Political Purgatory

The Battle to Save Stormont and the Play for a New Ireland

Brian Rowan

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781785373831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This is a book about political stasis; the purgatory that Stormont became, and the sins of that long standoff. The story begins in January 2017, with Martin McGuinness's dramatic resignation as Deputy First Minister, and chronicles all the behind-the-scenes negotiations that ultimately resulted in the restoration of the Executive in January 2020, with the 'New Decade, New Approach' agreement. Then, that new fight with a fearsome and unknowable foe: coronavirus.

Political Purgatory charts the three years from the collapse then restoration of the northern Executive to Covid-19 in the wider frame of building peace after conflict, and it turns the next corner into the centenary of Northern Ireland and that louder call for Irish unity since Brexit, like a piece of heavy machinery on fragile ground, has left cracks across the Union.

Spanning several decades, some of the biggest names on the inside of Irish and British politics, including Gerry Adams, Naomi Long, Peter Robinson, Julian Smith and Simon Coveney, help veteran journalist Brian Rowan turn the pages in what President Clinton has called the 'long war for peace'.

CHAPTER 1

Resignation – the nuclear option

‘There was a complete acceptance within the leadership of the DUP [Democratic Unionist Party] that reaching an agreement with Sinn Féin would cause serious pain and problems for us both inside and outside the party.’

Peter Robinson,
Former First Minister of Northern Ireland

This opening thought from Peter Robinson helps us understand not just the political collapse of 2017 but also the context of the previous decade. The starting point in the DUP–Sinn Féin power-sharing arrangement in 2007 is an enemy relationship, with Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness having to build on that ground, then Robinson and McGuinness, and then Arlene Foster and McGuinness. There were many times when the house could have fallen – yet it survived, until it could stand no more.

Over a period of a few days, 6–9 January 2017, we watched as our crisis politics was moved to intensive care – into one of those places of constant observation and attention, but of little hope. In the many different waiting rooms, there was a growing sense of inevitability about the news. The prognosis was not good. What was Gerry Adams thinking as he travelled towards Limerick on that Sunday morning in January 2017? Had the decision already been made? The course was set and McGuinness’s planned resignation as deputy First Minister would be unanimously endorsed at party leadership level in Dublin that Sunday. Adams travelled there from Limerick, and McGuinness joined the meeting by telephone, reflecting a position already held by Sinn Féin’s National Officer Board, which had met two days earlier. By Sunday, the discussion was about how the decision would be enacted, with McGuinness insisting that he would travel to Stormont the next day.

Almost twenty years previously, in that historic moment of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the then Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader John Hume (who died in 2020) had persuaded Adams and McGuinness of the need for Stormont as a place to engage unionists. In a strategic sense, it was needed then, as it is needed now – needed as part of the long making of an ‘agreed’ or ‘new’ or ‘shared’ Ireland, whatever that might be. It could not easily be given up.

By now, however, there was a mood and a condition that determined it could not be saved. Not even by McGuinness, who, at times, had ‘held it together’, as former First Minister Peter Robinson had also, in crisis moments, held things together – particularly in 2015 after the murder of Kevin McGuigan in Belfast, to which members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had been linked. After the killing, there was an intelligence assessment that pointed to the continued existence of an IRA structure, including an army council. The chief constable at that time, Sir George Hamilton, explains, ‘Within a short period of time, the investigation team were pursuing a strong line of enquiry that McGuigan had been murdered by members of the IRA. As the investigation developed, it became clear that there were reasonable grounds to suspect that this was with the knowledge and concurrence of senior figures within the republican movement.’ His words here take the policing assessment further than was publicly disclosed at the time. In this same period, the fight over welfare reform could easily have broken Stormont.

Crisis was commonplace, not unusual. So, what was Arlene Foster thinking over that weekend in January 2017? Did Robinson’s successor as DUP leader and First Minister still believe that somehow some way would be found out of this latest corner in which politics was stuck? That weekend, Foster gave an interview to the journalist Rodney Edwards, who, at that time, was working on the Impartial Reporter, a stone’s throw from Foster’s then office in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. The journalist asked if she thought McGuinness would resign. ‘He may well do,’ Foster replied.

We knew that Adams would speak at a republican commemoration that Sunday, 8 January. We did not know then that the Sinn Féin leadership – its Ard Chomhairle – was also meeting that day; and that its officer board had already met that Friday. There was also a speech on Saturday inside the Felons Club in west Belfast, used by Adams to place a message and to open out the republican mood for others to see. The media had been invited for this part of the proceedings, and that lunchtime, I watched the audience in that packed room hang on his every word. It was one of those days when you sense immediately that something is afoot. You know because of those who are present – the people who matter. You read it in their faces. In the words and in the reactions. I interpreted the Adams speech as an ultimatum. That afternoon, he described a worsening crisis – and said this was a ‘defining point’ in relation to the future of the political institutions. I believed the prospect of Martin McGuinness resigning as deputy First Minister, and thus collapsing those institutions at Stormont, was now centre stage in this political play. In these developing events, it would be three years before Stormont would breathe again – a long coma on life support.

In the final weeks of 2016, we had watched as the knot tightened – politics tied up in a mess that would require some remarkable escape. By now, the fiasco of the RHI scheme had made it into the headlines as ‘cash for ash’ – a phrase first used by the Press Association Editor in Ireland, David Young, as he untangled the complex jargon of RHI.

DAVID YOUNG:

Credit for the phrase should really be shared with a source who patiently walked me through how a little-known scheme called RHI actually worked. I was aware of the Renewable Heat Incentive, and had filed a brief story on its closure in early 2016, but that was long before allegations of misuse and huge overspends became public knowledge. Those were the claims I was trying to stand up some months later when a helpful industry insider explained the fatal errors that created the burn to earn incentive. After lots of puzzling talk of capped tariffs and varying kilowatt outputs, I needed to distil the information down into a concept that was easy to convey in a story for the wider public. ‘So, basically the more ash pellets you burn the more cash you get?’ I asked, somewhat incredulously. The source replied in the affirmative and a few days later, when PA Media published the first story on the critical flaw that had left Stormont with a multi-million-pound bill, ‘burning ash to make cash’ was how I described it.

By mid-December, Stormont’s survival had become a battle of wills – Sinn Féin pushing for Arlene Foster to step aside and the First Minister stubbornly resisting. In this very public argument, loosening the knot became an impossible task. It was too tight. On Monday, 19 December, Foster made a statement on RHI without the approval or authority of the deputy First Minister, and as we watched a pantomime of politics at Stormont, I wondered whether we were witnessing another of those ‘cry wolf’ moments. We had been here before – with policing and justice, Maze/Long Kesh and welfare reform – when Sinn Féin showed its teeth, then put them away.

There was a build-up that had created an expectation of something decisive. In mid-December, Martin McGuinness had a phone conversation with Arlene Foster – telling her that the credibility of the political institutions was being undermined ‘by the serious and ongoing allegations surrounding the design, operation, abuse and ending of the Renewable Heating Incentive scheme’. He said she should ‘stand aside from the role as First Minister’ while there was an investigation – advice immediately dismissed by the DUP: ‘The First Minister does not take her instructions from Sinn Féin but from the electorate.’

Given the talk of ‘grave consequences’, that ‘crisis’ Monday at Stormont closed with a feeling of false alarm; still no indication that Foster was willing to step aside, and Sinn Féin not yet ready to push the nuclear button of a McGuinness resignation. On that stage of December 2016, politics was disorientated, becoming dysfunctional – perhaps even desperate.

We had witnessed this before in the battles between these parties over the how and when to transfer policing and justice powers from London to Stormont and watched another falling out – this time in 2013 – over plans to build a peace centre on the old Maze/Long Kesh Prison site.

Peter Robinson, Ian Paisley’s successor as First Minister, buckled under the weight of opposition from within the loyalist-unionist community. He had no choice and no cover. The Maze/Long Kesh row took place in a period when events on the streets unnerved the unionist political leadership.

Within the unionist community, there was talk of republicans engaging in ‘cultural war’ – battles that threatened the Union Flag and loyal order marches. Talk, also, of Sinn Féin glorifying terrorism and causing further hurt and pain to the ‘innocent victims’ – including in a commemoration in Castlederg, County Tyrone. And there was an ever-louder argument that the Maze/Long Kesh peace centre would inevitably become a shrine to the ten hunger strikers who died there in 1981. In the heads of some, all of this was adding up to yet more evidence of republicans rewriting history, and in the noise of these times and in the angry street protests linked to a decision to reduce the number of days that the Union Flag would fly on Belfast City Hall, the Maze project was lost. Peter Robinson stepped away from that plan.

I thought Martin McGuinness might resign as deputy First Minister and that the power-sharing executive could collapse. With my colleague Eamonn Mallie, I had spoken with McGuinness in Derry on Tuesday, 27 August 2013 – a meeting at 11 a.m. in the City Hotel. We were not allowed to report that we had met him. The conversation was for background. It could not be sourced to him. This was one of two meetings we had with McGuinness that day. The second was in the grounds of Saint Eugene’s Cathedral. Both Mallie and I wanted to be sure that we had read his lines and his mind correctly; that we had properly understood the meaning and seriousness of what he had said and shared with us earlier. You read between lines in these conversations and try to assess the mood and message. McGuinness and Sinn Féin considered the Robinson decision as an act of bad faith. We believed that there was the potential for this to escalate into a bigger crisis – that McGuinness was reassessing the worth of that partnership at the top of the executive. These conversations in Derry took place twelve days after Robinson – on 15 August 2013 – had sent a letter to DUP Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) putting the peace centre project on hold.

McGuinness, in a power-sharing arrangement and in a joint office at the top of government, had no pre-warning. Robinson was on holiday. The correspondence he sent to party colleagues came to be described as his ‘letter from America’.* McGuinness was due to see him in New York on 9 September. When Mallie and I spoke with him, his anger was obvious. This was not just about the Maze project. It was about power-sharing and partnership – how joined-up decision-making was meant to work and how it was not working.

McGuinness believed a red line had been crossed. If the peace centre was on hold, then so too was everything else in that planned development. ‘Not a brick’, the deputy First Minister told us. The row was becoming the backdrop to new negotiations on the vexed questions of flags, parades and the past, which US diplomat Richard Haass would lead with Professor Meghan O’Sullivan – a negotiation in another storm of angry words and in that mindset of ‘cultural war’. Within a couple of days, Mallie and I wrote a joint article. Its headline, ‘Has Robinson’s US missile demolished Peace Centre and Executive’, spoke to the seriousness of the situation. It was our reading between the lines of those McGuinness conversations – the working out and the writing out of what we had been told. Every brick in that planned Maze development was now in jeopardy; and so also, we believed, was the highest office at Stormont.

When you walk the path of how this story developed, these are the stepping stones. On the evening of 15 August 2013, as news of the Robinson letter began to emerge, Dominic Doherty, one of Sinn Féin’s press team in Derry, contacted party MLA Raymond McCartney. In media interviews the next morning, McCartney would be Sinn Féin’s first responder into the political row and rubble of this collapsing Maze project – and into another of those moments when the cracks could not be concealed. They were there for all to see. ‘Further evidence of weak political leadership’, McCartney said of the Robinson letter. McCartney was part of the 1980 IRA hunger strike at the jail, and in the developing peace process beyond his release, he represented the Foyle constituency in the Assembly in the period 2004–2020. Here, he explains the consequences of that letter from America in August 2013.

RAYMOND McCARTNEY:

Dominic Doherty phoned me at about 10 p.m., and in the familiar manner told me that: ‘[Radio] Foyle is looking for you in the morning’, and went on to say that it was about the Long Kesh issue. Funding had been secured from the EU for a Peace Centre on the site, and in recent days some unionists were beating the drum in opposition to it. Dominic went on to say that there was an embargoed statement from Peter Robinson, so I asked him to try and suss what it was about. He came back and told me that the speculation was that Robinson was pulling the plug on the Peace Centre. We agreed that Dominic would phone Martin and that I would then phone Martin to get the agreed approach. Dominic came back again and told me that Martin was unaware of the statement, never mind its content. When I spoke to Martin, he was as measured as ever. I said despite the politics of bad faith, the obvious question would be about the future of the site. Martin’s view was that I should not be explicit, but take the approach, that if such a strategic development was not proceeding that it would be difficult to see how any future developments would ever be approved. After the interview with Foyle, and other interviews in the following days, it was obvious that the DUP buckling to pressure ensured that the future of the site was in obvious jeopardy.

Over a period of weeks, the row got louder. In public, McGuinness was measured, calling the Robinson decision ‘a mistake’. Privately, other republicans were less restrained. There was talk of an ‘untenable’ situation and a description of ‘a letter bomb from Florida’. In a speech in Warrington, McGuinness accused the DUP of reneging on a programme for government commitment: ‘For many, given the journey we’ve all trodden and the changes that have come about, and our work abroad as advocates of peace-building, it beggars belief that we cannot agree, on the building of a peace centre.’

In the Irish parliament, Adams described ‘a crisis within political loyalism and unionism’ and spoke of the ‘infamous letter from the USA’. There was ‘clearly a big problem’. By 25 September, the senior republican Gerry Kelly was describing a ‘crisis’ in power-sharing; this was dismissed by Robinson, who urged everyone to ‘cool their jets’. Then, there was another development. On 1 October, Sinn Féin’s former publicity director Danny Morrison wrote an article on the eamonnmallie.com political website: ‘I hope I am wrong but I suspect that the Assembly could collapse. If unionists are thinking this cannot happen, they should think again.’ It felt like the build-up – the choreography – to some big moment, some big decision, but then it was reined in. Three days after Morrison wrote that article, McGuinness said he would not ‘be part of any agenda that sees the institutions collapse’. Someone had changed the record – changed their mind – decided, for some reason, to give Stormont some more time.

Richard Haass and Meghan O’Sullivan were by now chairing those negotiations on flags, parades and the past. Was there a decision by the Sinn Féin leadership to allow this to be a breathing space – or that cooling-off space – in which something might change? Perhaps. There may also have been a view that this was the wrong issue on which to collapse those institutions? I don’t know.

What I do know is this: that those republicans who described ‘a letter bomb from Florida’, an ‘untenable’ situation, a ‘crisis’ in power-sharing and the possibility of the Assembly collapsing have been around a long time – too long to misread the tea leaves. Mallie and I had also understood what McGuinness had intimated to us when we met in Derry several weeks earlier; we understood the seriousness of the situation and wrote and spoke about that over a period of weeks. There was no contact from McGuinness to say we had the wrong end of the stick or had got things wrong. To be clear, he did not tell us that he was going to resign, but since our conversations with him, we had listened as other significant republicans took this suggestion, or this sense of crisis at the top of the executive, to a higher pitch; then, suddenly, the volume was turned down. On 4 October 2013, I chatted with the deputy First Minister on the phone. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Prologue: A cake with 100 candles – but how many more?
• 1. Resignation – the nuclear option
• 2. ‘Shadowy figures’ in the Stormont corridors
• 3. See you later, alligator
• 4. McGuinness – ‘part of the rage of his time’
• 5. A stage in the London lights – balance of power
• 6. Adams – the person least forgiven
• 7. Nearly fixed, but still broken – ‘keep your ears open’
• 8. Stormont breakfast – ‘tell me more’
• 9. No more road – election then agreement
• 10. ‘Project Dignity’ – politics and pandemic
• 11. Centenary and uncertainty – Union versus unity
• Afterword: Hume – ‘his long war for peace’
• Chronology: From ceasefires to peace
• Appendices
• Index
• Plates