance in tax evasion was offered as a standard service by the main banks; and a number of public officials, including the former minister for foreign affairs, were jailed on corruption charges.