The New Belfast Agreement
In the Joint
Declaration by the British and Irish Governments, published in April 2003,
Tony Blair has modified the Belfast
Agreement, with Bertie Ahern’s consent, to make Sinn Fein membership of the
Executive conditional, not just on the decommissioning of IRA arms, but also on
the disbandment of the IRA.
He has
done this in an attempt to save David Trimble.
The history of the Agreement has been littered with such attempts. This is just the latest. One would have thought that, by now, he
would have learnt to recognise a hopeless case when he sees one.
The original Agreement contains no
commitment to bring about the actual decommissioning of any paramilitary arms,
let alone paramilitary disbandment, prior to the formation of an executive, or
for that matter ever.
Paragraph 3 of the Decommissioning
Section of the Agreement merely says:
“All participants
accordingly reaffirm their commitment to the total disarmament of all
paramilitary organisations. They also confirm their intention to continue to
work constructively and in good faith with the Independent Commission, and to
use any influence they may have, to achieve the decommissioning of all
paramilitary arms within two years following endorsement in referendums North
and South of the agreement and in the context of the implementation of the
overall settlement.”
It is clear from this that, while
the decommissioning of paramilitary arms was an aspiration of the original
Agreement, it did not require any party to bring about the actual
decommissioning of arms, prior to the formation of an Executive. One member of the Ulster Unionist
delegation, Jeffrey Donaldson, walked out of the negotiations on Good Friday
because of that.
Paul Connolly, who was the Belfast
Telegraph’s political correspondent at the time, endorsed that view a few days
after the Agreement was signed:
“There is no specific, crystal clear wording
that actually bars Sinn Fein, PUP and UDP members being ministers while their
armed wings retain weapons, although this would be against the spirit of the
Agreement.” (Belfast Telegraph, 16
April 1998)
Yet for years David Trimble
asserted that the Agreement required IRA decommissioning prior to Sinn Fein
participation in the Executive. “No
guns, no government” was his slogan.
But instead of telling him to go home and read the Agreement he had
accepted on Good Friday, the other parties to the Agreement, apart from Sinn
Fein, continually gave credence to his plainly erroneous interpretation.
The
process of muddying the water on decommissioning began with the letter of
comfort Tony Blair wrote for David Trimble on the day the Agreement was signed,
in order to persuade him and the rest of the UUP delegation to accept the
Agreement. The following is the text of
that letter:
“I
understand your problem with Paragraph 25 of Strand 1 is that it requires
decisions on those who should be excluded or removed from office in the
Northern Ireland Executive to be taken on a cross-community basis.
“This
letter is to let you know that if, during the course of the first 6 months of
the Shadow Assembly or the Assembly itself, these provisions have been shown to
be ineffective, we will support changes to these provisions to enable them to
be made properly effective in preventing such people from holding office.
“Furthermore,
I confirm that in our view the effect of the decommissioning section of the
Agreement, with decommissioning schemes coming into effect in June, is that the
process of decommissioning should begin straight away.”
The final paragraph says that, in
the British Government’s view, decommissioning should begin in June 1998. It carefully doesn’t say that a start to
decommissioning by June is a requirement of the Agreement – which it obviously
isn’t. But it served to encourage a
stance which assumed that actual decommissioning is a requirement of the
Agreement and, furthermore, that there would be actual decommissioning of IRA
arms prior to Sinn Fein Ministers taking their place in an Executive (which
couldn’t be formed until after Assembly elections at the end of June).
At a press conference on 16 April
1998, Trimble insisted that Sinn Fein and other parties linked to
paramilitaries would have to decommission before holding office in a Northern
Ireland Executive (Belfast Telegraph, 16 April 1998). On the same day, he warned in the Northern Ireland Forum that
there would be a “major crisis” in the new arrangements if the decommissioning
of illegal weapons didn’t occur. And in
an article in the Belfast Telegraph on 17 April 1998, he wrote:
Blair’s
Good Friday letter was the first of several interventions by him during the
referendum campaign, which muddied the water on decommissioning, in order to
persuade Unionists to vote Yes.
Normally, Blair was careful not to say things which were in direct
conflict with what was in the Agreement but, encouraged by the Downing Street
machine, the interpretation of what he said, or was about to say, went well
beyond the Agreement.
Listen to this from the Belfast
Telegraph on 14 May 1998, previewing his speech later that day at
Balmoral. This was based on comments by
his ‘chief spokesman’. The Telegraph
front-page lead was headed “Blair lays down law on weapons”, splashed over
eight columns. It said: “Tony Blair
today will reinforce his promise that the release of prisoners and the right to
sit in a new executive must be tied to the handling of arms”. It continued: “Mr Blair, said sources, is
ready to accept the case by Tory and Unionist MPs such as Mr Donaldson that
decommissioning safeguards should be in legislation”.
His final intervention in the
referendum campaign was in an article published in the Irish News and the News
Letter on the morning of the referendum.
This contained the following extraordinary paragraph:
“Representatives of parties
intimately linked to paramilitary groups can only be in a future Northern
Ireland government if it is clear that there will be no more violence and the
threat of violence has gone. That
doesn’t just mean decommissioning but all bombings, killings, beatings, and an
end to targeting, recruiting and all the structures of terrorism.
“I have set out the tests for this.
They will be enshrined in law and these tests will be applied more and more
rigorously as time goes on. There can
be no fudge between democracy and terror. The people of Northern Ireland will
not stand for this. As prime minister
of this country nor will I.”
Anybody reading that before going
out to vote could be forgiven for thinking that they were voting on an
Agreement which required the IRA, not just to decommission arms, but also to
disband, before Sinn Fein would be allowed into a Northern Ireland government,
and that the Government was going to legislate to ensure this. There is, of course, no such pre-condition
in the Agreement.
But,
there is now.
Irish Political Review
July 2003