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The American Dimension Unleashed

John Hume had first travelled to the US to represent the Irish League of Credit Unions in the 1960s. Hume brought to the US a fascination for the republican model of government and an admiration for those who challenged the government to live up to the ideal of equality expressed at the founding of the United States. Mayor Ray Flynn of Boston walked John Hume through the city’s streets and recalls that Hume was:

Fascinated with Martin Luther King [who] was a strong presence in Boston since the days when he went to Boston University. I would tell John stories about how I saw Martin Luther King out in the Roxbury neighbourhood marching into downtown Boston. John would want to know the whole background. I would take him to different locations where Martin Luther King lived. I realised that John really looked up to Martin Luther King, probably more so than any political leader or personality in the world.

By the late 60s and the eruption of the Troubles, Hume, by then a prominent politician, was sought out for his views on the unfolding situation by concerned Irish-America. That began a series of false starts before an effective coterie of supporters could form.

As early as the autumn of 1969, when Hume was invited to address the Donegal Men’s Association in Boston, he had a realisation about where his political activities in the US would centre – it was to be at the treetop level rather than at the grassroots. As Seán Donlon, who was Irish Consul General in Boston from 1969–71, remembers:

In those days Ted Kennedy, as far as I recall, had no presence in Boston. He didn’t live there. John began to form the view that organised as it was, Irish-America was not the route to power. Organized Irish-America was extraordinary in the sense that there were maybe 500 different groupings – whether it was the Donegal men, Cork men, the Éire Society of Boston, the Irish Cultural Centre – you had lots and lots of organisations dealing with specific issues, for example, immigration or dealing with social matters. But John quickly came to the view, and he was absolutely right, that these are not the route to power; these people are not into the American political scene. If I want to influence American policy somehow or other, I’m going to have to break into the Washington scene … I think very quickly John began to focus on: Where is the power? Who has the power? How can I enter that zone of power?

Hume found that America was receptive to the Irish Question, but only on preconceived grounds and through the filter of their own experience, and that a good deal of education would be required to elucidate the complexity of the Northern Irish conflict for American audiences. Again, Seán Donlon explains:

The American media could easily relate to what was happening in Northern Ireland, particularly in 1968–69 because it was almost a copy of the Civil Rights Movement in their own country. The complexities were not easily understood in the United States; people understood civil rights, housing, electoral reform, discrimination, all of these things were understood. What was not easily understood was: Where was Northern Ireland? Why was it a part of the United Kingdom? What was the background? Why did people want a United Ireland, and of course in the Irish-American community, why don’t we achieve it by violence? In 1969, even people who subsequently became phenomenal supporters – Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, and Hugh Carey – were inclined to look towards what became the Provisional IRA. That was their first instinct.

In time these supporters – Hugh Carey, then in the US Congress and later Governor of New York, Ted Kennedy who was a senator from Massachusetts and Tip O’Neill who was a rising star in the Democratic party – were to join with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senator for New York, and form very powerful grouping concerned to support Ireland’s search for peace and justice. Thus, as American politicians became more involved, the need for an effective communicator, who combined a deep understanding of the historical evolution of the political problems in Northern Ireland with a vision of their solution, became even more necessary. Bloody Sunday, and the broader disintegration of the North of Ireland in 1972, focused the attention of Washington on the Irish Question as perhaps never before. The massacre in Derry that day made the need for a touchstone on the Irish Question all the more necessary for US politicians wishing to engage on Irish matters.

Bloody Sunday and its Repercussions

From any point of view, Bloody Sunday was a diplomatic disaster for British policy makers. After the massacre of innocent, non-violent protesters on their own streets, Britain’s moral case to act as an ‘honest broker’ among a divided people instantly proved risible. To exacerbate the sense of injustice in Derry, and to completely extinguish Britain’s integrity, Lord Chief Justice Widgery, who presided over a Tribunal on Bloody Sunday, exculpated the Parachute Regiment – which was guilty of the murders – and instead blamed the marchers. The international community’s sympathy for the Catholic victims of the massacre in Derry was apparent no less in Washington. Senator Ted Kennedy, who had called for a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland in 1971, stated in Congressional Hearings on Northern Ireland: ‘Just as Ulster is Britain’s Vietnam, so Bloody Sunday is Britain’s My Lai.’ Tip O’Neill, by now House Majority Whip, was similarly exercised, if less outspoken in public. As Seán Donlon remembers:

When Bloody Sunday happened there was a huge reaction and enormous criticism of the British military, of the British political system. At that stage, Tip O’Neill got together with some of his colleagues in the House of Representatives and arranged to hold hearings on the Northern Ireland situation; technically, he did that through a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

When Tip O’Neill invited a delegation from Derry to Washington to give evidence Hume declined the invitation, judging that at such a fraught time his focus needed to be squarely on the domestic situation at hand. As a result of those hearings, O’Neill sponsored a petition signed by 102 House members in response to the Northern Irish crisis. At the same time, a perception was growing in the US Congress that Hume would be central to any effort to address the crisis.

The need for a new voice on the Northern Ireland Question, someone who could show a way forward, was also shared by visiting American media reporters, and early on it was recognised that Hume could be that voice. As The New York Times reported in August 1972:

The Social Democratic and Labor party, a disparate grouping of Opposition politicians, sometimes is described as ‘six men and one mind’. The mind belongs to Mr. Hume, who at 35, is generally held to be the deepest thinker and most able tactician in the group. It is not just intellect that accounts for his importance in efforts to break the impasse here. Mr. Hume is also believed to have won, in part through frequent television appearances, more prestige in Dublin than any other politician in Northern Ireland. But his strongest claim to influence is his ability to speak for Derry … That ability has been somewhat eroded by the successive waves of violence, for Mr. Hume has consistently condemned the terrorism of the Irish Republican Army, even when much of his natural constituency was ready to condone it. But he retains strong support and is respected enough to get a hearing where he can no longer count on automatic allegiance. ‘I can’t influence the I.R.A.’, he says, ‘but I can influence the people’.1

The American Dimension: An Irreversible Shift in Perspective

The background to the first substantive encounter between Ted Kennedy and John Hume is somewhat protracted. Hume and Kennedy had briefly met at Trinity College Dublin in March 1970, not long after the Chappaquiddick incident. Kennedy had also sent a supportive telegram to Hume in 1969, stating that the Catholic minority did not struggle alone and that ‘the reforms you seek are basic to all democracies worthy of the name’.2 Meanwhile, in Derry, street violence began to escalate. However, it was not until a visit to London in 1971, after an encounter with an Irish woman, that Kennedy committed himself fully to working with Hume. The woman challenged Kennedy for having criticised the Kent State Massacre and yet having done, in practice, nothing to assist the Catholic minority in the North of Ireland. Kennedy’s Chief of Staff, Carey Parker recalls:

The Senator felt she was right, and in October 1971, a month after his return from Europe, he signed on to a resolution that Senator Abe Ribicoff and Congressman Hugh Carey, who was a member of the House at the time, introduced in Congress calling for immediate British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and the reunification of Ireland. That was what the American Irish wanted to hear, but as John Hume indicated to some friends of ours in Ireland, ‘We can understand your frustration, but that’s not the way the crisis in Northern Ireland will be resolved’. He wanted to talk to the Senator, and the Senator said, I have to go see John Hume.3

The Meeting

After Bloody Sunday, the smouldering conflict in Northern Ireland ‘became a war’, in the words of Eamonn McCann. Non-identification with the State on the part of the Catholic minority continued – civil servants and Catholic police resigned, public spaces became more clearly identified as ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’ – and against that backdrop, forging an inclusive approach to politics became considerably more difficult. The deepening divide fed absolutist and paramilitary ‘solutions’. With politics in Derry deteriorating, the timing for a determined American engagement on the Irish Question was right.

John Hume, unemployed since the Stormont Parliament had been prorogued by Prime Minister Ted Heath, was sitting in his kitchen at West End Park in Derry when he received an unanticipated telephone call from Senator Ted Kennedy. Hume was initially disbelieving, thinking the call a hoax, but the caller assured him that he was indeed Ted Kennedy and that he wanted to meet. Kennedy was scheduled to travel to Bonn for a NATO meeting and he asked Hume to come to Bonn to see him. As Hume’s wife, Pat, remembers: ‘I was teaching. I was the bread winner. We had five small children. But he realised that this was very important.’ Hume borrowed money from the Credit Union (of which he had been president) and bought a flight to Bonn. That meeting took place at the residence of the then Irish Ambassador to West Germany, Sean G. Ronan, at 65 Rolandstraße, Bad Godesberg, and as Senator Ted Kennedy himself put it:

He came to Bonn, and I spent a couple of hours with him in the residence of the Ambassador … that’s where John began the great education of Edward Kennedy about Northern Ireland and planted the seeds that grew and grew and grew into a wonderful relationship … Hume was pointing out to me, certainly, that if we were going to have any success with a political process, we had to stop the flow of arms and funds for arms to the IRA from the U.S.4

Seán Donlon recalls: ‘The ambassador had set up the meeting, arranged dinner, but the meeting was just between John Hume and Ted Kennedy. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but I do know that immediately afterwards Kennedy said to Ambassador Sean Ronan, “that’s the man … that’s the man I will listen to”. ’ The first horseman was in the saddle.

The other aspect of Kennedy’s education was the clear-headed perspective and constant stream of solid information provided by his exceptionally talented Chief of Staff, Carey Parker. Parker worked the phones on the Irish Question like nobody in the US. In the early phase of the conflict, Parker found that the British effort was ‘not so much to try to reach reconciliation between the two sides as it was to end the violence, and they treated it as a war that they had to win, not as a peace they could negotiate’.5 That a United States senator consciously sought out Hume was indicative of a rapidly sharpening view of Northern Ireland among senior US politicians. Kennedy wished to identify a trusted partner through whom he could channel what would become enormous US influence on Anglo-Irish relations. Hume had appeared to be that man and the meeting in Bonn confirmed Kennedy’s belief that Hume was. Carey Parker corroborates:

That meeting began a decades-long relationship, during which we didn’t do anything on Northern Ireland without first talking with John Hume … We felt that the Irish issue needed a voice in Congress that was clearly for reconciliation and peace, so it was the only voice in Congress that wasn’t being heard via the IRA. … It was largely a way of showing that Republicans and Democrats could work together on the Irish issue and that we were all in favor of the John Hume initiative.6

But the question remained: why did US politicians feel moved to become involved at all?

Background to Tip O’Neill’s Involvement

Something in Tip O’Neill’s background helps to explain the emotional centre of gravity for many Irish-American politicians. O’Neill’s son, Tom O’Neill, relates:

My father’s mother’s family came from Buncrana in Donegal – the Drumfries area of Buncrana, a farm area – and both sides of her family worked in the soil. His father’s father had worked in brickyards in Ireland and when he came to America he landed naturally enough in Cambridge, because there were brickyards in North Cambridge.

He certainly knew the history of the Irish and what the Irish-American condition was, not only in North Cambridge but in Dorchester, South Boston, and other enclaves where the Irish lived. He was old enough and early enough in American history to understand the British and what they felt about the Irish coming to America. I’m talking about the Brahmins and the Patrician Yankees here in New England and how they treated the Irish, and others frankly, coming in from other European nations, and how they were not welcomed.

There was a bank run by the Yankees in North Cambridge which bypassed all the ethnics, all the Irish and Italians, and never gave them loans. So my father went to the bank president and said: ‘You know, you’ve got on deposit all the Irish money and all the French Canadian money from our neighbourhoods. There’ll be a run on your bank if you don’t start loaning the money out’. And so the next day the bank started loaning the money out.

Tip O’Neill brought his inherited grasp of the Anglo-Irish imbroglio with him to the House of Representatives. O’Neill’s first Congressional speech, given on 5 March 1952, was ‘a five-minute address on a bill he had sponsored to improve working conditions and salaries for longshoremen. With an eye toward his new constituency, he spoke out on behalf of foreign aid to Israel and Italy – and for Irish reunification’.7 Even so, without a coherent framework rooted in the realities of the North of Ireland, any effort by a would-be supporter such as O’Neill in favour of Irish reunification or any aspect of policy relating to Ireland, was destined to fail.

Resolutions introduced in the US Congress on Ireland – given that Congress was becoming more Irish as decades passed – were a source of anxiety for the British. This became apparent when sixteen anti-partition resolutions were proposed in the US Congress between 1948 and 1951. These were substantially driven by Congressman John Fogarty of Rhode Island, who also tried to leverage US Marshall Aid to the UK by linking it to a push to end the partition of Ireland. As James Sharkey relates:

This was strongly opposed by the State Department by Secretary of State Dean Acheson. The State Department secured a major abstention in the vote and, as a consequence of that, the resolution failed. The British Embassy, reporting back to London at that time, spoke not just about the defeat of the Irish lobby in Washington, but the defeat of any ethnic lobby which came forward to divert American policy from its mainstream intent.

A tight alliance of the US State Department, the British Embassy and the White House was able to forestall any effort to reassess the US relationship with Ireland. But that coalition was about to be challenged by a concerted movement of influential figures in the US Senate and the House of Representatives.

Ted Kennedy, like Tip O’Neill, had imbibed Irish nationalism from an early age, through his maternal grandfather, John ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, who had been Mayor of Boston. This included walks through Irish parts of the city where the NINA (No Irish Need Apply) culture that had prevailed excluded the Irish from circles of power in both politics and commerce. The core lesson Honey Fitz imparted to JFK when he ran for election was: ‘He said: “The only thing you have to know about foreign policy is that Trieste belongs to Italy, and all of Ireland will be united and free”, and with those two things, you could get elected in Boston.’8 While that simplistic view may have worked for the ethnic politics of Boston, and indeed coloured Kennedy’s earliest pronouncements on Ireland, Hume disabused him of the validity of such simple views when applied to the contemporary Irish reality.

Yet even before Hume fully embarked on his partnership with US politicians, the establishment of a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland in 1973 had emerged from talks between the Irish and British governments at the Prime Ministerial level (Liam Cosgrave on the Irish side and Ted Heath on the British side). Hume, who had long identified power-sharing as a key element to solving the problem of Northern Ireland’s divided people, immediately and wholly committed himself to the power-sharing arrangement contained in the Executive agreed at the Sunningdale Conference, in Berkshire, England.

The Sunningdale Agreement

In the preliminary talks leading to the Sunningdale Agreement in December 1973, it was clear that any discussion on a settlement in Northern Ireland would involve a recognition in London and Dublin that the conflict could not be defined solely within the Northern Irish State; rather, the Irish and British governments would have a considerable role to play in the creation of any new structure for Northern Ireland. That was an analysis that Unionists largely rejected. Similarly, the Hume/SDLP concept of a ‘New Ireland’ which provided for territorial unity by consent was assailed by the Unionist population on the grounds that a New Ireland was a Trojan Horse for a United Ireland by stealth. ‘Dublin is just a Sunningdale away’ ran a contemporary Unionist slogan. Undeniably, however, the Irish dimension to the Northern Irish crisis needed to be recognised: the Irish and British governments were expected in any authentic reassessment of the Northern Irish State to construct institutions that would reflect all of the strands of Northern Irish political identity.

At Sunningdale, the Irish delegation insisted that everything be recorded in writing. There were six meeting rooms at Sunningdale to accommodate the talks, though in practice a great deal of the negotiations actually took place in the corridors. The British representative was James Allen, who reported directly to the British government, and he was assisted by Philip Woodfield, Deputy Head of the Northern Ireland Office. Their counterparts from Dublin were Declan Costello and Garret FitzGerald, both of whom were immersed in the details. William Whitelaw, Secretary for State for Northern Ireland, put his political career at risk to guarantee Sunningdale’s success and at key moments in the negotiations he would speak at length with John Hume and the SDLP in camera to ensure their views were accommodated. Eventually, on 9 December 1973, a deal was agreed which provided for a power-sharing Executive in Belfast and a North–South Council of Ireland, in the form of a Consultative Assembly made up of thirty members from the Northern Ireland Assembly and thirty members from Dáil Éireann.

The Guarantee

A recurring bugbear for Hume and other Constitutional Nationalists was London’s guarantee to Unionists that no constitutional change would ever occur without their consent. That guarantee had the appearance of properly taking account of Unionists’ constitutional rights. However, in doing so it took absolutely no account of Nationalists’ legislative rights. Hume even made the blunt argument that such an unspoken guarantee to Unionists had been the cornerstone of the intransigent one-party government that ran Northern Ireland for sixty years and was the root cause of the Troubles.9 The fact that Britain had given a legislative guarantee of no constitutional change to Unionists strengthened their hand immensely. In negotiations, not just about constitutional change, but on any agenda for reform, it served Unionists to simply retreat to their constitutional guarantee position, which tended to be enough to foil any initiative for change. Therefore Hume and others railed against it and attempted to rethink and reconfigure the political landscape outside it, based on the fact that Northern Ireland was an artificial jurisdiction from its foundation and that the consent of all its people was never sought. For as long as the guarantee obtained in Northern Ireland existed, democracy could only exist in a vitiated form.

Sunningdale was a fundamental break with London’s position that no new political structures were required to achieve stability for Northern Ireland. Today the agreement reads as both a reasonable and a prescient document. For example, both the Irish and British governments accept (in paragraph five) that there could be no change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland without the consent of a majority. This was an unprecedented recognition for the Irish government. At the same time, the British prime minister signed up to a clause providing that ‘if in the future the majority of the people of Northern Ireland should indicate a wish to become part of a united Ireland, the British Government would support that wish’; and (in paragraph thirteen) that it ‘was broadly accepted that the two parts of Ireland are to a considerable extent inter-dependent in the whole field of law and order’.10

In 1973, the slightest hint of a United Ireland in the future and the acknowledgement of an existing symbiotic relationship between Ireland North and South seemed to enrage Unionism. The structure of the Council of Ireland, designed to reflect the interdependence of the two states in Ireland, became a source of contempt for hardline Unionism. Conor Cruise O’Brien, then Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, argued that the Council of Ireland was asking Unionism to concede too much, while Republicans recoiled from the Council of Ireland because they saw it as an implicitly partitionist institution.

Besides the philosophical misgivings of both the nationalist right-wing and the Unionist right-wing, the practical task of sustaining Sunningdale’s institutions represented an enormous undertaking. Dermot Nally, a senior official of the Irish government, estimated at the time that sustaining the Council of Ireland alone would require 2,000 civil servants to maximise its functions. Sunningdale required for its success a huge degree of good will and determined commitment.

Sunningdale

The civil rights protests had been a necessary step, but only a first step, toward recasting politics in Northern Ireland. Hume’s attempts to awaken the conscience of Stormont were met by an almost preternatural unwillingness. With the signing of the Sunningdale Agreement, however, Hume realised that Northern Ireland now had a reasonable framework within which the diverse facets of Northern identity could be recognised. The Sunningdale Executive contained within it the strands – centrist Nationalist and Unionist parties in the North, along with Southern Irish and British participation – that together would form the basis for a workable political process in Northern Ireland provided that Britain and Ireland would stand by the newly minted Executive.

However, it was going to take enormous political will to prop up the Sunningdale arrangements and within weeks of the signing of the Agreement signs of serious tension were already evident. In a December 1973 report to the Department of Foreign Affairs Headquarters, Seán Donlon, then head of Northern Irish policy for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, expressed doubt that Sunningdale could last because Faulkner had lost too much Unionist support. Getting on the ground and exercising ‘shoe-leather diplomacy’, Donlon had spoken to people who held the keys of Orange Halls in Newry, Dungannon and Omagh and the isolation of the Executive was becoming clear to him.

The murder by the Provisional IRA of Thomas Niedermayer, general manager in Northern Ireland of the German company, Grundig, and honorary consul for West Germany, was devastating. Niedermayer was murdered on 27 December 1973 (subsequently his wife and both his daughters committed suicide), and his abduction and murder happened against the backdrop of Hume, as Minister for Commerce in the Sunningdale Executive, attempting to promote Northern Ireland as a location for foreign investment by multinationals. In a broader context, it also occurred at a time when Ireland and the UK had just joined the EEC, and the possibility of new investment from Europe and from the US were opening up.

For all the hostile reception and the variety of opposition Sunningdale provoked among disparate political groups, North and South, it marked a glimpse of a new political era. The Catholic minority, which had been dispossessed for half a century since the foundation of the State, finally had achieved parity of esteem in a power-sharing Executive. The degree of the shift which occurred could be seen in this succinct summation by Austin Currie: ‘I became the Minister for Housing and Planning. The person who had been squatting in a discrimination case in a house in Caledon in 1968 was, by 1974, in charge of housing and planning. It was quite a remarkable achievement and it was done by non-violent political activity.’ Hume’s wife, Pat, remembers that Hume, as Minister for Commerce in the power-sharing Executive, had scarcely ever worked so hard in his life: he was convinced that the path to securing political stability lay through economic growth.

In advance of a trip to the US by Hume in April 1974, to promote industrial investment in Northern Ireland, an official of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office forearmed himself with briefing material for Hume, but decided that given Hume’s experience in the US, his command of Irish history, and the historic significance of the power-sharing Executive, it would have been ‘otiose’ to hand Hume the briefing material. In the US, Hume spoke to the media regarding Northern Ireland as a prime destination for investment. Hume was due to meet Senator Ted Kennedy, which he had confided to the FCO in strict confidence (as he was already conscious of the SDLP members’ sensitivities that the media was putting a preponderant emphasis on Hume’s personality). Nevertheless, there was wide coverage of his visit in print and television media in Washington, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. The US State Department report of his visit in print and television media in Washington, New York, and Boston, asserts:

Hume proved to be effective spokesperson for moderates in Northern Ireland before key Congressmen who until hearing Hume had evidently had more exposure to IRA views than those of hitherto unknown SDLP. SDLP case, however, proved convincing and further visits to Washington by Catholic leaders like Hume could very well result in recognition of SDLP as legitimate spokesman for Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.11

Hume’s visit resulted in a letter of thanks and encouragement from the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, James Callaghan, on 13 May 1974.

The Collapse of Sunningdale

The Executive’s problems continued to multiply exponentially, primarily because it was built on unstable foundations. The Sunningdale Agreement was technically a Joint Communiqué, intended as a prelude to an international agreement to be registered at the United Nations for full ratification. However, animosity to it from all sides intensified. In the South, Kevin Boland, who led a splinter from the Fianna Fáil party and held extreme nationalist views, challenged Sunningdale’s constitutionality but failed; during his challenge, Southern politicians were prohibited sub judice from defending it. Yet while the Council of Ireland is often cited as the determinative element that finally brought Sunningdale down, there were other factors that weighed heavily in its demise.

The Heath government faced an election in February 1974, and so the UK had to pass a judgement on Sunningdale almost immediately after it came into existence. If the Council of Ireland were to have already been in existence for a year, it might have gained more traction, but Kevin Boland’s constitutional challenge meant that the Irish government was obliged to sell the Agreement merely as a Joint Communiqué (it was in limbo until the Irish judiciary declared on its status). It may have been legally expedient, but it was politically unwise, to undersell the Agreement. When Harold Wilson succeeded Ted Heath as British Prime Minister, neither he nor Merlyn Rees, whom Wilson appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (1974–6), were genuinely committed to the Agreement. Thus when a general strike was called by the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) it posed an existential risk for the Agreement.

The Ulster Workers’ Council Strike

The UWC strike, supported by the wider Unionist community, had the sole objective of sabotaging the Sunningdale Executive. Countering Unionist opposition would have required an enormous feat of courage and dedication by Unionist politicians, and that was lacking. To counter the strike, the British had to deploy the army to man the electric and sewage works as described in Robert Fisk’s book, Point of No Return: The Strike Which Broke the British in Ulster.12 On 23 May 1974, Gerry Fitt urged the British army to deploy men to the power stations; by 27 May, the army was running petrol stations across the North to combat the UWC’s shadow government coup. The British government did not immediately surrender to the mob; it did so after thirteen days. That capitulation was fatal to the prospects of a functioning democratic Assembly in Northern Ireland for another generation. As Seamus Heaney stated in his Nobel Lecture, ‘until the British government caved in to the strong-arm tactics of the Ulster loyalist workers after the Sunningdale Conference in 1974, a well-disposed mind could still hope to make sense of the circumstances … After 1974, however, for the twenty long years between then and the ceasefires of August 1994, such a hope proved impossible’.13

Continuing Republican paramilitary activity throughout the time of the Sunningdale Executive provided Unionists with the argument that any form of diminution of the British administration in Northern Ireland (which they believed was implicit within a full power-sharing arrangement) would result in a state of anarchy. Briefly, both hardline Unionists and Republicans rallied to the same cause, albeit spurred on by opposing political motives. Fear of any encroachment by Dublin on Northern Irish affairs convinced Unionists that negotiations involving the Southern government, of which they were instinctively suspicious, would not serve their interests. So they sabotaged the Sunningdale Agreement and its institutions, which did not sustain their majority prerogatives. The Provisional IRA portrayed the UWC strike, which brought the Sunningdale Executive down, as a fascist victory: an irony of ironies, since the IRA intensified its terror campaign for the same purpose, hastening the collapse of the Executive. Republicans believed that by continuing to destabilise the state they could legitimise their claim that only a United Ireland was a viable resolution. As Brendan O’Leary observes:

[Sunningdale was] rejected by the Unionist community, and they came to the negotiation table in the 90s partly because they believed that things would only get worse for them. It is true that Republicans also rejected the settlement of 1973–74. They had just got rid of the Stormont Parliament, so they believed it would be easy to pursue getting the British out of Ireland completely, which turned out to be a fantasy.

The hue and cry unleashed by Unionist leaders over the Council of Ireland proposal served to cloak the more fundamental point: their unwillingness to concede to any power-sharing arrangement. Brian Faulkner’s admission that the Council of Ireland controversy was a useful diversion says a great deal: ‘Certainly I was convinced all along that the outcry against Council of Ireland was only a useful [author’s emphasis] red herring – the real opposition was to sharing of power.’14 Unionist opposition was bolstered by a small but growing constituency in Dublin that sympathised with the Unionist paranoia of being encircled, and in some cases that support was animated by historical naiveté and an intellectually capricious espousal of ‘liberalism’. In the case of Conor Cruise O’Brien, it was a convenient argument to covertly advance the cause of Unionism in the South, a cause which in later life he openly embraced by running as a UK Unionist candidate in the 1996 Forum Elections.

There was certainly a depressing aspect to the failure of Sunningdale, and as Seamus Deane, responding to the unwillingness of the British Government to face down Unionist resistance in 1974, put it:

The failure of Sunningdale was sinister because it showed that a certain kind of refusal, a certain kind of recalcitrance, was very much political war. It was partly the lack of backbone that [British Prime Minister] Harold Wilson displayed, but it was also a sinister indication that you could be rewarded for bigotry. I’m not really sure if the British government formed a policy in relation to Northern Ireland until about ten years after that, a policy that it felt it could actually pursue without being pulled to the side by its own army or its own officer corps. The Sunningdale Agreement was a very clever agreement, very cleverly designed. What we have been seeing is a version of Sunningdale, and a series of extensions from Sunningdale, actually becoming part of an agreed policy between Dublin and London, which is the crucial thing: the Dublin and London axis. That that has been formed and that that’s well greased.15

The enormous opposition Prime Minister Harold Wilson faced to his predecessor’s Agreement undermined, in his eyes, the case for continued commitment. Merlyn Rees, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, intimated that Wilson was even considering a full British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, including the cutting off of the financial subvention which effectively sustained Northern Ireland, in the hope that that would encourage Unionists to be more conciliatory with Dublin. However, John Hume believed that the Sunningdale provisions – all parties working together across the divide, cross-border political and economic cooperation, including the British and Irish governments – had great validity. Gerry Adams disagreed:

I see a validity. But I see the Sunningdale Agreement as a bad deal. It was not a good deal. It did not get to the root of the problems. We did not get to the root until we got round to the Good Friday Agreement negotiations. Whether it was the Anglo-Irish Agreement, whether it was Sunningdale or the Downing Street Declaration; all of them improved as things went on.

When the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, Seamus Mallon, ever ready with a stinging formulation, stated that it was ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’. How so?

The Good Friday Agreement in my view (and I was one of the people very much involved in creating it) was not as good a deal [for Nationalists] in many ways as the Sunningdale Agreement, which had much stronger North-South structures. The irony of it all is that those who claimed to be defending the Nationalist community in the North of Ireland in 1974 – the IRA and Sinn Féin – were the very same people who bombed the Sunningdale Agreement out of existence.

That campaign, in combination with the withdrawal of support by some Unionists and the British government’s failure to stand up to the striking Loyalist organisations, preventing travel and the delivery of food and other basic services, spelled the end of the Executive. In Seamus Mallon’s opinion:

They buckled. It is the most you can say about it. That opportunity, had it been taken, would have saved many lives. The tragedy was Unionism did not see the opportunity for a revitalisation within their community; Sinn Féin–IRA made the destruction of Sunningdale their priority. How contradictory can you get? The Good Friday Agreement is Sunningdale for slow learners. That is how I described it at the time.

Seán Donlon corroborates: ‘The subsequent agreements, whether the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985, [or] the Good Friday agreement of 1998, are all based on the Sunningdale principles, or the John Hume principles: unite the two communities in Northern Ireland; create North–South structures for cooperation. Essentially what we have today is what was agreed at Sunningdale.’ What effect did the collapse of the Sunningdale Executive – that represented so much of Hume’s thinking – have on him? In Seán Donlon’s opinion: ‘Once the Sunningdale agreement had collapsed, Hume felt that he must now focus on getting support for his position particularly in the United States. So it was after Sunningdale’s collapse that Hume began what I call his American chapter.’

The demise of power-sharing drove Hume to seek the support of the most powerful government in the world, and to bring its influence to bear on Northern Irish politics. Simply put, Hume’s analysis, post-Sunningdale, was that the two communities could not do it on their own; the British government had failed to stand by power-sharing in Northern Ireland and gave in to its traditional allies, the Unionists. The Irish government had proved unable to dissuade the British government from abandoning the Joint Agreement. It was now clear to Hume that bringing the support of the US to bear would help to balance the equation enough for a return to constitutionality and the establishment of a lasting power-sharing arrangement based on Anglo-Irish consensus.

Hume’s US strategy

Building firm and sustained relations on Capitol Hill and, eventually, in the White House was without precedent in Irish-American relations. Senator Ted Kennedy was later to remark:

It was rather interesting why the leaders of Ireland had not [engaged America meaningfully on policy matters]. De Valera was certainly alive when my brother visited Ireland but there was no real kind of a play towards involving, interesting, and engaging … I don’t think there’s any question that the dramatic shift and change are really attributed to Hume and the confluence of events that took place at this time.16

In a speech entitled ‘Ireland in the Atlantic Community’, Hume stated: ‘The great tides of Irish emigration began to flow to America in the 19th century … The Irish in America tried without success to interest the Washington administration in the Irish question.’17 Hume fully understood that by focusing on Washington and not on grassroots Irish-American organisations that he was breaking with the precedent of Irish leaders. Partly due to a lack of focus on federal power, but in large part due to vigorous resistance by the British to Irish involvement in political Washington, the Irish in America were contained. As former Irish diplomat Michael Lillis argued: