Inside Accounts, Volume I

The Irish Government and Peace in Northern Ireland, from Sunningdale to the Good Friday Agreement

Graham Spencer

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526142535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire moderne de la Grande-Bretagne

Volume one of the most authoritative and revealing account yet of how the Irish Government managed the Northern Ireland peace process and helped broker a political settlement to end the conflict there. Based on eight extended interviews with key officials and political leaders, this book provides a compelling picture of how the peace process was created and how it came to be successful. Covering areas such as informal negotiation, text and context, strategy, working with British and American Governments, and offering perceptions of other players involved in the dialogue and negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the power-sharing arrangements that followed, this dramatic account will become a major source for academics and interested readers alike for years to come. Volume one deals with the Irish Government and Sunningdale (1973) and the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and Volume two on the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and beyond.

1

Sunningdale and the problem of power-sharing: an interview with Sean Donlon

Graham Spencer: Can you give me some background on your involvement in Northern Ireland?

Sean Donlon: When the Troubles started in late 1968 the Irish Government was not administratively structured in any way to deal with the situation. The older generation of politicians thought they knew it all themselves because they had been involved in the 1920s and since some of them came from Northern Ireland they didn’t feel the need to have any professional Civil Service assistance. The Department of Foreign Affairs was essentially told it’s not a foreign policy matter; Northern Ireland is part of the national territory therefore it is not appropriate for you to be involved in it. The fact that it was an Anglo-Irish matter, and therefore a foreign policy matter, did not seem to impinge very much, so there was no one in the Department of Foreign Affairs who was dealing with the situation in Northern Ireland. That is, until a middle-level councillor called Eamonn Gallagher, who was from Donegal, started spending regular weekends with his sister in Letterkenny. His sister happened to be friendly with a Derry family called the Desmonds who were very close to the Humes and through that connection Eamonn Gallagher met John Hume in August 1969 and began to do analytic reports which he gave to the Head of Foreign Affairs, Hugh McCann, who gave them to Paddy Hillery, the Minister, and Jack Lynch, the Taioseach. But it took about six months of Eamonn doing these weekend visits and reports before Jack Lynch decided it might be helpful to appoint him full time to the position, so in the spring in 1970 Eamonn became the first official of the Department of Foreign Affairs to be given an assignment relating to Northern Ireland.

I got involved in August 1971 when internment was introduced. I was happily in post in Boston, where I was Consul General, when I got a phone call from Foreign Affairs the morning internment was imposed asking me to return to Ireland and go to Northern Ireland and collect information relating to the circumstances in which internment was introduced. I had been chosen apparently because I had no family connections with Northern Ireland, and had indeed never been there, probably typical enough for a Southerner in those days of my generation. I rented a car in Dublin, drove to Belfast where the only appointment that had been made for me was to go to see Paddy Devlin on the Shore Road in Belfast, and Paddy would introduce me to other people who might be in a better position to help. As we now know the circumstances surrounding the introduction of internment were pretty vicious, with the use of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, and through a network that I built up of solicitors, doctors, community groups and, particularly, priests I was able to assemble quite a bit of information which became the basis for the human rights case which the Irish Government launched in November 1971 against the British Government under the European Convention on Human Rights.

My network built up fairly quickly for one or two reasons. I had been a clerical student in Maynooth from 1958 to 1960 and in those days Maynooth was the national seminary for the whole island, where, by 1970–71, the ordination class was in virtually every part of Northern Ireland. I could knock on a presbytery door and if I didn’t find somebody I knew from my Maynooth days my connection would be sufficiently well established to allow me immediate access. Very often the Irish parish priest and his curates were well plugged in to the community, so if I wanted information through reliable sources they were extremely helpful to me, and particularly people like Father Denis Faul in Dungannon, Father Raymond Murray in Armagh and Father Brian Brady in Belfast. The only instruction I had been given was not to have any contact with anybody who was involved in violence, so therefore I had no direct contact with the IRA. But I have no doubt the IRA were approached, particularly by Father Brian Brady, to ensure that they did not put any obstacle in the way of my work, and indeed to hope for a level of co-operation from the IRA prisoners and the IRA internees who had been lifted in August. I had no particular problem, but I had no political mandate to deal with the IRA either. My mandate in Northern Ireland was gradually extended as Eamonn Gallagher moved on to other things such as getting involved in Ireland’s application to join the Common Market and then eventually becoming a Commissioner in Brussels. So from the spring of 1973 my mandate was extended basically to monitor and assess the political situation in Northern Ireland.

And at that point there was still no contact with the British?

Very little contact with the British other than for what might be called ‘protest related matters’, for example, Bloody Sunday, when we withdrew our Ambassador from London, and although there was contact on that sort of issue with the Foreign Office there was no dialogue in any serious sense. There was an attempt at dialogue in 1971 when Ted Heath was Prime Minister and the situation in Northern Ireland was bad. Jack Lynch had two meetings with Heath in September 1971. One was a bilateral meeting involving simply Dublin and London and the second was a trilateral meeting involving Brian Faulkner and some other people from the unionist side, but both of those meetings led nowhere and there was no follow-up. You then fast-forward, where the objective of Irish Government policy now became the abolition of Stormont because we had lost confidence in the ability the British had to reform it, so we felt it had to go. We were heavily influenced in that by our relationship with the SDLP, which had been formed. There had been informal associations between Devlin, Fitt, Currie, Hume, Cooper and O’Hanlon, who were the six original members of what became the SDLP, and the initial contact through Eamonn Gallagher. Jack Lynch came to the view they were a reliable interlocutor and I certainly continued that contact. I was in regular communication with all the leading SDLP people and I was reporting back to the Irish Government. My reports essentially summarised my conversations with individuals so that I could enable the political masters to make up their own mind based on what I was being told.

Where were the seeds sown? Was there a turning point when unionists started to become involved in talks with the SDLP, and what were the factors which led to the British getting involved in discussion with you?

It was when Stormont was prorogued in March of 1972. Having achieved that objective we then began a dialogue with the British. Initially it was Paddy Hillery dealing with Willie Whitelaw, and then that translated into conversations at official level between people like myself and British representatives in Laneside, which had been established in 1969 as a centre for London-based officials to monitor the situation in Northern Ireland. The British had a very professional approach. They had MI6-types, Foreign Office-types and security-types monitoring the situation and I suspect it was their information that led the British to conclude that there is no future in relying on Stormont. But there were lots of factors such as Bloody Sunday at the end of January, the failure of internment, which manifestly had led to massive recruitment to the IRA by people who would never have contemplated joining the IRA, the use of torture and what was euphemistically called ‘interrogation in depth’. All of that led to the emergence of very significant hostility on the part of the nationalist community towards Britain.

When you first met British people and when you first met the unionists what was their attitude towards you? Where they hostile or did they recognise there had to be negotiations to try and achieve power-sharing?

First of all, I did not meet any unionists until the summer of 1973, when I began to meet British representatives in Northern Ireland, and it was actually quite comical. My personal relations with them were quite good, it was open and we traded information. I would arrive back in Dublin to find that the British Ambassador had gone to see the Minister for Foreign Affairs to object to my presence in Northern Ireland on the grounds that I was not accredited in the UK and I had no immunities, so therefore they could not guarantee my safety. I had discovered only in recent years, when I had chance to dig into records in Kew, that in 1972–73 the British regarded me as the Head of Irish Intelligence in Northern Ireland, which had the implication that my role was a security one. In essence, it was a political role with security as an element, but I had no security background. I had no training of any description and I certainly had no brief in relation to security matters other than in so far as security impacted on politics. I didn’t know at the time who, if anyone, on the Irish Government side was involved in security matters, but it was probably someone from army intelligence. However, I don’t think they had a very active presence in Northern Ireland. I had no contacts on the unionist side. That happened only when you had the British Green Paper and White Paper proposing power-sharing with an Irish dimension and then the Assembly elections. My closest contact became John Hume, who had been an approximate contemporary in Maynooth. I had met him in Boston when I was Counsellor-General when he came out in 1970 to talk to various people there. Certainly he was my primary contact among SDLP people and it was John who suggested to me that after the Assembly elections we needed to go for power-sharing talks with North–South institutions and that somebody from Dublin had better start talking to the unionists. John Hume set up my very first meeting with Brian Faulkner and, accompanied by Dermot Nally from the Taioseach’s Office, we went to see him late September–early October 1973, just before Sunningdale.

So the decision by Faulkner and the unionists to get involved in power-sharing discussions essentially came through conversations between Hume and Faulkner?

Well it came initially because the British Government had laid it down as their recipe in the Green Paper, and then in the White Paper. Once Stormont was prorogued the British were very active in coming up with policies, and that is where people like Ken Bloomfield came into it.

What was the SDLP attitude towards the Irish Government? Did they expect you to do more for them or did they find you interfering? What were relations like?

I think relations were constructive. Each side recognised that it needed the other side. For an Irish Government to have a Northern Ireland policy at all it had to have the support of nationalism in Northern Ireland and, from the SDLP’s perspective, to gain credibility in London and internationally, they had to have credibility with the Irish Government. There were times when Dublin’s policy was not just influenced by the SDLP but was formed by the SDLP, and there were many occasions through the 1970s into the 1980s where, if you’re looking for Irish Government policy, you basically take the SDLP’s policy.

Were they talking even then about self-determination, consent and power-sharing?

Yes, the principles that Hume had set out as far back as 1964 in the Irish Times and which are framed in the SDLP constitution. Not exactly the words Hume had used in 1963–64, but their commitment to the principle of consent was key. The principle of power-sharing was also important, and somewhere down the list of objectives they also included the coming together of the people of Ireland. They never used the word ‘reunification’. They always talked about the coming together of the people of Ireland, or the coming together of the communities in Northern Ireland and the people of both parts of Ireland. They were careful in their use of language. But the biggest single influence was two articles written by John Hume, published in the Irish Times in 1964, where he set out the principles that he thought would form the basis of an agreement. Consent was the big one, the accommodation of the two communities and agreed structures was the second one, and obviously no room for violence. One can certainly trace some of the language of Sunningdale back to Hume’s articles in the Irish Times. One very important feature is that he never changed his position. You could say that was a negative and that he was inflexible, and although he certainly was on the principles he wasn’t inflexible on the detail. The same principles that were in Sunningdale were in the Hume–Adams dialogues, the Downing Street Declaration and the Good Friday Agreement, and they came from Hume. In the Irish Times articles what he was saying posed a challenge to Irish Government policy, which at that time was sterile. It had nothing to show. What Hume did was open people’s eyes to you’ve got to look at what our policy is and what it is achieving. He said the policy hasn’t achieved anything so I am now putting an alternative policy. Hume’s influence on FitzGerald was important. FitzGerald took his thinking on Northern Ireland from Hume, and although Hume can’t take one hundred per cent credit for the formulation of that policy he can take one hundred per cent for selling it and having it implemented. It was first set out by a man called Donal Barrington way back in 1957–58, and that heavily influenced Hume. Barrington was a lawyer who became a Supreme Court judge and a judge of the European Court. He was one of the original thinkers of his generation.

Were the SDLP instrumental or central to the thinking of the Irish Government on these issues or was it more about what was coming from you to them?

I would go so far as to say that from 1970 onwards, and certainly from 1971, the Irish Government’s policy was in effect made by Hume. Sometimes Hume would put a proposition to people in Dublin. I know of no situation where any Irish Government or any senior Irish politician in those years from, say, 1969–76 tried to influence Hume or didn’t accept what he was saying.

What about Hume’s relationship with Gerry Fitt, as he was leader? How did Hume become the central character?

Gerry Fitt, and I say this in a spirit of generosity, not otherwise, wasn’t an intellectual. Gerry was a good grafter, particularly at Westminster. Don’t forget he had been an MP from around 1966 to 1967. He knew how to work Westminster in a way that Hume did not, and in particular Gerry had very good relationships with the British Labour Party and people like Kevin McNamara, who had started off a campaign for democracy some time back in the 1960s. Gerry had his role, and the reason he was leader was because he was the only MP when the party was being founded, so it would have been invidious not to make him leader. But he and Hume fully understood their respective strengths and weaknesses. Gerry knew and accepted that Hume was the intellectual leader of the party. Sometimes there were tensions because there were times when Gerry...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on interviewees
• Acknowledgements
• Brief chronology of the Troubles and origins of the peace process
• Parties, organisations, offices and key documents
• Introduction
• 1 Sunningdale and the problem of power-sharing: an interview with Sean Donlon
• 2 Fermenting the Irish dimension – Sunningdale to the Anglo-Irish Agreement: an interview with Noel Dorr
• 3 Political imagination and the Anglo-Irish Agreement: an interview with Michael Lillis
• 4 Tightening Anglo-Irish relations: an interview with Daithi O’Ceallaigh
• 5 Foundations and principles of a peace process: an interview with Sean O hUiginn
• 6 Back-channels and the possibilities of movement: an interview with Martin Mansergh
• 7 Critical minimums and the expectations of change: an interview with Tim O’Connor
• 8 The management of dialogue: an interview with Dermot Gallagher
• Conclusion
• Index