Brokering the Good Friday Agreement: the Untold Story by Mary E Daly (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Mary E Daly (ed.), Brokering the Good Friday Agreement: the Untold Story (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2019), 208 pages. For those who’ve been infected with the virus of the Northern Ireland peace process, perhaps as a result of insufficient social distancing, there has as yet been no vaccine developed which is capable of quelling their enthusiasm for more testimony of the kind brought together in this book. It is a series of personal accounts by some of the most distinguished Irish public servants to have contributed to the search for peace in the three decades leading up to Good Friday 1998, which were delivered at a conference hosted by the Royal Irish Academy in March 2018 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Agreement. All the essays offer support for the simple point made by Olivia O’Leary in her foreword: the slow realisation over time by both the Irish and the British governments that they were much stronger when they worked together than when, as she puts it, they remained hostage to their respective extremists. It was a long journey for both Dublin and London and the necessary understanding was only gradually acquired. For an English reader who may be aware just how under-informed successive British governments were about developments in Northern Ireland in the period from 1945, it is intriguing to discover from Seán Donlon’s piece that at the outset of the Troubles there was no one in either the Department of the Taoiseach or the Department of Foreign Affairs tasked with reporting on the North. Ted Smyth’s account of the New Ireland Forum confirms that ignorance of Northern Ireland was a feature of the Irish political class too. The Sunningdale Conference in December 1973 was a telling indicator of what might be possible, as Donlon and Noel Dorr remind us. Seamus Mallon’s famous reference to slow learners is one way of characterising the period between 1974 and 1998, though in fairness to the two governments they themselves made quicker progress than that interval suggests. Michael Lillis makes the direct connection between Sunningdale and the next major stopping point in this collection, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. His account of its origins, intentions and consequences is invaluable. It has always seemed remarkable to this observer that Mrs Thatcher was Studies • volume 109 • number 436 466 persuaded to sign up to it only a year after being so nearly assassinated in Brighton, but, as Charles Moore notes in his biography of her, it was extraordinary in retrospect how little British policy on Northern Ireland changed in the aftermath of the bombing. Her own subsequent verdict that the Agreement was ‘something uniquely valuable and lasting’ is on the record, but Lillis’s analysis would confirm some of her anxieties and concerns about its substance, not least his description of Garret Fitzgerald’s ‘key but “unspoken” objective to push its terms as closely as possible to a system of joint authority … for the government of Northern Ireland’. Martin Mansergh’s succinct summary of its significance would almost certainly have confirmed such doubts, though a balanced historical judgement must surely echo his conclusion that the Agreement was instrumental in ‘leading to an eventual break in the prolonged political and military deadlock, even if in its immediate aftermath the opposite seemed to be the case’. There are several ways of expressing that instrumentality. One is, as Mansergh does, by referring to the impact on the parties in Northern Ireland. Another is, as David Donoghue suggests, by attributing to it the launch of a genuine partnership between the two governments which had its ultimate fruits in the Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent decade or so of attempted implementation. One telling aspect of the developing partnership is recounted in Richard Ryan’s fascinating account of how he built and broadened Irish contacts in Westminster, especially in the Conservative party, such that there might eventually be parliamentary support for what became the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The effectiveness of that operation is a great tribute to the quality of Irish diplomacy. Briefer references to the Brooke-Mayhew talks and the Downing Street Declaration in December 1993 evidence...