Читать книгу The Times Guide to the House of Commons - Литагент HarperCollins USD, Ю. Д. Земенков, Koostaja: Ajakiri New Scientist - Страница 55

David Sharrock

Ireland Correspondent

It was the parliamentary term in which the Northern Ireland peace process was finally completed, a time of extraordinary events that few could have imagined even five years earlier. The defining image must be that of the Rev Ian Paisley, the old warhorse of No Surrender Unionism, and Martin McGuinness, the former “Public Enemy No 1” in his role as Provisional IRA commander, laughing uproariously together in the company of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern. And yet there should be no surprise that, this being Northern Ireland, the conclusion of the peace process does not mean the end of the Troubles nor the threat from violent Irish republicanism to the security of the State. A page was turned in the history of Britain’s involvement with Ireland but the story was left far from over.

The backdrop was the usurpation of the Ulster Unionist Party, since the founding of the Northern Ireland state its “ruling party”, by its rivals the Democratic Unionists in the 2005 general election. As disaffection with the outworking of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the dysfunctional power-sharing Executive led by David Trimble, the First Minister, reached new heights among Unionists, a sea change in voting patterns swept away the ancien régime, rewarding the DUP with nine Westminster seats and reducing the UUP to just one, North Down, held by Sylvia Hermon.

Mr Paisley’s party promised an end to “pushover Unionism” and the experiment of sharing power with Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional IRA. Yet even before the 2005 anointment of the DUP as the new voice of Northern Ireland’s majority community, there were sufficient straws in the wind for Mr Blair’s advisers to form the view that the real endgame in Ulster was to bring together the political extremes, abandoning the centre ground shared by the UUP and the SDLP, to create a new political status quo.

Indeed, Mr Blair’s delayed departure from No 10 had much to do with the Prime Minister’s determination to see his project reaching some definable goal, nearly a decade after the euphoria of the Good Friday Agreement. He courted Mr Paisley assiduously with a near-perfect reading of the psychology of Ulster’s “Dr No”. By now in his 80s and with a terrifying brush with mortality a recent memory, Mr Paisley was conscious that his political career was drawing to a close. He wanted, and was encouraged by Mr Blair in this with lengthy intimate chats about religion, to leave behind a legacy that subverted all the beliefs of his admirers and enemies.

At the same time Mr Blair’s wingman in Ulster, the Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, was given the job of playing Bad Cop to the PM’s Good Cop. Mr Hain threatened the DUP with dire warnings that, if it failed to respond to the political progress that Sinn Féin was making, the British and Irish Governments would implement a Plan B – a far deeper green shade of Direct Rule for Northern Ireland bordering on joint sovereignty shared between London and Dublin.

Sinn Féin was suffering some game-changing setbacks. The manner in which Mr Blair had indulged Republican leaders for so long over the Provisional IRA’s failure to decommission its vast arsenal of weaponry no longer impressed Washington, which began to threaten Gerry Adams’s frequent trips to the United States with visa withdrawals. The Provisionals’ murder of Robert McCartney, a working-class Roman Catholic from a strongly Republican Belfast district, in addition to the £26.5 million cash raid from the Northern Bank – at the time the largest robbery in UK criminal history – set an ominous new tone. Sinn Féin was in a corner and only the winding up of its military wing would extricate the party.

With time running out for Mr Blair, the scene was set for a final attempt at resolution with one more round of negotiations at a venue away from the pressures and distractions of Belfast. In October 2006 the parties and British and Irish leaders convened at St Andrews. Even the choice of a Scottish location played to Mr Paisley’s Ulster-Scots roots. The DUP leader was said to be more enthusiastic than some of his party officers on signing a new international treaty between two sovereign governments that Mr Paisley would argue was an improvement on the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

The St Andrews Agreement contained more inducements for Mr Paisley than it did for Mr Adams and Sinn Féin, but the republicans also knew that they had fewer cards to play. Just as with Mr Blair, Sinn Féin’s investment in years of developing a political strategy to achieve Irish unity without resort to violence now depended on the man who had made a career out of wrecking every attempt to reach an accommodation with nationalism. Sinn Féin agreed not only to recognise but to support the forces of law and order in the guise of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, a reformed Royal Ulster Constabulary shorn of its name and emblems, in return for the DUP’s agreement to share power at Stormont. This was the moment when the sacred cow of the legitimacy of the Provisional IRA, a construct of the Irish liberation movement dating back to 1919, was finally dispatched. The following summer the Provos would quietly announce that they had formally ended their campaign to force Britain out of Ireland.

Symbolically this was a significant victory for Mr Paisley and the DUP, but it was still proving to be a hard sell to his grassroots, for so long weaned on the rhetoric of smashing Sinn Féin and republicanism. Mr Paisley demanded and got another Northern Ireland Assembly election, the tenth time that Northern Ireland had been called to the polls since 1998, to test his mandate for going into government with his former sworn enemies.

The March 2007 election rewarded the DUP with 36 seats in the 108-seat Assembly, reinforcing its primacy. The UUP managed only half that number and Sinn Féin also pulled away from the SDLP, taking 28 seats. On May 8, Mr Paisley was formally sworn in as First Minister. “If anyone had told me that I would be standing here today to take this office, I would have been totally unbelieving,” he said. Mr Blair and the Provisional IRA’s ruling Army Council, separated by just a few seats, watched from the Stormont gallery. Mr McGuinness took the oath as Deputy First Minister. Mr Blair left office with his peace project prize.

The “Chuckle Brothers” era was golden but brief, a honeymoon period in which the two former enemies laughed in public at one another’s jokes even though Mr Paisley still refused to shake Mr McGuinness’s hand. The former’s fortunes soon waned. Having been schmoozed by the Establishment he had for so long spurned, even his wife Eileen was now a member of the House of Lords, he was rejected by the very Church he founded. Free Presbyterian elders forced him to stand down as Moderator over his decision to share power with “unreformed terrorists”.

It was the tangled allegations of financial impropriety against his son Ian Jr that provided the excuse to get rid of him (the Stormont Ombudsman later cleared him). Mr Paisley tersely announced that he was retiring, to be replaced as DUP leader and First Minister by Peter Robinson. Mr McGuinness learnt of it from the radio news.

Mr Robinson promised a new era of “business-like” dealings with Sinn Féin: code for less grinning, which was going down badly with the grassroots. The DUP’s foot-dragging over the transfer of policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont began to unnerve Sinn Féin, which withdrew its cooperation, effectively rendering the power-sharing Executive mute for many months. In local parlance, the Chuckle Brothers had become the Brothers Grim.

Northern Ireland slid in slow motion towards a new crisis. Sinn Féin privately briefed that its patience was not eternal and that if policing and justice were not devolved by Christmas 2009 they would bring down the institutions whose construction had taken so long to complete.

Then came the most unpredictable of crises for Northern Ireland’s leaders. Gerry Adams was accused of covering up for decades the alleged sexual abuse by his brother Liam of Liam’s daughter. Mr Robinson was revealed as a cuckold, his wife, Iris, MP for Strangford, having had an affair with a teenager. There was more. Iris had raised £50,000 from property developer friends to set her young lover up in business, pocketing a “commission” herself from the cash. Mr Robinson was accused in a BBC investigative documentary of having breached his office’s code of conduct by not having made the authorities aware, a charge that he strongly denied.

The personal and political crises intertwined as Sinn Féin increased the pressure. Gordon Brown, whose interest in Northern Ireland had been minimal until now, was forced to fly with Brian Cowen, his Irish counterpart, to Belfast to hold emergency proximity talks. These failed and after three days the Prime Minister abandoned Hillsborough Castle, leaving Shaun Woodward, his Northern Ireland Secretary, to oversee two weeks of marathon negotiations, during which Mr Robinson temporarily stood down as First Minister.

Eventually the deal was done and sealed by the British and Irish leaders, who returned to unveil a firm date for the transfer of policing and justice powers, a hugely symbolic act for Sinn Fein since it could henceforth argue that the English were no longer running the show.

The extraordinary survival of Mr Robinson and Mr Adams as leaders of their respective parties was much commented upon, with most agreeing that neither could or would have remained in any other part of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. Yet there was one surprise in the general election of 2010. Mr Robinson’s party saw off the challenge from a revived Ulster Unionist Party, now in alliance with the Conservatives, but also the Traditional Unionist Voice power-sharing rejectionists.

Establishing themselves beyond question as the voice of Unionism, talk began once more about a united Unionist party to challenge Sinn Fein’s onward march towards becoming Northern Ireland’s largest party. But Mr Robinson lost his East Belfast seat, which he had held for 31 years, to Naomi Long of the cross-community Alliance party, which designates itself neither Unionist nor nationalist. Across the city in West Belfast Mr Adams increased his share of the vote to 71 per cent.

As the parliamentary term drew to a close it seemed as if the self-denial about the threat of a fresh cycle of terrorism from a new generation of Irish Republican extremists was finally over. The Real IRA, a splinter of the Provisionals, bombed the Army’s Palace Barracks outside Belfast where MI5 has its headquarters.

One phase of the Troubles had drawn to a close, but another was threatening to commence.