In a British fairyland
The portrayal of Sinn Féin as a reluctant partner in peace is a fiction that did not fool the Irish voters
Ronan Bennett
Saturday March 17, 2007
The Guardian
Does Sinn Féin deserve no credit for the extraordinary transformation that
has taken place in the north of Ireland over the past 15 years? From Peter
Mandelson's account of the prime minister's handling of the peace process,
one would think that the British government had to drag a stubborn
republican leadership kicking and screaming to the negotiating table, and
that once there they could only be kept on board by repeated capitulation to
republican demands.
The former secretary of state for Northern Ireland has played no significant
part in Irish politics since his forced resignation in 2001 over the Hinduja
affair, but his portrayal of republicans as reluctant partners in peace -
which the British media has eagerly picked up - not only rewrites history
but helps to perpetuate an atmosphere of distrust and bad faith as the March
26 deadline for the return of power sharing approaches. For this reason
alone it is worth getting the facts straight.
Hume / Adams peace initiative greeted with hostility by the British back in 1992
The peace process pre-dated the advent of Tony Blair to power by almost a
decade. It does not detract from Blair's commitment to a settlement to
recall that in 1988 Gerry Adams and John Hume, the former leader of the
nationalist SDLP, began a series of private talks in an attempt to agree a
joint strategy to take the gun out of Irish politics.
When the so-called Hume-Adams document was delivered in June 1992, it was
greeted not as a promising avenue but with hostility. Hume, who went on to
become a joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, reacted with hurt
incomprehension. A man of Gandhian commitment to non-violence, he was
accused of being everything from an IRA stooge to an outright villain.
Unionists reviled him, and his British allies in the Labour party deserted
him. The message from John Major's government was clear: there could be no
negotiation with "the men of violence", only more war, more death, more
misery. If the enemy was genuine about peace, all it had to do was
surrender. This may have made Major feel strong, but as a strategy for peace
it wasn't going to work.
Reflecting on the response to the Hume-Adams initiative, republican leaders
could have been forgiven for falling back on the old dictum that
nationalists in the north of Ireland never achieved anything by politics. It
could easily have been the signal to give the physical-force tradition its
head. But, undeterred, the IRA called a three-day ceasefire, on December 23
1993.
The intention was to show that the IRA had the discipline and cohesion to
maintain a ceasefire and that the republican leadership was serious about
finding a settlement. But such was the fury provoked by the Christmas
ceasefire that Adams wondered aloud if the IRA had declared an
intensification of the war. The message was the same: peace had to be on
British/unionist terms.
Lessons from History?
When the IRA declared a "complete cessation of military operations" on
August 31 1994, the response was no less hostile. Adams in particular came
in for vicious and sustained criticism, including on these pages. Gerry
Adams "is a coffin-filler strategically deciding to desist from filling
coffins", wrote Edward Pearce in 1994. "Even if his heart is in peace, his
words and his actions suggest a man who has neither the confidence nor the
courage to drive events," an Observer editorial claimed in the same year.
Later Roy Hattersley reflected in the Guardian that "Gerry Adams is part of
the Troubles ... by treating him as if he is essential to a permanent
settlement, we glorify intransigence, bigotry and extremism". It was as
though nothing whatsoever had changed from a year earlier when the Sunday
Telegraph, for example, declared that Gerry Adams was "one of the ... most
formidable enemies to peace in Ireland's bloodstained history".
Given subsequent events, what lesson do we take from these quotations, apart
from evidence of the writers' prejudice and inaccurate judgment? It is the
same one that echoes throughout Mandelson's interview, which is that the
British government is a patient, reasonable, much put-upon and disinterested
party to the whole sorry affair.
The land of fairies, of pixies and leprechauns
In this smug, patronising and valedictory view, the British government can
maintain the fiction that the conflict arose of nothing, that the
nationalist community never had genuine grievances, that the whole thing was
- to quote Jeremy Paxman during his coverage of the recent elections -
"tribal" and therefore irrational, beyond politics. Or as the former Tory MP
Edward du Cann said: "The English find [the Irish] impossible to understand
- why they fight each other, why they speak with such a total lack of logic.
There's no reality in Ireland. It's a land of fairies, of pixies and
leprechauns."
Mandelson's Ireland may be inhabited by "bloody hard" people, but he
colludes with Du Cann in propagating the self-exculpating myths that allowed
both Labour and Conservative governments to shore up one side - the
unionists - while waging war against republicans and still claiming to be
impartial.
Voters acknowledge, that republican leadership drove the peace
process
The elections last week saw Sinn Féin register its largest vote since
partition. The lesson Mandelson and those who nod so approvingly at his
interview have still to learn is that the party's success is an
acknowledgment by voters that the republican leadership drove the peace
process, while the British government and unionists have proved - and in the
case of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist party continue to prove - dilatory
in pursuit of a settlement.
· Ronan Bennett's latest novel, Zugzwang, is published by Bloomsbury in July