A Journey (32 page)

We whittled it down to two issues – one real, the other surreal – but by now the border between the two was becoming harder to discern. The surreal issue was the Unionist desire to close down somewhere called Maryfield. At first there was confusion, since we thought that the Unionists were saying ‘Murrayfield’ had to close, and even I winced at the prospect of demolishing the Edinburgh home of Scottish rugby that I had visited often as a teenager. But it was a measure of our now complete isolation in the negotiating cell that I neither asked why Unionism might want to erase a rugby pitch, nor was unprepared to do it.

After a few minutes, we elicited to my relief that Maryfield was in fact the name of the secretariat established under Mrs Thatcher’s hated Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s. The secretariat basically did nothing, and in any event would be superseded by our agreement. Maryfield was just an office, so the whole business was entirely symbolic. Then it transpired they didn’t simply want the secretariat shut – that would happen anyway – they wanted the physical building closed. ‘Fine, we’ll use it for something else,’ I said.

‘No,’ they said, ‘we want Maryfield shut. Closed. No longer in use. For anything.’

It was as if the building had become a political manifestation of the dispute, which I suppose in a sense it had. By now, I didn’t care. I would have taken a crane and concrete block round and demolished it myself if it meant they signed up.

The Northern Ireland Office cavilled. ‘Why do they need it closed? Can’t we use it for filing?’

‘Guys,’ I said, ‘please don’t ask why. From now on Maryfield is a thing of the past. It’s over. Part of history. Raze it to the ground.’ I never did find out what happened to it. Probably everyone forgot about it.

The serious issue was one in which I had a lot of sympathy for David. He and Unionism as a whole were worried that if the Republican movement reneged, if they failed to decommission, how would they be excluded from government? Of course, the Unionists could walk out; but, reasonably enough, they felt it shouldn’t be them that would have to bring the thing down.

For Sinn Fein, any talk of exclusion was anathema. They had point-blank refused such a suggestion earlier. Reopen it now and we would lose the whole show. I explained to David. He went away crestfallen and his delegation walked into a closed session.

I sat and reflected with Jonathan. We were within inches, but I could tell it was not going to work. David couldn’t swing it. Heaven knows what would be going on in that delegation room, but if it were positive, my Great-Aunt Lizzie was a philanthropist. ‘We’ve got to do something,’ I said. I was pacing the room. I had a thought. ‘Let’s write him a letter, a side letter.’ The letter guaranteed that if within the first six months of the Assembly, Sinn Fein didn’t deliver on decommissioning, we would support changing the provisions within the agreement to allow exclusion. It was very typical of the intricate nuance of the negotiation: we didn’t say we
would
exclude, we said we would support changing the agreement so as to exclude.

We drafted at speed, Jonathan at his laptop, me dictating, and both Jonathan and John Steele offering comments. I signed it, and sent Jonathan racing down to the delegation room. At first he couldn’t get in. Eventually, like the message from the governor halting the execution just before they turn the switch on, he brought it into the packed session. John Taylor, David Trimble’s other deputy who by turns could be incredibly helpful or incredibly unhelpful, read it, looked up and said, ‘That’s fine by me.’

I sat in trepidation and anxiety for a further hour (not least because I’m afraid I had told none of the other parties about the side letter) while each member of the delegation gave their views. David called up to my room. ‘We’re going to run with this.’

We had a deal.

The next hours passed in a blur. We were beyond exhaustion, light-headed almost. George Mitchell announced the agreement. Bertie and I gave statements. There was general euphoria. At long last I was released from the hellhole Castle Buildings had become.

I had lost all sense of time. As I got into the car to drive away and the close protection team said we would be at the airport in twenty minutes, I realised with a start that I was off to Spain. Like all of us, I had thought this would be a quick negotiation and had booked a visit to Spain, taking up the invitation of the Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, whom I only knew slightly at that time, for me and my family to come and spend some days with him. I knew he was a tough negotiator and a strong, successful party leader, but little else. We were from different political families, he being leader of the Partido Popular, the Spanish Conservative Party, and I thought it worthwhile to get to know him. I knew about his toughness because we had been together at the Amsterdam Treaty negotiation at the end of May 1997, just weeks after I had come to power and a year into his first term.

In Amsterdam I had had all sorts of complicating demands, some correct, some hangovers from the previous government, and I was negotiating hard. It was my first international deal and I didn’t want to mess up. José María had one major sticking point: he needed the treaty to reflect Spain’s special position as the recipient of European support and as a ‘big’ country along with other ‘bigs’, not a ‘small’. This was a real problem for the other ‘bigs’, notably the Germans led by Helmut Kohl.

The Dutch tried the old tactic, with German encouragement, of leaving the Spanish demands till last. The idea was that you settled everyone else and then put the thumbscrews on the remaining recalcitrant, who got bullied or shamed into submission. ‘Europe needs you. How can you disturb Europe’s stability at a moment like this? Have you no sense of history? Do you want to be responsible for a European failure?’ etc. A load of old nonsense, but effective in a large number of cases.

But not with Aznar. They waited until everyone had settled, including me, and then offered him a compromise, not a bad one but not a good one. He said, no, I told you my terms. Ah, yes, but we need to know your bottom line, they said. That is my bottom line, he replied. He then said: I’m going into the next room to smoke a cigar. Which he promptly did.

They tried everything. Wim Kok went in and made his disapproval clear in a mildly Dutch Protestant way. Jacques Chirac tried to lord it over him in a very French way. Helmut Kohl finally rose to his feet and carried his considerable weight into the next room, looking like a juggernaut in search of a hedgehog. He came back mystified. The hedgehog had inexplicably refused to be squashed. Kohl turned to me. ‘You’re new like him,’ he barked. ‘You go and try.’

I went into where José María was sitting, just him, his interpreter and his cigar, on which he was puffing away as if he hadn’t a care in the world. We dispensed with the interpreter and spoke French. I gave him a spiel about how important it was, how this negotiation hung in the balance, how only he could save the day, and ended by saying how truly disappointed everyone would be, especially Helmut, if he didn’t compromise. ‘I know. I am so sad,’ he said with an enormous grin. ‘Can you give them a message from me? Tell them I said on what terms this treaty was acceptable to Spain and I said it at the beginning. And until now, they never asked me again. But if they had, I would have told them those were the terms acceptable to Spain. And look,’ he said, pulling something out of his pocket, ‘I have so many more cigars to smoke.’ He got his terms.

The family and I had been due to pass a few days before Easter with him. Such was my confidence on the Ireland negotiations – crazy, I know – that I decided to send Cherie, the kids and my mother-in-law on ahead, telling them I would join them shortly.

Now this was a real mark of Aznar. They arrived on the Wednesday, forty-eight hours before me, during which time he hosted them all with enormous kindness and effusive goodwill. I think I and most leaders would have been a tiny bit disconcerted having to entertain the family of another leader, and moreover a family they’d never met, with young kids to boot; but he took it all with perfect equanimity and it formed the basis of a lasting personal friendship that had important consequences at a later date.

At Belfast’s RAF Aldergrove I somehow got on to the plane, and took a call from the Queen to congratulate me. I think until then I really hadn’t understood the enormity of the achievement. I thought, I bet she doesn’t do this often, and indeed she doesn’t. I then fell asleep for the whole journey.

It was the early hours of the morning when I finally crept into bed beside Cherie, who woke and also congratulated me. I slept again until mid-morning. When I got up I went in search of my host, only to find him somewhat alarmingly closeted with my mother-in-law. ‘Oh, you needn’t have bothered turning up,’ she said, ‘we’ve sorted everything.’

‘Sorted what?’ I said.

‘Gibraltar of course,’ she said.

Well, she would have done as good a job as anyone.

After a couple of days with the Aznars we went to spend some time with Derry’s friends Karin and Paco Peña – the flamenco guitarist – in Córdoba. I completely fell in love with Córdoba, a beautiful place. The Mezquita was the highlight, but the whole city was enchanting. Paco had a delightful old home in the centre of town with a traditional courtyard and, perhaps less traditionally, a barrel of sherry at the top of the stairs to the balcony, to slake the thirst of any passing guest. It was a week of wonderful relaxation. Paco taught me some classical guitar, we visited tapas bars and sherry vaults and generally passed an agreeable time.

The impact of the Good Friday Agreement, as it was already being called (except by Unionists who insisted in calling it the Belfast Agreement), reverberated around the world. I was constantly stopped and congratulated, and it was one of the few times in the job I can honestly say I felt content, fulfilled and proud. There weren’t many more!

Back home, reality swiftly took hold. The thing is, the Good Friday Agreement was a supreme achievement – without it, nothing else could have been done – but it wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. It was a predictor of the course that the peace process should take if all went well. The implementation then had to begin; and whereas the agreement could be described as art – at least in concept – the implementation was more akin to heavy manufacturing.

The first challenge was to have a referendum North and South endorsing the agreement and then an election in the Assembly so as to begin the procedure for getting a working Executive. The Northern Irish were, to be fair, hugely supportive of the agreement – at least as an idea. However, they didn’t know the detail, and in the euphoria of the moment certainly hadn’t contemplated the true ramifications. Very soon, they started to.

In a typical twist, the agreement was formally agreed to by the UUP, but never by Sinn Fein. The UUP might therefore have been expected to be the more upbeat, but no: as soon as the agreement was signed (fortunately David Trimble quickly got his party executive to endorse it), Unionist tremors, never far below the surface, broke out. Such doubts were magnified by the political equivalent of the Hubble telescope by what happened next.

The deal on prisoners included the power in the United Kingdom government to transfer IRA prisoners to the South. Rather unwisely, Mo decided to transfer from England to Ireland the ‘Balcombe Street Four’, members of the notorious gang which had carried out assassinations and terror attacks for the IRA in the 1970s. Then the Irish government, having taken receipt of the prisoners, released them on parole to attend Sinn Fein’s Dublin Conference without telling us. The prisoners received a ten-minute ovation on prime-time telly while Unionists looked on in utter horror.

It is true to say that that decision very nearly wrecked the train as it was leaving the station. It certainly put it on one rail for the duration of the referendum campaign and subsequent election to the Assembly, all of which had to happen within roughly ten weeks of the Good Friday Agreement being signed.

John Major and I visited to calm things. Then I went with William Hague. I wrote out pledges in my own hand, promising no seat in government for those of violence and other such things. Bill Clinton issued a statement of support from the G8 in Birmingham, which I was also chairing.

It was an anxious time. We got a majority of Unionists to back the agreement in the referendum (55 per cent to 45 per cent). David won the Assembly election over the DUP, and the SDLP were the second biggest party. But we had learned a lesson: there was still a long way to go. Although we had the map, we were miles from journey’s end.

It took us another nine years to put it all together in a final working solution. Each of those years was fraught, and many times we were close to admitting failure. Deadlines were missed and negotiations over minutiae took months, but we kept going.

There was never again a negotiation as comprehensive as at Castle Buildings, but there was a constant stream of meetings over one, two or three days, which we usually tried to hold in a nice place. Looking back, it reads like a roll call of stately homes: Hillsborough, Weston Park, Leeds Castle, St Andrews. The parties always feigned reluctance to be taken out of their natural habitat in order to have the discussions to move the process forward, but I had a hunch they were probably like me: if you were going to have a hellish time arguing back and forth, you might as well do it in a pretty environment. It also served to free people up, in some strange way – if we had had the meetings in the middle of Belfast or in Downing Street, people would cling to cherished positions, but somehow a new setting produced a new attitude. Or at least sometimes it did. Anyway, that was my justification for the partnership between the Northern Ireland peace process and something from the pages of
Country Life
.