Sunningdale

Noel Dorr

Description

In this book a former Irish diplomat looks at British-Irish relations in the years leading up to Sunningdale, at the Conference itself and at some of the reasons why this initiative, born in hope, did not succeed. The book includes the author's own contemporaneous notes of the negotiations, which have not previously been published.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Irlanda del Norte
• Military history
• Memoir
• Ireland
• Northern Ireland
• Stephen Ireland
• Irlande du Nord

Informations

• Publié par: Royal Irish Academy
• Date de parution: 17 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908997661
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNNINGDALE
The Search For Peace In Northern Ireland
N OEL D ORR
Sunningdale: the search for peace in Northern Ireland
First published 2017
Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2 www.ria.ie
Text 2017 Noel Dorr
ISBN 978-1-908997-64-7 (Hardback) ISBN 978-1-908997-65-4 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-908997-66-1 (epub) ISBN 978-1-908997-67-8 (mobi)
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Editor: Maggie Armstrong Typesetter: Datapage International Ltd Indexer: Brendan O Brien Project manager: Helena King
Printed by CPI
Contents
Introduction
1 History and its consequences
2 An internal situation
3 Briefing the media
4 Jack Lynch, 1969-70
5 Summit at Chequers, 1971
6 Chequers II
7 Bloody Sunday
8 Direct rule
9 How policy is formed
10 The Green Paper
11 A Council of Ireland?
12 The White Paper
13 The new Irish government responds
14 Deciding on proposals
15 Summer and Autumn 1973
16 Arrangements for the conference
17 The Sunningdale conference
18 The Sunningdale Communiqu
19 How Sunningdale was received
20 The end of the Agreement
21 Conclusion: Slow learners?
Appendix I: The agreed Communiqu
Appendix II: The Sunningdale conference
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Introduction
In 1970 I was a middle-level diplomat in the Irish embassy in Washington D.C., where I had served for nearly six years-a good deal longer than the usual posting in our foreign service.
Without telling my embassy colleagues, and without taking-I hope-from my work in the embassy, I had managed to pursue courses in Georgetown University simultaneously with my life as a diplomat. This was made somewhat easier by the fact that lectures in the graduate school normally took place in the evenings.
In late June of that year, my double life came to an abrupt halt. The ambassador passed me a letter from the Administration Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin. I was to be transferred home and to report for duty in Dublin with immediate effect . What exactly did this mean, I asked? Since it was many years since this ambassador had served at home he was inclined to take instructions from that distant authority rather more literally than one more closely acquainted with its vagaries might have done. Immediate he said, reflectively. I think that must mean immediate .
In retrospect now, I can see that it was probably time for me to come home although I did not take it well at the time. One of the hazards of diplomatic life is that of going native after a long time in a particular post. It was beginning to happen to me. In May 1970, a month before my transfer to Dublin, a colleague in the Irish consulate general in New York in the course of a phone call asked my views on the current political crisis . We had spoken for half a minute before I realised that we were at cross-purposes: I was talking in American terms-about the events at Kent State University in Ohio where on 4 May the National Guard had shot dead four unarmed students who were part of a group protesting against the Vietnam War and the bombing of Cambodia; he had meant the Arms Crisis at home, which led the taoiseach, Jack Lynch, to sack two ministers in his government who were accused of the illegal importation of arms destined for Northern Ireland. 1
I did in the end allow myself some leeway in regard to timing- but only a little. One Monday morning in early July, just two weeks after I had received the letter, I reported for work at Iveagh House in Dublin.
The situation in Northern Ireland was deteriorating seriously at the time. In June there had been rioting in Belfast and Derry and five men had been shot dead. On 3 July more were killed and a 34-hour curfew was imposed on the whole of the Lower Falls. Jack Lynch s government in Dublin was trying to cope with the aftermath of the so-called Arms Crisis, and the Department of Foreign Affairs was not at that stage well organised to play the part it began to play later in regard to Northern Ireland. So it was reasonable to think that, although I was still relatively junior, the reason I had been recalled at such short notice was that an extra hand was needed in one or other section of the department at a difficult time.
If that was so there was no great evidence of it on those first days after my return. My initial impression was that the system did not quite know where to put me. In due course I was assigned to the Press and Information section where I had responsibility for handling visiting journalists. Northern Ireland had now become a subject of wide international interest and the London-based correspondents of many foreign news media had begun to travel there, and then on to Dublin, in order to cover the story. My job was to ensure that they were briefed on the Irish government s view and to set up a series of appointments-with ministers, opposition spokespersons, academics, Irish journalists and so on. This gradually developed into writing a ministerial speech from time to time and, later, on occasion, some input into policy issues.
During the initial months after my return I was far from content. Apart from the obvious difficulties of adjusting to life in Ireland after eight years abroad, my thoughts were still very much on the student half of my life in Washington. I had a small amount of money saved-though not enough. But if I took my courage in my hands, I thought privately, perhaps I could find some way of giving up my post in Foreign Affairs and returning to Georgetown to finish my studies. After that, who knows?
The dream of taking that other road did not fade easily. But as the weeks and months went on the situation in Northern Ireland became steadily worse. I was more and more drawn to think that none of us on the island of Ireland could escape some kind of moral responsibility for a conflict that was beginning to consume the north and spill over into the south. So I too, as an official in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin, was in some way involved. A pretentious idea, one might say, for someone who occupied quite a modest position at the time, but it carried me through the early months of disillusion which followed my precipitate recall home.
I did not know it then but the same thought was to stay with me through much of the rest of my career. Sometimes I had quite different responsibilities in other areas of the Irish foreign service. Nevertheless, I seemed to be drawn back, in various ways, and at different times over the next 25 years, to some degree of involvement as an official in the efforts by successive taoisigh and ministers in Dublin to respond to the conflict in Northern Ireland. This extended over quite a lengthy period-from 1970 when London tended to dismiss Dublin s views as those of an outsider, through the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, to the mid-1990s when the British and Irish governments, notwithstanding some disagreements and tensions, were working closely together to steer the peace process . It covered the terms of office of six taoisigh-Jack Lynch, Liam Cosgrave, Charles Haughey, Garret FitzGerald, Albert Reynolds and John Bruton-and eight ministers for foreign affairs. Of these only the late Garret FitzGerald has written at length about the events of his time in office.
I retired from the foreign service in 1995, just three years before the historic Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
A landmark in the early period was the Sunningdale conference of December 1973-the first joint initiative in relation to Northern Ireland by the British and Irish governments, working with those democratically-elected parties in Northern Ireland willing to participate. In the short-run it did not succeed. But I have always been intrigued by the acerbic comment of Seamus Mallon, one of the most active and important political figures over this whole period: the 1998 Agreement, he said, was Sunningdale for slow learners . By implication that was an accusation addressed to all those who helped to bring down the Sunningdale settlement, and in particular perhaps to supporters of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn F in, the two main parties who share power in the executive. If they had been less politically intransigent, and if those who were engaged in violence had been prepared to end it at that time, could everything that was agreed in 1998 have been achieved 25 years earlier at far less cost in human suffering? A haunting question indeed. In the nature of things we have to accept that there can be no definitive answer. But I do think that Sunningdale was important. Although it did not succeed in its immediate objective, I believe that it marked an important turning point in the approach of both the British and the Irish governments to the problem of Northern Ireland. Furthermore, ideas and concepts that were developed around the time of Sunningdale-on issues such as power-sharing and north-south relations-remained relevant and some were drawn on as building blocks in the settlement achieved eventually in Northern Ireland some 25 years later.
In this book I want to look back at the Sunningdale conference and its outcome, at the short life of the new political institutions, and at some of the reasons why this initiative, born in hope, did not succeed. My main focus will be on how the policies of the Irish government-or rather, two successive Irish governments-in relation to Northern Ireland evolved over the years 1969 to early 1974. However, I want to look also at what I see as a significant change in the attitude of the Bri