Northern Ireland Committee
Oral evidence: The effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, HC 781
Wednesday 1 March 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 1 March 2023.
Members present: Simon Hoare (Chair); Sir Robert Buckland; Stephen Farry; Sir Robert Goodwill; Claire Hanna; Jim Shannon; Bob Stewart; Mr Robin Walker.
Questions 63-90
Witnesses
I: Lord Bew and Tim O'Connor, former diplomat of the Republic of Ireland.
Witnesses: Lord Bew and Tim O'Connor.
Chair: Good afternoon, colleagues, and welcome to another session on our inquiry into the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. We have two panels this afternoon; we are indulging ourselves on this St David’s Day. Pausing there, I wish a very happy St David’s Day to my fellow Welsh member of the Committee, and to anybody else who has an interest in Wales or is lucky enough to have Welsh blood anywhere near their veins.
On a more sombre note, on behalf of the Committee, I send all our thoughts, prayers and good wishes to John Caldwell and his friends and family, after that inexcusable and unspeakable event last week. We all say it, but it is worthwhile rehearsing. It was always a tragedy when the men of violence deployed their tactics. There is absolutely no excuse to do so in 2023. We wish him well, and we hope that the investigating officers of the PSNI and others very quickly bring the perpetrators to justice.
If we can celebrate anything at all, let us celebrate and mark the fact that all the party leaders, together with the Chief Constable, were able to gather last week and come out with a joint condemnation. At least that points in the direction that we are all facing the same way, and it is only the luddites and lunatics who want to disrupt and destroy.
Jim Shannon: It sends a strong message.
Q63 Chair: Thank you, Jim.
We are delighted to welcome Lord Bew and Tim O’Connor this afternoon. Their collective memory, thoughts and wisdom on this could probably take us through to at least the “Shipping Forecast”, but we will try to keep to about an hour for each panel. I am conscious of time.
Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. I will kick off, if I may. The Belfast/Good Friday agreement is rightly regarded as a significant achievement, both in ending much of the violence of the Troubles and in establishing a devolved Government, based on consensus, in Northern Ireland. Bearing in mind that at the time we referred to a peace “process”— the foundation stone of which was the Good Friday agreement—do you think that over time, the evolutionary, iterative notion of a process has been slightly neglected? Has the agreement itself been cast into tablets of stone—almost with the totemic, unchangeable status of Moses’s tablets of stone from a slightly earlier era?
Tim O'Connor: First of all, I thank you for the invitation. It is a great honour to be here with you and your colleagues. I echo your very eloquent words about the terrible act last week, and I send our best wishes to Detective Chief Inspector Caldwell and his family. You are not starting with an easy question, Chair; that is a challenging question.
Chair: They get harder, don’t worry.
Tim O'Connor: I was an Irish Government official, as you know. I joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1979. I started working directly on Northern Ireland in 1986, and I have been involved more or less ever since. The old phrase is “context is everything”. We need to remind ourselves that by the autumn of 1997 when the negotiations were starting, we were coming off almost 30 years with 3,700 deaths. Lord Bew will be speaking eloquently about all this as well. I just did a little bit of maths to compare what that would be in terms of the population of Britain. That would be the equivalent of about 130,000 killings in Britain. Just think of the scale of that in a small geography.
You ask about the process. I suppose what we had in the 30 years starting with Sunningdale in ’73-74 were process attempts. Sunningdale was a brave attempt, but ultimately it failed. A decade and a bit later, we had the Anglo-Irish agreement, which was a different kind of agreement. It obviously didn’t involve the parties and the two Governments. The big deficit of the Anglo-Irish agreement was that there was no involvement by the parties, so it was very clear that the next stage had to bring the parties together.
The other significant shift—I would be interested in Paul’s view on this—is that up to the early ’90s, the strategy of the two Governments had been to work with the constitutional parties: you work, effectively, with the centre, and you do not involve in any way parties associated with the conflict directly. That changed, and Claire’s party, with John Hume, was very heavily involved towards the late ’80s and early ’90s in changing that.
The process expanded in the early ’90s, by the time the ceasefire came around. The big difference with the Good Friday process, if I can call it that, versus previous ones, is that it was comprehensive, in terms of the issues on the table, and inclusive, broadly speaking, in terms of the parties around the table. Obviously, Mr Shannon will know that not every party was around the table, but most parties were. What you have is the evolution of process, and a bringing in of wider parties. We just about managed to get the agreement over the line. It was very, very challenging—we can talk about that.
Q64 Chair: That is important to remember. There was no inevitability about it.
Tim O'Connor: Precisely. That is a very important point. What was the mood 25 years ago—Paul was there too—in February/March ’98? The answer is that things were extremely tense and intense. Claire and Stephen will remember that there was a famous Belfast Telegraph poll maybe 10 days before in which people were asked whether they expected the talks to succeed, and over 90% said they didn’t, so there was no expectation of success.
The fact that there was agreement after all that is partly why it took on this totemic quality. You finally had something where you had more or less got just about everybody signed up. The fundamental basis of the agreement was obviously an accommodation between the two main traditions. Obviously, we have got now a more diverse Northern Ireland today, and of course Alliance was part of it at the time as well. That would be the main piece that I would say.
Q65 Chair: Thank you for that. It was almost, “Phew! We’ve got this over the line. Everybody has signed up. Right, don’t touch it because it might break.” Recent polling—numbers change and, as we know, polls are only a snapshot in time—indicates that there is a very clear, compelling majority of people in Northern Ireland, irrespective of which tradition they associate themselves with, who would vote in support of a Belfast/Good Friday agreement. Given the fact that 25 years have elapsed, do you think there should be more acceptance of fluidity, evolution and the ability to reflect changes in Northern Irish society? Sir Robert will talk about that later.
Tim O'Connor: Very briefly—I am interested in Paul’s view as well—I will say two things. First, my old friend Seamus Mallon, a great Member of this House who sadly passed, had a great phrase from that time: it is for each generation to write its own history. The need to be able to evolve is certainly there, and of course it was built into the agreement. An important part of the design of the agreement was the review clause.
People ask me, “Looking back, would you have anything differently?” The biggest thing I say is that I think we perhaps underestimated the challenges of implementation when we finally got it over the line. Then, of course, we had the referendum immediately after that, and then there was a period of another 15 or 16 months of stalemate and impasse before we got the institutions up and running. Once December ’99 came, the institutions were up and running and I personally was sent to Armagh to be the first secretary of the North South Ministerial Council. My job then was just looking after north-south relations—everyone scattered to their own pieces—but we did not actually understand that, in many ways, implementation is actually continued negotiation.
We have the review clause; we did build in the capacity to be able to review and, as I said, you can combine that with Seamus Mallon’s dictum. On the other hand, the one caveat is that the essence of the Good Friday agreement is how it deals with the totality of issues on the basis of accommodation. If you start to pull at threads, that is the big fear. That is the delicate design challenge. There is a rationale to what you are saying, but how do you do that without losing the essence of what was so hard won?
Q66 Chair: There is nothing we can do about history. Let me ask you to just give a moment’s though on this. If—the underestimating word of the afternoon—the great flare-up in the middle east had not occurred shortly thereafter, which then obviously took up a huge amount of the Blair Government’s bandwidth, do you think there would have been more review and more evolution at an early stage to get that embedded as part of the process?
Tim O'Connor: I think we have to cut ourselves a bit of slack because, as you said, we had no experience of success. We had no experience of what success looks like in agreement terms. I think we were all feeling our way. There was also the rationale, “Let the parties get on with it now—power sharing has been established.” I am an old Government guy and there was a case of, “Governments step back now.” That was a reasonable rationale as well. There is a fine line on over-interference by Governments—once you have set up power sharing, let it be. These were delicate trade-offs. What do you think about that, Paul?
Lord Bew: You are absolutely right. Everything Tim has said, I recognise as being substantive. I do have a view that you were never going to get a situation where the then Prime Minister Blair was spending 40% of his time in the first two or three years on Northern Ireland. Things change. But even up to the end of his premiership, there was a lot of engagement; there was the whole business of putting together a new deal between the DUP and Sinn Féin because the previous deal, principally between the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP, structurally still reflects their thinking.
I remember, prior to the agreement itself, there was a framework document. I remember talking to Sir John Chilcot, with whom I was very friendly. Everyone would say, “This is far too complex a document and it can’t bring good governance”, and he laughed and said, “That is not the point. The point is to bring peace.” Actually, that is the reason. Against myself, I would say that, towards the end of his life, Sir John was saying to me, “Well, it is time we aimed for a bit more than peace. We want some good governance.” I have to say, I would still give the same answer as regards these structures. The point is peace.
There is no possibility, by the way, of changing the thing that causes the most gridlock, which is cross-community veto, because it is not just a question of what the DUP thinks—Sinn Féin will never agree. It is wonderful that lots of people I respect enormously have written in favour of saying, “Because of the frustrations of the last few years, we need to be looking at this a bit and changing this”, but there is actually just no possibility. That is important—it is a tedious but real fact. It is not just because of the DUP.
I also think, at this moment, it is unfortunate that people are going on about it, because when Sinn Féin brought down the Assembly people did not go on about it to the same degree as they are now that the DUP has done it. When they say, “Hello? You didn’t worry so much about this or talk about changing the rules when Sinn Féin brought it down,” they are actually being entirely accurate, and the DUP has a clearcut point in that respect.
The other reason why it is not helpful is that we are now at a moment where there is at least a reasonable, and certainly a renewed, chance of the return of the Assembly and of getting it to work again. To be absolutely honest, it is not just about peace; community psychotherapy is the point. I don’t want to be too brutal, but I never really believed that devolution anywhere was about better governance. There are political, psychological and communal reasons why you have to do it throughout the rest of the United Kingdom. It is very hard to point to results in education, health, anywhere, that are superior to what was previously existent under an old style of Westminster government. I do regard it as a political necessity that exists for political reasons and, in the case of Northern Ireland, the need for equality of esteem between the two communities, so I believe that anything else would be worse. But on the idea in principle that devolution leads to wiser or better decisions, not even just in Northern Ireland, I have never expected good governance as such, particularly.
While I do think having the sight of the two leaders and the two communities working together is a top-down exercise in helping to reduce sectarianism—it hasn’t cured it, but the form of governance definitely reduces it—I have never believed or expected that suddenly creatures of the stature of Churchill and Attlee are going to appear in Stormont. I just never thought that was ever likely to happen, and I do not think it ever will happen. But you could have a decent agreed form of government in which people meet and discuss their differences, and we have done it. To be fair to the DUP, as well as David Trimble’s original achievement, we have done it for many years in Northern Ireland and we can do it again. It can be stable, and Northern Ireland needs stability. The watchwords are peace and stability—that is how I see it. I do not believe in significant change of the structures of the Good Friday agreement.
Q67 Chair: Would you add as the third magic ingredient—apart from peace and stability, without wishing to denigrate either—prosperity?
Lord Bew: Yes.
Q68 Chair: Because prosperity flows from peace and stability. If people feel better, if their pocketbook is feeling a bit fuller, if their quality of life is going up and if their life expectancy is improving, there is a far more personable investment in securing the retention of the keys that unlocked access to stability, prosperity and peace.
Lord Bew: I agree absolutely. Quite simply, the promise of this moment, which I think is real enough, is not just that you have the possibility of a more stable Northern Ireland that actually works, but how it relates to investment opportunity or people’s attitude outside to investment opportunities. Clearly, there is very considerable promise in this moment. It may yet fail. It may yet be blighted, but I agree absolutely with the point. But, again, that is not a matter of structures of the Assembly. What matters is you have ongoing power sharing and stability and people looking in from outside can see this might be a place to invest.
Tim O'Connor: Can I just add something, Chair, on this very important discussion you are having and your own point about prosperity? Speaking as a southerner, the past 25, 30 years have also coincided with the most prosperous period in the history of our state. But I immediately remove the word “coincidence”—it is not a coincidence; the two are inextricably linked. You are making an important point there, building on peace and stability. In fact, our main business confederation Ibec has just launched a new campaign that directly underlines the connectivity between the two called “For Peace + Prosperity”, so it is expressly talking about the interlinkage of the two. I fully agree with Paul on peace and stability. We need to be careful to not underestimate this, because the change from the previous 30 years to the past 30 years could not be second-guessed.
Chair: We have spent 17 minutes on question one, and I know about our time constraints. I now turn to Bob Stewart.
Q69 Bob Stewart: My question is quite a quick one. I presume you both agree that the d’Hondt method of government—the Jefferson method of designing who the Ministers and Committee Chairs are, and so on—is a good thing and has worked. If that is the case, and you both nod, then my question is over.
Lord Bew: I am of that view. Famously, d’Hondt is the answer to the pub quiz question, “Name me a famous Belgian.”
Bob Stewart: Something did come out of that country.
Lord Bew: We both accept the method. With chairmanships and so on, Stephen Farry knows a lot more about how these things worked out in Stormont than almost anybody else living. But actually, these things worked out reasonably fairly in Stormont.
Chair: Stephen was an adviser to Edward Carson at one point, I think.
Q70 Bob Stewart: So we can speed up really, because both of you are in agreement that the answer is yes, and therefore my question is over. We are on to question three.
Tim O'Connor: I do not know if colleagues were there, but there was a drama about it on the first day—I think it was 29 November 1999—when d’Hondt was run for the first time. The way is works is that the Speaker calls first on the party leader, based on their number of votes. They have 15 minutes to respond and say, first of all, what Ministry they are taking and who is going to be assigned to that Ministry. So nobody knows, as it goes on, what pick number five will be, for example.
Q71 Bob Stewart: It is all fractional, isn’t it?
Tim O'Connor: Yes, exactly.
Bob Stewart: You can understand that.
Tim O'Connor: We knew on that occasion, for instance, the UUP were going to have the first pick, the SDLP would have the second, Sinn Féin the third and the DUP the fourth. There was a power and a drama about it.
Bob Stewart: So Stephen is a bit fractional as well, is he?
Chair: So it is the political equivalent of a hybrid of “Love Island” and “Naked Attraction”?
Stephen Farry: There was one year when it was done behind closed doors and worked out in advance. There was a script all laid out, and it all went like clockwork.
Claire Hanna: I wonder if the script has changed?
Q72 Chair: Going back to your point, Lord Bew, clearly the imperative is that both sides—if one can use that phrase—have parity of esteem as represented by ministerial office, and so on and so forth, but in 25 years, the society, the linkages and the associations of Northern Ireland have evolved and changed. Do we bake in, or hardwire, the sense of them and us?
Lord Bew: For a long time in my life, particularly in the 80s, I did not believe in them and us. That was the reality I wanted to recognise. I remember being very upset when the external chairman for the department I was in, Sir Bernard Crick, wrote an article saying Northern Ireland faces both ways. My obsession at the time was how working people should come together and transcend these differences. It is not happening; it will not happen. We need to manage the fact that there are these two predominant identities—and there still are, despite the increase in the Alliance vote.
The advantage of equality of esteem is not just the occupation of First Minister and Deputy First Minister; it is the responsibility it imposes on the sovereign Government in the international agreement. The sovereign Government have to work at it, when local circumstances don’t work. There are no simple answers, but they have to try.
For example, recently in this Parliament we passed Irish language legislation to deal with—to use a phrase from article 1, paragraph (v)—the aspirations of the nationalist community. That was passed here. Equally now, the Windsor framework respects the British Government’s work, and says that there was clearly alienation in the Unionist community with respect to the way the protocol was working, but we have now carried out a labour of work to try to redress that. I agree that there is a part the formulations around equality of esteem that are encasing the sectarian dimension, and for a long time I found it very hard to live with, but in real terms it is actually the best thing to do. Not only has it allowed dealing with the Irish language for the nationalist community—it is effectively the nationalist community that is most concerned about the Irish language and respect for it—but it is the rationale for the United Kingdom Government to say, “We can’t leave the Unionist community in this alienated condition in which it believes its identity is flouted.”
That is why so much work has gone in, for example, to the White Paper here, as well as the actual text of the agreement. An awful lot of work has gone in, and it is on the basis of saying, “We have a responsibility under the Good Friday agreement to do this.” The Bill was originally defended by the Government on those terms. There is now no real basis for the Bill, because quite a large chunk of it has actually been acted on. None the less, there is a labour of work carried on that is based on the fundamental principle of equality of esteem and what it means.
People talk about how it is a joint agreement. Actually, the UK Government has far greater responsibility. It is a joint agreement between the British and Irish Governments—it is an international agreement—but the sovereign Government has the weight of responsibility, which the Irish Government doesn’t have, to deal with that particular aspect of reality, and it has really, really tried, as anybody can see from the text of the Windsor framework.
Tim O'Connor: I totally agree. Lord Bew is touching on a fundamental point. The focus of your inquiry is correctly on the institutions, but the institutions are based on the foundation platform, which is article 1, which enshrines these principles of partnership, equality and mutual respect. Article 1—I am a bit of a nerd—doesn’t get the attention that it deserves, which is—
Lord Bew: We both agree.
Tim O'Connor: We both agree. You don’t hear too many people talking about article 1(v), but it gladdens my heart to hear Paul say that. Article 1 has six parts; you can think of them as six parts of a jigsaw, all of which together constitute the new constitutional understandings, and they are fundamental to the way forward. Article 1(v) is “rigorous impartiality” on both sides and obviously now, with all communities coming in, you know, there is a new diversity in Northern Ireland. I totally echo the fundamental importance of article 1 as the foundation stone of everything that we are talking about.
Lord Bew: And as I have just said, it is the basis for the very difficult, complex, serious work of the UK Government and the moves they have made over the last year or 18 months. They have been acting in response to their responsibilities under that agreement, as they have stated a number of times. However, what we mean by equality of esteem is complicated. I don’t think there is any reason to argue that on the one hand you must respond to the alienation of a community, which they have tried to do in the case of the Unionist community in recent times, but there is no point in replacing it with the alienation of another community. Therefore, to say, “We’re going to have a hard border on the island of Ireland,” or, “There won’t be special access to the single market,” would not be in the spirit of article 1 either. Flouting and treating with contempt, as so many people have done over the last year, the wishes of the Unionist community is not defensible under article 1.
To take the argument further, this is why we have reached a terminus with this document. It cannot be taken further. The British Government has gone as far as it can reasonably be expected to go—or as far as it is possible to go—to address Unionist concerns. The idea that you can say, “No, we’ll just carry on; this hasn’t happened”—no. The point is that it cannot go further. Prime Minister Johnson said it about the protocol: the point is to fix it, not to nix it. That means that if you want access to the single market, which, by the way, a very large section, albeit perhaps a minority, of the businesses of Northern Ireland wants, there are certain consequences, and you cannot totally expunge EU law.
You cannot take this principle, which the Unionist community has rightly turned to and said, “Under the Good Friday agreement, we want our alienation and aspirations addressed,” as some kind of absolute that somehow the aspirations of the other community don’t exist. I just wanted to add that point. That is why in some way we are now at a terminus for a particular process. A particular moment in history is over.
Q73 Chair: Isn’t that a refreshing change of tack from the Prime Minister? On Monday, he very clearly started to talk about judgments and balances and trade-offs, rather than everybody can eat cake, no matter how much cake they want to eat and no matter what the flavour.
Lord Bew: I now hear on everybody’s lips in all parties in my own House talk about the delicate balance of the Good Friday agreement and that we need to preserve it and we are worried it is not being preserved. To be fair, that was in Boris Johnson’s first letter to the EU. That is when it first appears.
Q74 Chair: Sounds like Paul to the Corinthians, doesn’t it?
Lord Bew: I am simply saying that it is slightly—and by the way, Rishi Sunak has made clear that he has completed, with characteristic attention to detail and precision, the work that his predecessors actually began in substance. There is a fundamental continuity between the three. Now, we can talk about style and mistakes made earlier.
The other way I see it is as the end of a moment, by the way. The 2017 agreement, which is an international agreement as Michel Barnier insisted, the joint EU-UK report of December 2017, was the beginning of a kind of very disastrous collapse of the British negotiating position. As the Irish side said subsequently, Ireland was basically allowed complete ownership of the interpretation of the agreement. So we are ending that moment. It has taken time—
Chair: Lord Bew, we could spend a huge amount of time on the protocol, its fathers and everything else but I do want to focus in the time available to us.
We have been covering quite a lot of territory already. Colleagues should feel free to chip in and amend and demonstrate fluidity. I have Jim Shannon next, but did you want to come on this particular point, Robert?
Q75 Sir Robert Buckland: I do, because I have been listening carefully to two of the architects of the machinery of Government. I want to ask about petitions of concern. We have heard reference to them this week in the form of the Stormont brake. The analogy has been drawn between petitions of concern and the Stormont brake, by the Prime Minister.
We know in New Decade, New Approach, the original purpose of petitions of concern was refocused, quite properly, and there was an agreement that petitions of concern would not be used to criticise ministerial conduct and so on. How do you square the grafting on of a new process with the approach in New Decade, New Approach? Do you think there is a contradiction, or do you think it is actually a reinforcement of the cross-community principle?
Lord Bew: To be quite clear about this, the petition of concern and the so-called Assembly brake is one of the key issues that mean that this deal is on the upper end of Unionist community expectation. I am certain that the previous arrangements in this respect played little part in the decision that they are going to go for this.
What it means, of course, in terms of the criticism in the Unionist community and their doubts, is that it does depend on the UK Government. At this present time, the brutal reality is the DUP could not alone trigger a petition of concern, because they are, I think, five Members short. With a few Ulster Unionists, they could.
People in Northern Ireland are now asking, “Is it as good as it looks?” and there are now some DUP doubters. My point is very simple: if the Assembly is up and running again, and if there is a real issue—if it is some trivial point that is got up, the UK Government will say, “Wise up”—no UK Government, in the event that there is a serious issue at stake, something with substance of concern that concerns significant numbers of citizens, are going to say, “Oh, forget your petition of concern. We’re not going to look at this. We are not going to help.” This is rather more than just what is in the document. Just think ahead to what is likely to be.
The other circumstance is that it is not immediately obvious to me that what is coming down the pipe, either under this Government or the next, is actually likely to create circumstances for it to be triggered. It is not immediately obvious. So I think there is a defence, regardless.
It was totally unpredicted. One of the many things about this agreement is that the entire local intelligentsia and media class didn’t expect this; much of the political class did not expect it. That is slightly a comment on their ingrained habits and provincial self-regard, essentially, which is now communally cross-community in Northern Ireland—a very high level of same. None the less, one of our problems is that people, not having expected it, insist that because they didn’t expect it, it can’t have happened. You could quite palpably hear that, and you could read certain journalists and so on saying, “Because I am a wise man who tells you what is happening here in Northern Ireland, but I hadn’t a clue about this, well don’t really believe it. Believe this isn’t as good as it looks.” You can pick that up in what has been written and said so far in the local media.
Tim O'Connor: On the petition of concern, the whole focus back when we were negotiating the Good Friday agreement was on creating a delicate balance across everything: check, balance, check, balance. I was the secretary at the North South Ministerial Council for five and half years, working with my Northern Ireland colleagues, which was a great privilege. I had a mythical sign on my wall that said, “Our job here, every day, is to manage complexity. That is what we do.” That was a kind of a principle.
So that was built into the design of every aspect of the petition of concern. On the design point, I will give you an example of what happened at meetings of the North South Ministerial Council. As part of the checks and balances and the complexity—because complexity is your friend in a conflict situation—you had a scenario where the Minister of a particular Department was obviously either a Unionist or a nationalist, in the early stages, anyway. The Minister for Education was Martin McGuinness. When Martin McGuinness was appearing in the North South Ministerial Council, with our southern counterpart, he was always accompanied by a Minister from the other grouping, so that is one check and balance; and all decisions of the Council had to be by agreement, therefore that was effectively a veto by a Minister. What’s that all about? Answer: by true complexity.
David Trimble, who again has sadly passed, had a great phrase that said that the Council of Ireland would have been regarded as the element that brought down Sunningdale, and yet there we were operating the North South Ministerial Council. David Trimble was asked, “Why the difference?” He said, “Because on Good Friday”, in terms of north-south, “we got the architecture right”. That is the key. All of these dimensions are built-in complexities that enable everybody to work there. The other principle that I had on my wall was, “No surprises”; so it was about managing complexity and no surprises.
Chair: I might go and start doing some needlepoint to have precisely those things on my wall.
Q76 Jim Shannon: The first question took 17 minutes and this question took 20 minutes, so the rest of us can work out the figures and how it works.
Bob Stewart: Mine was short actually, Jim. It wasn’t me; it was everyone else.
Jim Shannon: I have been criticised many times for not being pithy, but I have realised that maybe I am pithy.
Chair: Give us a flavour of your pithiness, Jim.
Q77 Jim Shannon: Lord Bew, may I say what a pleasure it is to have you here? Thank you for all that you do. I have always enjoyed the conversations we have had at the airport; thank you for them. Tim, you mentioned that big drama. My goodness, there is always drama in Northern Ireland. It never changes, and it won’t change in the future either.
My question is about the UK Government having legislated on several occasions. For example, with the identity and language Bill, even though we in the DUP put forward that the Ulster Scots language should be given the same equal treatment as the Irish language, the Government in charge decided that was not to be the case. As an example of that, by the way, I made a freedom of information request in relation to the Irish language and Ulster Scots being spoken at the Northern Ireland Assembly. In the last term, £145,000 was spent on the Irish language and £1,000 was spent on Ulster Scots. You can see the differential in very clear terms. That shows me that unfortunately the Government here did not give the languages equal treatment, even though we put forward that case.
The second occasion was the abortion Bill. In this place, they rode roughshod over the views of elected representatives and those of us who have a strong tradition and belief in that area.
The third occasion was on Dáithí's law, which incidentally the collective—all five parties—supported. That is an example of how we can put something forward here that is not contentious over what would be done in a different way. Robert commented on the petition; I think it is important to have the petition of concern there, because it gives a security or perhaps a methodology whereby both sides of the community can, if they have to and want to, exercise that right. I don’t think you can ignore that.
Chair: Pithy, Mr Shannon.
Jim Shannon: I am following everybody else’s example, Mr Chairman.
Chair: No, we want you to set one.
Q78 Jim Shannon: I thought you might. I feel this point is important, even if nobody else does—but that is a guess, by the way. Lord Bew, I think you have answered this question, but is it right to say that a Government in Northern Ireland, by its very nature—and I was part of that Assembly in 1998; I am a supporter of that process and I agreed with it, because it was the only way we could move forward to have a political process that embraced all the political aspirations of those in Northern Ireland—can probably never be what I would refer to as a majority Government such as they have here, even though a majority Government in Northern Ireland would involve two parties from different traditions in making that happen? Is that your impression of where we are—that the political processes we have in place now will always be the political processes that we have and that majority rule really is not possible?
Lord Bew: I never say always; I am saying it for the current phase we are in. A particular phase is over, the phase between Brexit, the early agreements and now the sorting out of the early agreements between the UK and the EU, so we are at the end of a five-year period. This is a decisively new moment, but there are some people talking as if they can carry on as if something major has not happened. That is not the case. Something decisive has happened and we are in a new moment. New rules and new contexts are being created. We lived in one set of problems for five dreary years, and things have moved on—not perfectly, because they cannot be perfect, but things have moved on as well as statesmanship can make them move on.
I would never say never; there is still a part of me that harks back to the idea of non-sectarian politics, to which I devoted a large part of the 1970s and 1980s, but Bernard Crick was right that Northern Ireland faces both ways; it is hybrid, and there is no getting away from that. Currently, that is the clue to understanding why we cannot say “No tincture of EU law, because I am a Unionist,” any more than the EU law junkies in Belfast, who are high on the supply of EU law, can start addressing the Unionist community from that perspective. Irreducibly, that is where we are: it faces both ways, there is an inevitable hybridity of society, and most Unionists accept that. The question is the terms, and for the last five years it has been a perfectly fair argument, which the UK Government has essentially accepted, and which the EU has now to a very considerable degree accepted, that those terms were not in balance for Northern Ireland. We are now in a new place. It will never be a perfect balance.
Q79 Jim Shannon: On the aspiration to have majority rule, my former leader Peter Robinson, who led the party some time ago, suggested that perhaps some day there might be majority rule and that that political process could be won. I probably subscribe to what you have said on that; I am not sure it is possible.
Tim O'Connor: I agree with everything that Lord Bew has said, but you are right that ultimately it is about trust and confidence. This agreement 25 years ago was coming off the back of 25 or 30 years of conflict that caused so much death and destruction. So, trust practically didn’t exist and therefore you have to put together structures in the absence of trust and confidence.
That is why there was the principle of no surprises. Eventually, one Unionist Minister said to me one day after a meeting of the North South Ministerial Council, which we had carefully managed so that there were no surprises, “We could have done that meeting by email, because it was so choreographed.” I took that as kind of a good sign that we could start removing some of these things. You are the politician, Mr Shannon, so I guess the call is whether at political level the level of confidence and trust is there that you could move to that. I will just add in Seamus Mallon’s great dictum that it is for each generation to “write their own history”. As Paul is saying, maybe the time will come, but it is not there at the moment, one would think.
Q80 Chair: Mr O’Connor, you just mentioned “no surprises”. Running through all the answers from both of you this afternoon, and indeed all of our questions, is the basic assumption that it is the electorate who deal the hand of cards and it is the politicians who then decide how they are played, but it is the electorate who decide their representatives will be?
I am going to guess here that you would concur with the proposition that the architects of the Good Friday agreement and all of those who have been custodians of it subsequently would have subscribed to that view, namely that in any electoral process it is the electorate who are king. Is it a surprise, or possibly a shocking disappointment, that we find one party in Northern Ireland—it is a small party, but it is a vocal party—who appear to be saying, “We will only support this institution if the electorate give us the result that we want”? We have heard recently—there have been clips on social media—“We will never put in a Sinn Féin First Minister”. If that is what the electorate have voted for and the numbers are there, should we be surprised, shocked or disappointed that people who stand under the banner of democracy—let me just be absolutely clear; I think that Jeffrey Donaldson has been perfectly clear that he would be perfectly happy to do this. I think the DUP’s position is clear, supportable and laudable. But for politicians to then tell the electorate, “You got it wrong”—shock, surprise or disappointment?
Lord Bew: I suppose I could say I am shocked or surprised, but I basically think that it is not even remotely realistic. Happily, I do not believe for a minute that that is the position of the DUP—
Q81 Chair: It is not; I am talking about the TUV.
Lord Bew: May I just add something to that?
Chair: Lord Bew, let me just be absolutely clear—
Lord Bew: I understood exactly what you were talking about, and I did want to add something to that—two things, really. One is that we are moving before too long to the major change between the May iteration of the agreement, which did not even mention the Northern Ireland Assembly. This shows how major the labour has been to deal with the democratic deficit and the changes that are now in place.
Now, the Johnson withdrawal agreement does give a role—and it does mean there will be a vote before very long—to the Northern Ireland Assembly on the protocol, so we are heading down the road to a democratic vote before very long. At the moment most people assume that particularly with these changes—some very substantive changes—there will be a consensus, and certainly a great majority of the people in Northern Ireland, judging by their electoral performance, accept that. I wonder, do people fully realise that we have passed a very significant moment? There is no endless replay of these arguments available, because eventually—there already is a very considerable closure.
The reason why some of these arguments from the TUV and so on have got leverage is that things were said by an Irish leadership that were unwise, so they don’t have to misquote things that were said in 2016 and 2017 in the argument. I understand Ireland’s position. Ireland thought that Brexit was a huge threat to their real and legitimate interests, and almost anything was justified, in terms of political process, to defend their position. I understand how it happened, and there is no point in revisiting it, but things were said. People in that neck of the woods, politically, do not have to invent quotations, which were unwise and look very bad today, from Irish political leadership. It is only right to say that. They have not got fuel—it does not just come from nowhere; there are things that have happened that, unfortunately, are part of the historical record.
It still does not matter, because your point is the overriding point, which I fully accept at this stage. There is a question of the democratic will of the peoples of Northern Ireland, if I can put it like that, and we are very close to a definitive test on that. How do you carry on this argument after that?
Q82 Claire Hanna: I do not want to derail us too much, because I think there is too much focus on what I would characterise as the “themmuns did it” narrative. The arguments against removal from the single market were not just about the possibility of unrest and dislocation; they were primarily economic and practical.
If you are placing the focus on comments made by the Irish Government, was it not the chief constable at the time—was it not, I believe, at this Committee, perhaps MI5 and others—who set out the possibility of there being disaffection, up to and including dissident republicans? I am just not sure about why the emphasis is on the Irish Government and not others pointing out the same thing. It is a demonisation strategy.
Lord Bew: None the less, it is true what I said. If you are Jamie Bryson, you do not have—
Q83 Claire Hanna: Jamie Bryson said that. He said exactly the same thing a week after the referendum.
Lord Bew: You don’t have to invent these quotes. That is all I said. You don’t have to invent these quotes that do not look great in retrospect—it is as simple as that. If we want to understand why we are in a mess, that is unfortunately a part. Basically, Brexit was destabilising for Ireland, and I completely understand why the Irish Government hunkered down in the way that they did.
I am not saying this to raise problems with the Irish Government. I am trying to say that there is a problem of political management here with the Democratic Unionist party and the mood in their community, which is not all the fault of the many inadequacies of the Democratic Unionist party. They are confronted with a mood in their community that has been to some degree created by others—it is that simple.
Q84 Chair: To take Ms Hanna’s point, it does stoke a fire, does it not, if a whole range of people across boundaries and borders have said broadly the same thing—albeit in different terms and using a different language—but then one only uses the gobbets of certain sources to augment an argument?
Lord Bew: I accept that, but this is Northern Ireland. I am trying to observe, because I think you are quite right, this business of not revisiting the past, but you could raise a whole number of other things—things that have been said by Irish Ministers that do not have the contextual backing that Claire has rightly given today. It is not the game I want to play. What I am trying to say is that there is a problem of political management for the Democratic Unionist party in their own community that is not simply the fault of mistakes they may have made, but a mood that has been created by forces.
The worrying thing about this and the White Paper, for example—which is an exceptionally detailed argument, and it should be read more widely than it is in Northern Ireland, it seems to me, in terms of its arguments—is that people will not decide enough on the basis of the content of the deal in front of them, which, by the way, will have some flaws. They will decide it on the basis of communal balance, communal rhetoric and things that have been said that poked them in the eye. That is the really worrying thing.
I am saying what I am saying to respect the task of political leadership, which is not an easy one for the DUP at the present time. There is a sourness in its community that is outside the actual issues that are dealt with in the Windsor framework.
I will add something on this that is very important. People say, “Why did people carry out the attempted murder of the last few days? It is non-political and it is just for the joy of killing,” and so on. I respect those who believe that. There is a very good reason why people do it. Just as people sing, “Ooh, ahh, up the ‘Ra!” now in mainstream locations in Dublin—football teams or whatever—the people who did it expect that they will be sung about in similar terms 20 years from now. That is why they do it. They do not do it just for killing, or because they are particularly cruel people or whatever; they do it because they expect retrospective validation of their actions. That is why they do it.
Again, the fact that these mainstream events have happened in mainstream Irish culture means that you have a souring of the public mood—quite outside the detail, say, in this White Paper. That makes it harder to do what has to be done here. I think you have to acknowledge the seriousness of the task, and realise we are not in a world where it is just going to be people looking through the Windsor thing and saying, “I agree with page 38 and not 39.” We are not in that world.
Tim O'Connor: This is a very interesting discussion. I am here in a personal capacity; I am not here representing the Irish Government, obviously. My comment back to Paul, who made a very powerful argument, is that we can all agree that everybody is entitled to their view on every matter. I think we can all agree that certainly Brexit was, as one colleague described it, a “major disturbance in the force,” to use “Star Wars”. I was brought up on the Hume and Mallon doctrine of the two Governments, basically: it is the two Governments working as co-guardians. One of the tremendous dislocations that happened after 2016 was this divergence of interest of the two Governments. Thankfully, we are now much more back in a scenario with the two Governments working together. That is a core doctrine of everything positive that has been achieved in the last 50 years, starting with Sunningdale. We need to get back to the two Governments working because they have this common interest.
In terms of what happened last week, we have to remind ourselves that the primary reason why we had a peace process was precisely to end the killing and to find a way to break that—against a backdrop of the famous William Faulkner quote, “History is not dead. It’s not even past.” That was the achievement of the agreement, and I think Paul is making a very important point when he says to keep our eyes on that prize. The primary role of Good Friday was peace and stability, and it has achieved that demonstrably—not totally. Now the other pieces have to follow, but I think that at the core of that is the two Governments working together. Hopefully, we are on that track now again, which I deeply welcome.
Q85 Chair: The designation “other” suggests—we all heard your answers to earlier questions, Lord Bew—foreign, alien, different or almost beyond description, doesn’t it? We know society is changing. We know that the old affiliations are looser than they were in a large swathe of opinion. The diaspora of Northern Irish youth get qualified, go away to university—to GB or elsewhere—and do not come back. That suggests a growing anxiety and tension about all of that. Notwithstanding the absolutely important need to reflect how the institutions are founded and based, how does one evolve the Good Friday agreement, the institutions of Stormont, the strands and so on to reflect the “other,” and to find a better word? As I say, “other” from the start suggests alien, different and beyond description.
Lord Bew: First of all, I absolutely accept that that is spot on about “other.” It must not be beyond the wit of man to do better.
Q86 Chair: We could use “non-aligned,” couldn’t we?
Lord Bew: I am absolutely with you on that, Chairman. It is important to understand that, while you have these two blocs, actually they have liberalised dramatically. The DUP bloc and the Sinn Féin bloc both no longer believe things that were mainstream beliefs in their parties two years ago; so the idea that what we have got is a system unmarked by liberalism does not actually understand the pervasive strength of modern, liberal, secular society even within the DUP and even within the republican movement, which in its own way for a long time was a congealed little world of its own. So while I totally accept your point—“other” is an ugly term; I am totally with you on that—none the less, with the way that we are going in Northern Ireland, people should not look at these blocs, because they are internally changing quite dramatically, as being in stasis or a staleness necessarily. They are already unrecognisable.
One of the reasons I was so committed to what David Trimble was trying to do was that I did not think the DUP would pick it up and work it, because I believed they were so set in their ways. It is a nonsensical assumption on my part; I was totally wrong. In general, people from outside do not realise how far things have actually changed within the two major parties in Northern Ireland—the DUP and Sinn Féin. The tendencies of thought within them are much more complex than they once were. It is not quite as rigid and sterile. The prize for them both in the future—I think that in Belfast something like 10% of the people were not born there—is whether either of them can generate support. I do not rule it out that both of them are capable of being flexible enough to generate support from the 10% of Belfast people who were not born in the place, for example. Do not rule that out at all if we get stability.
Tim O'Connor: Briefly to add to that, the agreement itself also provides for beyond “other”. To go back to article 1(v), which Paul and I have both referred to—if you could just indulge me briefly—it states: “affirm that whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, the power of the sovereign government with jurisdiction there shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions”. Then it goes on to say, “of freedom from discrimination for all citizens”. So there is a totality piece recognised there. At other points it talks about, in a sense, the primacy of the two major traditions, but there is a nod to full diversity.
Q87 Chair: I agree with you—there is a nod—but should it be more than that?
Tim O'Connor: That’s a reasonable question.
Chair: I ask this as legitimately an open-ended question: is there a risk, do we think, that people who have to identify as “other” today, because that is the word that is there, feel second or third class, and that their vote and their views are not reflected by the architecture—the foundation stones of the architecture—and therefore why bother and why engage? Is there a risk of people opting out if the perennial compartmentalisation continues?
Tim O'Connor: That is a fair point. Again, it goes back to the question of complexity.
Chair: It is not easy stuff.
Tim O'Connor: Your own terms of reference for this inquiry are about the design. To go back to the fundamental question, what was the design question posed? Answer: it was a contestation between two political philosophies, which of course was being expressed in political violence. That was the essential question that we were trying to solve. The plurality of the agreement addresses that, but that does leave the question that you are rightly asking: what about everybody else? That is a challenging design question: how are we going to be realistic in tackling the core fundamental contestation of two political philosophies sharing the same small geography? How do we address that and at the same time not almost codify sectarianism, which is another question? As I say, that is the design challenge of complexity.
Lord Bew: I agree with Tim, and I take the force of your question. To be of some comfort, there is no sign at the moment that people who consider themselves “other” are discouraged from voting. I accept that this should be kept under review.
Q88 Chair: Is the Secretary of State right? He has said to this Committee and on the Floor of the House that he stands ready to respond to grassroots initiatives. I think everybody has broadly translated that as meaning he will respond if the parties of Northern Ireland knock on his door and say that we have to do something other than “other”. Is that the right approach, or should this be more a case of Westminster and Dublin leading a review on it between them?
Lord Bew: In a narrower sense, with respect to Dáithí's law, he has just done exactly what he said would do in bringing it here and not letting the issue get stuck in the mud. So he has done that. It comes back to my simpler point. At the moment, people talk about the DUP and its veto on these institutions, which I hope will be ending before too long because it has effectively had a campaign and got a result—a rare thing in politics. It is not a perfect result, but it is better than what was generally expected. It is Sinn Féin as well. Sinn Féin will not tolerate any significant change in the current governmental structures. I note an imbalance in the discussion. People really are missing this completely. Sinn Féin will not tolerate any significant change in these structures.
Q89 Chair: Very briefly, is there any merit in a joint First Minister?
Lord Bew: Everybody—there is agony in my House and in yours—wants to discuss this. Everybody can see this would be a potential way out of a big problem. To be honest, if I were to say there was something we did get wrong in 1998, it was this. There should have been joint First Ministers from the start. It actually is a co-premiership, and that should have been explicit right from the start.
Tim O'Connor: I think, realistically, if the agreement was being signed today, there would be joint First Ministers.
Lord Bew: If I were to say there was a mistake in the original structure, that would be it. Everybody who is sitting in your House and in mine, knowing about the general election, is tremendously tempted to say, “Let’s just avoid all this and do it now.” By the way, I am quite confident it will happen over the next few years, because of the pressure from all the parties towards it. It was the DUP’s choice, and the DUP’s old strategy towards electoral changes in Northern Ireland, that underpinned this. They wouldn’t be in this position if they still had David Trimble’s rules, because the Unionist voting bloc is larger. This is where you have to be an adult in politics. These are your rules, to a very considerable degree, agreed with Sinn Féin. It is embarrassing, but you lost under them. In a sense, you have no choice but to say, “Well, that’s it.” Anyway, it’s a co-premiership. There is actually no loss in any material part.
By the way, the grace and dignity shown by such a move by the DUP will have a significant effect on the Catholic community. It hasn’t really got a problem with the protocol at all; it has a problem with never having a Sinn Féin First Minister. And I believe that is unfair. On this occasion, there is a great advantage in what looks somewhat embarrassing, just by living up to your own word on these matters. In the longer term, it is hard to justify having a co-premiership that doesn’t call itself a co-premiership. It is something that Brendan O’Leary, an academic colleague of mine, has been saying for 25 years. He was right 25 years ago, and it is right now. That is my view.
Chair: Thank you. Nobody has waved at me to come in with further questions. I am conscious of the time.
Claire Hanna: Briefly, Chair.
Chair: A late eye-catch.
Q90 Claire Hanna: I thought I was already on your list.
On the issue of a potential rearrangement of some of the protocols, obviously there are mechanisms within the agreement for review, and for good reasons and bad, people haven’t wanted to open that up. Particularly given the mood over the last year, I would have concerns, as would others, about the potential that it wouldn’t be keyhole surgery; it might be something less targeted. Hopefully, the wolf will be gone from the door if we are back in a few weeks.
How do you think that should be best approached to look at some of the protocols and arrangements? You are correct to point out, Lord Bew, that there certainly wouldn’t be consensus; there would be active resistance to evolving them from some quarters. What do you think is the appropriate way to pursue that? Citizens assemblies are in vogue and have demonstrated success in the south. Do you think this would be the type of discreet issue that could be usefully teased out in that way?
Tim O'Connor: That is a good question. Hopefully, if we can move forward over the coming period and get everything back up and running again, there will be a question at some point. The review section of the agreement talks about what happens when difficulties arise, but it is a political judgment, Claire; the two Governments and the parties must decide together whether the moment has come. Exactly how that gets triggered isn’t written down. For the reasons you just said, I think there would be a nervousness at one level about doing that, but at the same time it is provided for. That is going to be a big political decision that lies ahead.
Going back to Seamus Mallon’s point, it is for each generation to write its own history. The question, therefore, one generation later, is: is this the moment to do that? It is a fine political call that the two Governments, yourselves and the parties are going to have to make together. It is certainly rational, but it is a big political call.
Lord Bew: I basically agree with Tim on that, Claire. I see why you asked the question.
Chair: Nobody else has caught my eye, so that is to the good. Thank you both again for your time and for taking our questions. If you want to stay for the second panel, you are very welcome. I can understand entirely if you wish, in the words of “Why Don’t You?”, to go off and do something less boring instead.