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CIAO DATE: 8/00
When New Meets Old: Irish Diplomacy, Northern Ireland and the Peace Process
Paul Sharp
International Studies Association
41st Annual Convention
Los Angeles, CA
March 14-18, 2000
Introduction
My purpose in this chapter is to examine the contribution of Irish diplomacy to the Northern Ireland peace process in the thirty year period between 1968, when Northern Ireland re-emerged as an international issue, and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which combined elements of a settlement with new ways of conducting old disputes. By diplomacy I mean the activities of negotiation and representation undertaken primarily, but not exclusively, by professional diplomats acting for sovereign states. By most accounts, the recent century has been a bad one for diplomacy of this sort. In the first half it was widely judged to have failed in preventing two world wars, although for very different reasons, and in the second half it was seen as becoming increasingly unable or unwilling to address the great problems presented by globalization and fragmentation.
Yet we live in what Reychler has termed a period of diplomatic inflation. 1 This is partially explained by the new foreign services of the former Soviet and Yugoslav republics. Beyond the system of formal representatives of 180 or so sovereign states, however, exists an expanding host of organizations, agencies, associations, clubs and individuals whose representatives behave like diplomats and seek a recognition of their status which goes beyond regarding them as conveniences agreed to, or tolerated by, sovereign states. One explanation of this development is to see it as part of the emergence of a global civil society. Crotty has suggested, the development of intermediate agencies between people and governments may be taken as an indicator of increasing democratic sophistication and maturation. 2 If this is so not only between states but also within them, then this helps explain why the question "who are the diplomats now?" increasingly receives the answer "nearly, or potentially, everyone". 3 People, or associations of people, in a democratizing international or regional system need representation not just to their own government, but to other associations of people and other governments.
If this is so, and people are increasingly willing and able to take care of their own "representation needs," then the role of professional diplomacy might be expected to become increasingly unclear. What, it might be asked, do professional diplomats do that people and their associations cannot do for themselves. One answer, entertained by several "think tank" reports on diplomacy is that it might fade into irrelevance as an increasingly "wired" and democratized world simply passes it by. 4 Another is to argue that the current attention to new diplomatic actors and speculation about diplomacy’s decline simply illustrates the continuing capacity of non-experts and outsiders to misunderstand what is and is not important in international relations. Professional diplomacy, in this view, continues to handle the essentials while the rest is froth.
Finally, more scholarly analyses consider the possibility that as the claims of states to being the only full members of international society become harder to sustain, then so too will the standing of the diplomats who serve them. They will simply be the representatives of actors, which for historical reasons may retain considerable material and ideological power but which are becoming just one type of international actor among several. 5
The Northern Ireland peace process provides an interesting case study for testing these perspectives because all the factors which might be expected to squeeze out professional diplomacy are present in abundance. From Ireland's point of view, the North remains a "national question," one of those which concerns the fundamental identity of the country and, as such, is often regarded as being too important to be left to the diplomats. Just as the Middle East process has been dominated by the Israeli prime minister’s office and kept out of the hands of the foreign service, for example, so too there have been times when the North was a matter for the Taoiseach’s office and, apparently, no one else. Secondly, in its international dimension, the dispute over Northern Ireland has been between two countries, Britain and Ireland, whose differences in terms of power would suggest few diplomatic opportunities for the weaker party, particularly when the stronger presented the problem as an internal affair. Thirdly, many of the front line parties to the dispute have been non-state actors manifesting hostility towards the principal formal actors, Ireland and Britain, and contempt for the legitimacy of the international society of which both are members. For such actors, diplomats feature often as symbols and, hence, sometimes as targets.
Finally, the established protagonists, both state and non-state, have on occasions looked like becoming swamped by a plethora of new actors from home, abroad and places in between representing new agendas and presenting new ideas with which they seek to redefine "the Northern Ireland problem." Indeed, the present settlement may be plausibly presented as evidence that for now, at least, "new" thinking has overtaken "old" about questions of sovereignty, national identity and self-determination. In such unpromising circumstances, it would seem that the professional foreign service of a small, weak country with many other things to keep it busy would have very little to offer.
As we shall see, however, none of the three perspectives set out above captures the role of Irish diplomats and diplomacy in the peace process. Certainly, they were not irrelevant to it. The most cursory examination of the period reveals the centrality of the diplomats’ involvement. The form of that involvement, however, did not remain unchanged. In terms of traditional diplomacy, Irish diplomats often found themselves talking to very strange strangers indeed and in unusual settings, but they did so not just as the representatives of one actor among several. What stands out in this analysis is the role of diplomacy and diplomats in creating, maintaining and selling the political framework within which others bargained with one another and with the diplomats.
This is not a work of diplomatic history. The precise details of who was arguing what with whom and when, will have to await the publication of government and party records. Still less, is it an attempt to make an assessment of the ability of the peace process to achieve peace and justice in Northern Ireland. As we shall see, the quest for peace and justice is never the only concern of professional diplomacy and when it becomes interested in them, it often does so in an oblique and distinctive way. Diplomats have other things to worry about but, I shall argue, we should be glad that they do, for it is these concerns which continue to make professional diplomacy indispensable, if not always to the settlement of international disputes, then to their successful management. The chapter examines Irish diplomacy in three arenas: state-to-state relations; international society relations; and transnational society relations.
Irish diplomacy, the North, and state-to-state relations
Professional diplomats are conservatives. To be sure, they may appear as radicals, especially in the case of new states. Ireland, for example, rewarded some of those who had advocated its independence before international organizations and the great powers in its "embryonic" civil service with positions in the real thing. They may find themselves serving or advocating a revisionist policy, seeking adjustments in the international order in favor of their own state, but revisionism and radicalism are not the same thing. Diplomats who serve a genuinely radical state, are faced with an impossible choice between appearing as the moderate face of the immoderate, or participating in its confrontations and subversions. Either way pushes them into irrelevance. Fortunately for diplomats, revolutionary states are rare, and the capacity of those which do occur to remain revolutionary is limited.
The reasons for this conservatism are straightforward. In international politics, sovereignty is a priceless asset and diplomats are one of its front line guardians. Professionally and personally, they have a stake in both the sovereignty of their own country and the system of recognition in the society of states by which sovereignty in general, and their country’s sovereignty in particular, are constituted. Accordingly, the circumstances under which Ireland won, or was granted, its independence in 1922 presented, and continue to present, Irish diplomats with a particularly acute version of the dilemma which faced all Irish nationalists. Dominion status and partition entailed that they represented a state which was incomplete by both external and internal criteria. The British Crown remained the formal source of political authority in Ireland, and Britain retained control over important aspects of Ireland’s external relations, two naval bases and, of course, the six counties which became the province of Northern Ireland.
The argument and subsequent civil war over whether or not to accept the treaty with Britain focused more on the residual rights of the Crown rather than partition and was won by the side which maintained, in Michael Collin’s phrase, that Ireland had secured the freedom to achieve its freedom. As far as the external standing of the state was concerned, this was so. By a policy of exercising, and thus establishing, it international rights, particularly by participating in international conferences, Irish diplomacy secured all but the most formal aspects of sovereignty before end of the Second World War. However, the freedom secured by obtaining international recognition of the Free State and its successors did not translate into similar success on the question of Irish unity. Far from being a lever with which to pries open the barrier of partition, from the point of view of Irish diplomacy, the country’s status became a value to be defended against those who might put it at risk by actively seeking Irish unity. Prominent among the latter were those who opposed the Treaty, most of whose leaders had, by the early 1930s, entered the Dáil with putative "revolvers in their pockets." Once in power under De Valera, they enshrined Ireland’s international status as a revisionist state in a new Constitution which laid claim to the North de jure while recognizing that de facto its writ did not run there for the time being.
Irish diplomats may have enjoyed the quest for international status their political masters had instructed them to pursue in the 1920s. In many ways, the experience served as a model for how peaceful change might be successfully affected by the exercise of claimed rights. It is doubtful, however, that they enjoyed the policy of commercial confrontation with Britain and political propagandizing against partition which followed the election of De Valera in 1934. In its external aspect, at least, the policy was almost a complete failure. It demonstrated that if the North was passive and the British not interested, then Ireland lacked the capacity to make Britain budge on the issue. It also demonstrated that there were real costs to trying, whether commercial, as in the case of the tariff war, or diplomatic, as in the case of the isolation which resulted from Ireland’s decision to keep out of the Second World War even when it was clear that Germany was beaten and that ganging up on it was precondition for full participation in the new international order signified by the establishment of the United Nations (UN)
As compensation, there existed the cold comfort that, in fact, Ireland (although not Irish men and women) had successfully kept out of the war, it was the only Commonwealth country to do so, and, despite considerable American pressure to the contrary, the British had put up with this state of affairs. Abstentionism from international life had provided confirmation of a sort of Ireland’s international standing. To this may be added that the diplomacy of confrontation and non-cooperation was conducted on a state-to-state basis. The De Valera government ruthlessly suppressed anyone who sought to freelance towards the same end.
For two decades after the war, the North remained a dormant issue. For Irish diplomacy it was a piece of unfinished, but probably unfinishable, business about which, with the exception of a painful exercise in declaratory policy at the Council of Europe, it was required to do nothing. Its political boss for most of the period, Frank Aiken, was interested in other things, especially carving out an international role for both Ireland and himself once admission to the UN was secured in 1955. Besides, there was so much more going in Anglo-Irish relations. The period began with the apparently final chapters being written in establishing the constitutional status of both parts of Ireland. 6 It finished with the two countries negotiating a free trade agreement with one another as they both manoeuvred for membership of the European Economic Community, 7 and talks between the Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, and the Northern Irish prime minister, Terence O’Neill on matters of practical cross-border collaboration. If there was any political spillover from such contacts, it was not in the direction of bringing the two parts of Ireland closer together, but in demonstrating that Anglo-Irish relations over the North had so stabilized, that such issues could be thus handled.
The response of the Northern Ireland government to civil rights protests in 1968, the re-emergence of sectarian violence, the introduction of British troops and the imposition of direct rule from London by 1972, upset the assumptions upon which Irish diplomacy had been based.
While the North "worked," the pursuit of Irish unity presented a threat to the interests and stability of the actually existing Ireland. One might think of it always, but mention it never or, at least, as infrequently as the requirements of domestic politics permitted. There was no sense in annoying Britain and embarrassing other countries for no conceivable gain. However, the revival of a republican movement which regarded the Dublin government as merely the latest iteration of the illegitimate Free State and the emergence of an arms smuggling scandal involving leading members of the government began the process of transforming the North from an issue of principle and conscience to a matter Ireland’s security and, at times, its survival, to which its diplomacy had to respond. Over the ensuing thirty years what had begun with civil servants co-ordinating bus time tables and electrical power distribution under the benign gaze of the two chief executives was transformed into the number one priority of Irish foreign policy, ahead, in Foreign Minister Burke ranking in 1997, of developing the European Union (EU), reviving Ireland’s role in the UN, and economic policy. 8
Whatever the variations in government policy on the North during the intervening period, it is possible with the benefit of hindsight to see that from an early point. Irish diplomacy focused on intensifying the bilateral relationship with Britain. The full implications of this for Dublin’s say in the North and, less noted, but perhaps no less significant, London’s say in the South, have yet to emerge. After a brief period during the initial crisis in which all parties seemed to revert to historical type, with Dublin calling for the involvement of the UN as a way of easing Britain out and London maintaining that the affairs of the North were purely a domestic matter, both quickly settled down to bargaining over the issue of how best to return political stability to the province. Both agreed that Northern Ireland presented a security problem and a political justice problem. However, they did not agree on the extent to which it was either. Irish diplomacy had to manage a sense among those whom it represented that the British were, in fact, biased against the nationalist, largely Catholic, minority community in the North and half-hearted about pressing reforms, and to manage a sense amongst those with whom it negotiated that the Irish did not pursue the military and legal aspects of security with sufficient vigor. As a consequence, the day-to-day diplomacy of Irish-British relations consisted of arguments about who was and who was not doing "enough" about reforms and security, interspersed with crisis management in response to terrorist and counter-terrorist violence in the North, Britain,`Ireland and elsewhere.
Behind the day-to-day spats, however, existed a deeper lack of agreement about the direction of the reforms which London was willing to implement in the North. Agreement was impossible, as it now appears clear in retrospect, because neither party knew (and arguably still do not know) where their respective governments wanted the reforms to lead, nor what price they were prepared to pay to get to their eventual destination. Both agreed that the first step was to get the nationalist minority community involved in the political life of the North by instituting specific reforms which would ensure that their representatives obtained positions in the government. Power-sharing, as it was known, was at the heart of the Sunningdale Agreement negotiated in 1973. Present also, however, were measures designed to increase the nationalist minority community’s confidence and sense of security; preconditions, it was argued, of its willingness to participate in the political life of the North on the terms envisaged in 1973 agreement. As a result, there emerged, in embryonic form at least, many of the dimensions on which the present settlement is being attempted. The idea of a Council of Ireland, as envisaged in the Home Rule proposals and 1922 Treaty , was revived as a way for dealing with certain all-Ireland issues. The Irish government declared that it wanted no change in the status of Northern Ireland without a majority there agreeing to it. And the British government declared that in the event of a majority in the North (no longer just the Northern Ireland parliament) declaring their wish to be part of a united Ireland, it would respect those wishes.
These have been the key elements in all subsequent attempts at agreement. Together they can be presented as a historic concession on the part of either the British (that Northern Ireland does have the right of secession from the Union) or the Irish (that Northern Ireland has the right to remain British), or both or neither. From the points of view of both Irish and British diplomacy, however, they constituted the elements of an agreement to let events in the North take their own course if they could do so without violence, which purchased acceptance of a more respectable version of the status quo with the promise of the possibility of change. A "working" North, admittedly a re-worked North, remained the point of focus for Irish diplomacy on the national question.
To say that the rest has been a matter of selling various versions of this deal to the parties involved, is not to underestimate the scale and difficulty of the activity which this has involved. While the elements of the present agreement were present in 1973 (arguably earlier), 9 it should be recalled that they existed in a context in which very different views were also being expressed by both authoritative and powerful sources, not least among the governments which the diplomats represented and, in which actions were frequently at odds with words. The Sunningdale agreement collapsed in 1974 because many leaders of the Unionist majority refused to accept it, and the British government was too distracted by other problems to push for its implementation. There followed a period in which the British attempted to focus on their effort to secure an "internal settlement" among the political parties of the North. The failure to do so and a worsening economic situation combined to result in increasing support for violent republicanism, retaliatory sectarian violence and, ultimately, the great contest of wills between Margaret Thatcher and the IRA, in which the latter attempted to gain political status for its prisoners by a campaign of hunger strikes. The consequences, more violence including eventually an assassination attempt on the British prime minister, increasing fears of political instability in Ireland expressed by the Irish themselves and increasing international pressure, especially on the British, to "do something," brought them back to formally involving the Irish. 10
To be fair, an "external" settlement had never been completely abandoned. Thatcher and the Irish Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, had earlier talked about achieving a settlement in the context of "the totality of the relationships" in the (British) Isles or Islands of the North Atlantic (IONA), although what this entailed was never really clarified, and an Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Council was established by Thatcher and Haughey’s successor, Garrett FitzGerald, in 1981. Although assessments of the significance of this body differed (did it signal a new departure or merely put a new name on ongoing contacts?), it was a precursor to the next major development, the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. This reiterated the basic commitments of the two governments regarding the status of Northern Ireland noted above, and added an Intergovernmental Conference of civil servants from both countries to the Intergovernmental Council of ministers. Like the Council, the Conference was intended to promote confidence among the nationalist community but, in an important new departure (as far as both Irish interests and Irish diplomacy were concerned), the relevant civil servants were to be based near Belfast. Thus, an Irish presence, directed by members of the Department of Foreign Affairs, was established in the North with the right to raise (for discussion only) matters of concern to the nationalist community. The immediate price for this involvement was the promise of more security co-operation. The prize (if such it can be called) was that now Irish diplomacy not only sought a Northern Ireland that worked, it was faced with the prospect of being directly involved in making it work.
As we shall see, making Northern Ireland work increasingly involved developments which, from the point of view of state-to-state diplomacy, were taking place off center stage. By the next milestone in the evolution of the Irish-British relationship, the Downing Street Declaration of 1993, it was the re-orientations of other actors which was making progress possible. At the time, however, the declaration appeared to emphasize the extent to which progress in the North remained dependent on relations between Dublin and London, whether this meant between the respective diplomats and public servants, or between the two prime ministers. In making it, the British Prime Minister, John Major, stated that Britain had no selfish interest in the North and would respect the democratic will of its people, while the Irish Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, affirmed that Ireland had no interest in an imposed solution in the North and would be willing to examine the articles of the Irish constitution (notably those which exerted a claim to the North) which Unionists found objectionable. As such, the significance of the Declaration lay not so much in what was said but in who was saying it and its amplification relative to other signals. Despite the wishes of the Irish political leadership, at least, to the contrary, they had not been invited to participate in the previous Downing Street Declaration of 1969, by which British and Northern Irish political leaders had committed themselves to reforms in the North. Now, the complex of negotiations taking place within and about Northern Ireland was presented as taking place under the patronage of London and Dublin, and ideas which had previously been floated soto voce in relaxed moments or off the record became guiding principles with which to pressure the protagonists and to judge each other’s actions. Whatever the other shortcomings of the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985, notably the lack of Unionist involvement in its negotiation, its value in building habits of cooperation between the two governments was demonstrated by their achievement of the Declaration. In the intervening period, the relationship had undergone periods of intense strain in response to terrorist and anti-terrorist violence, human rights violations by the security forces in the North, miscarriages of justice in Britain, and accusations of bad faith arising out of secret contacts with the IRA. The negotiations leading to the Declaration itself were very intense by all accounts, but both sides continued to work with one another to reach an agreed position, despite the political pressures from those to whom they were accountable, and upon whose votes they depended, to do otherwise.
The 1985 Agreement may be said to have been a British document, in the sense that the Irish direct Irish involvement in the North it envisaged, the inter-governmental conference, while real, was small. 11 In contrast, the Framework proposals announced by Major and John Bruton in 1995, after an IRA cease-fire the previous year, may be regarded as a document of Irish diplomacy. Much of it was written by Sean O hUiginn (also Seán O'Huiginn), a senior Irish diplomat. 12
In it, all the, by now, familiar principles -the status of the North to be determined by a majority in the North, a new assembly with power-sharing by proportional representation, and changes in the Irish constitution- were present. However, the envisaged Irish involvement in the North was much expanded with plans for an assembly made up of officials from both parts of Ireland to consider matters of common interest.
The impact of these proposals was muted by the argument which developed over the relationship between paramilitary groups (specifically the IRA) disarming and their political representation in the negotiations about the future of Northern Ireland. In an effort to end the resulting impasse, it was agreed that outside mediation be employed, and a commission under the former US senator John Mitchell was established to deal with the decommissioning of weapons and, subsequently, to chair the negotiations which lead to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The details of this agreement need not be elaborated here. Despite the interlocking of the "three strands" of the agreement to ensure that the province’s own executive and assembly could not begin operating without the North-South and East-West bodies also coming into operation, the implementation of the agreement was delayed by the Unionists and, to a lesser extent, the British government’s insistence that some arms be decommissioned beforehand. This position was subsequently modified by accepting Mitchell’s proposal that decommissioning could be undertaken in parallel with negotiations and by setting a target date for its completion, and the provisions of the agreement came into force at the end of 1999. However, to an extent which is hard to determine, they remain hostage to progress on decommissioning or, more importantly, the highly political judgement that sufficient progress is being made.
While the story of the peace process remained ongoing, the use of outside mediation confirmed the end of a chapter in Irish-British diplomacy. No longer was Irish diplomacy engaged in working with Britain to come up with a process by which Northern Ireland might be stabilized while, seeking to contain the more nationalist elements among the government and society it represented. As the political leadership of the Irish government was at pains to make clear in the run up to the Good Friday Agreement, Ireland would have no formal role in the Strand One negotiations about, or operations of, internal political arrangements in the North, arguably a step back from the position it had achieved in the 1985 agreement. 13 And when Minister for Foreign Affairs Andrews suggested that the North-South Ministerial Council would function "not unlike a government," the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern intervened to get him back "on message" stressing at the Dublin-based Forum on Peace and Reconciliation that the Council was not "...perceived by us as a vehicle for taking over the government of Northern Ireland against the wishes of a majority there. 14 The task of Irish diplomacy was now to do its part in the North/South Ministerial Council and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference and Council to show that they could work effectively.
What the Mitchell Committee did not change, however, was the essentially Irish-British framework within which attempts to operate a Northern Ireland settlement were now made.
Third party mediation was introduced to build confidence among some of the protagonists, but the Commission was created as a creature of the two governments, operating independently, but making its proposals to the two governments, rather than any third party such as the UN, EU or US. As its various lives as a decommissioning commission (sic) and chair of settlement negotiations suggest, the two governments were capable of turning the Mitchell process off and on at (their jointly achieved) will. There is little evidence to suggest that Mitchell himself became a source of third party pressure on either of the two governments.
Even if nothing else emerges, so long as the peace negotiations preserve a cease fire, they must be judged a success, certainly by the criteria of diplomacy, probably by the criteria of the British government and possibly even by the criteria of the Irish government. With success, even in these limited terms, both Dublin and London would probably be content to keep the process in an Irish-British framework. If the cease fire was to break down, however, over the relationship between progress in the political negotiations and progress in disarming, then it is likely that the Irish political leadership would be very reluctant to surrender the precedent of third party involvement at the prospect of leverage over the British which it appears to hold out. The British, in contrast, would prefer to return to bilateral crisis management with the Irish or, failing that, their own version of ourselves alone for taking care of Northern Ireland. In the absence of agreement between Ireland and Britain this would remain the default option and, accordingly, one would expect Irish diplomacy to advise in favor of a return to bilateralism. Only in the event of a close vote (either way) in a referendum on the future of the Province would it be conceivable that both parties would opt for greater international mediation, but this (remarkable though it may seem) is to move into uncharted and, almost, unimagined waters. For these reasons, the Mitchell Commission should not be seen as the harbinger of an internationalization of the Northern Ireland peace process for the time being. Rather, it should be seen as a symptom of the increasingly complex networks and multiplicity of actors for which professional diplomacy continues to provide the basic structures, agendas and processes within which agreements are sought and interests are pursued. The mainframe of those structures was the international society of states.
Irish diplomacy, the North, and international society relations
Ultimately, all diplomacy is bilateral. However, there can be no diplomacy without a process for mutual recognition, and this process derives its specific character from the norms and conventions of international society. Hence the second source of diplomats’ conservatism. If they have a professional and a personal stake in the sovereignty of those they represent, then they have a similar stake in the society by which that sovereignty is constituted. This presents problems for the diplomats of small states like Ireland which have had particular revisionist aspirations for they operate under three conflicting impulses.
The first, shared with their political masters, is to engage in "existential diplomacy," to exercise and demonstrate the benefits of having secured what, in the Irish political lexicon, has been called "...a place among the nations." Through a wide range of actions, which may sometimes seem irrational by any narrower means-end calculus, those who act for the state constitute its status by doing the sorts of things which states are supposed to do. For example, it can be argued that the kind of armed forces Ireland constructed between the wars and the operational doctrine they were given made no military sense given likely threats, and that a, far less symbolically satisfying, capacity for unconventional warfare should have been revived and developed. 15 In this regard, Irish diplomacy’s participation in conferences on matters in which its leaders conceded it had no direct material stake, for example, naval arms reduction, has been well documented. In both cases, actions were taken for the sake of form rather than for immediate or substantive reasons, which is not by any means to suggest that satisfying form is not on occasions an important and worthy objective.
The second impulse, which the diplomats of small states and their political masters are less likely to share because it involves complex and detailed work with few immediate payoffs, is to argue and work for a strengthening of international society. The assumption which informs this impulse is that in mitigating the effects of anarchy, a stronger international society of conventions and rules will constrain the strong and, thus, favor the weak, who are constrained anyway. The equalizing argument is intended to apply principally to countries, but it may be seen that the diplomats, themselves, of smaller countries have more, and more interesting, things to do when relations between states, and not just relations between diplomats, are more regulated by rules and conventions. Since independence, Ireland has possessed a diplomats who are enthusiasts of such an approach and who, whenever their political masters have shared this enthusiasm, have been highly active and, in the assessment of their colleagues from other services, highly effective. The first Free State government backed them in this regard at the League of Nations and in the Commonwealth. Frank Aiken, the foreign minister from 1955 to 1968, led them in this regard at the UN. And Irish diplomats have been among the most enthusiastic participants in those aspects of the European Union which equalize member state influence in collective decision-making. Indeed, since the Aiken era, Irish diplomats have self-consciously sought to construct and represent a new Irish identity as a good, helpful and reformist international citizen, a country whose people are putting behind them the attitudes which remain a source of political conflict elsewhere. A good example of this is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ recent claim that the Irish people increasingly see the European Union not simply as an organization to which Ireland belongs, but as an integral part of the future. We see ourselves increasingly as Europeans 17 .
The third impulse, however, is to use international society and the reputation one’s state enjoys as supporter of strengthening it to pursue more substantive objectives. Virtue may be its own reward but, not surprisingly, Irish governments have hoped for a little more and, on occasions, asked their diplomats to secure it. In the 1940s and early 1950s, for example, they were instructed to bring the issue Northern Ireland before the Council of Europe, one of the few multilateral forums to which Ireland had access since its war time neutrality was being used to keep it out of the UN system. It is doubtful whether Irish governments expected much to come of this, but discomforting the British and showing one’s domestic audience that one was doing something could be regarded as reasonable secondary benefits from the effort. However, the policy’s detractors likened it to the child who raises a sore thumb seeking attention. It made Ireland look immature, self-absorbed and unfamiliar with the way the world of diplomacy actually works; fine if one did not care what foreigners think, but damaging if one sought to be taken seriously by them, as Irish diplomats did.
Their reluctance to engage in the diplomacy of complaint gathered strength as they engaged in the business of constructing a new identity for Ireland under Lemass and Aiken as a good international citizen. Certainly diplomacy, just like Irish politics, had its culture of performing and securing favors, a derogation from common tariffs here and an international organization chairmanship there, but one should not expect constructive and helpful diplomacy -peacekeeping in Cyprus or arms control initiatives in New York, for example- to procure bilateral support in a substantial dispute over the sovereignty of a piece of territory. More importantly, one should not want it to do so if one took at all seriously the case which Irish diplomacy was making for how arguments should be settled and how states, big and small alike, should behave responsibly in international affairs. The only thing worse than a failed attempt to secure international leverage over Britain by behaving oneself and holding to the high ground would be a successful one.
A failed attempt would undermine Irish credibility, while a successful one would provoke Britain by raising the stakes and, thereby, undermine Irish security.
Accordingly, Irish diplomacy did not, of its own volition, seek support for Ireland’s national aspirations in the North from the international society as a whole or its members. And when forced to do so by domestic political requirements, it sought to moderate both the scope and the tone of such requests. The pressure to do something would be most intense in the aftermath of a terrorist incident or local crisis in the North. For example, with the initial breakdown of law and order and the involvement of the security forces in attacks on the nationalist community in 1969, the political temperature in Ireland rose to the point where both direct and indirect military intervention were suggested to the government and considered by some members of it. This was modified to the call for Britain to accept a UN peacekeeping force in the North, a proposal in which the British had no interest at all. Since Britain was a member of the UN Security Council, indeed it was currently holding the chair, there was no prospect of its position being overridden. Nevertheless, Ireland’s permanent representative was instructed to ask for a consideration of the situation in Northern Ireland to be placed on the Security Council agenda. 18
The British maintained that Northern Ireland was a domestic matter but, nevertheless, the issue was discussed twice, and the British gave assurances that they were doing all they could to restore order and implement reforms. In the worlds of public opinion or political horse trading this did not amount to much. In the world of professional diplomacy, however, it was a considerable triumph. Ireland’s diplomatic standing was such that the British had felt obliged, or were willing, to give an account of themselves before the Council, although the letter of the law was on their side and they could have prevented any discussion. Further, the whole exercise had been conducted without making things worse. Unwanted friends, such as the USSR, had appeared supporting the Irish case to be heard, but wanted friends like the US, France and, indeed, Britain had not been forced into either taking difficult positions against one another or into turning down an Irish request that they should do so. From the point of view of Irish diplomacy, this was an outcome which was consistent both with Irish interests and Ireland’s position on how international affairs ought to be conducted if a stronger international society was to emerge.
The need to respond to other flare ups in the conflict in the North was mitigated by the tendency of terror and what sometimes looked like counter-terror to cancel each other out. Thus during hunger`strikes or after a counter-terrorist success, for example, Irish diplomacy generally restricted itself to calls for flexibility and self-restraint on the part of the British, expressed with the degree of intensity for which the situation seemed to call, although after the incident known as "Bloody Sunday" in 1972, the Irish ambassador was withdrawn from London. While the armed conflict was generally episodic in nature, however, one aspect of it which was not was the British treatment of terrorist suspects and prisoners. In 1971, the Irish government brought the interrogation techniques used by the British on internees (people arrested on suspicion and detained without trial) before the European Commission on Human Rights. The Commission investigated the complaint and brought the case before the European Court in 1976, which two years later found the British guilty of using human and degrading methods, but not torture. This was the only explicit attempt made by the Irish to use the machinery of international society against Britain. The duration of the process and the disappointing results (for some Irish politicians if not for Irish diplomats), given the time and effort expended, may have contributed to the subsequent reluctance of Irish governments to pursue this line of pressure on Britain. It should be recalled, however, that the approach was initiated at a time when internment without trial was in force and a beleaguered and hostile Unionist government was still in power in the North. Once direct rule was established, the Irish diplomacy’s preference for working on Britain through partnership and persuasion, rather than pressure, was greatly strengthened.
If Irish diplomacy did not regard the mobilization of international society to pressure Britain with favor, however, its view of its capacity to improve circumstances in the North was another matter. The disadvantage of the UN was that its procedures always risked putting states in direct conflict with one another. To get anything done, it seemed as those one state had to bring the conduct of another before a tribunal of their peers. The European Community, in contrast, which both Ireland and Britain joined in 1973, sometimes presented opportunities for finessing these problems. The Community consists of a mix of inter-governmental, intersocietal, and supranational institutions engaged in a complex of activities directed at making its members richer and stronger by bringing them closer together. Many of these activities involve the re-distribution of wealth from rich to poor regions or sectors of the Community. This is used for a wide range of purposes from employment schemes to infrastructure development.
One of the dilemmas which confronted both Irish and British governments after they embarked on establishing all-Ireland entities for certain aspects of public policy in the mid 1970s, was the extent to which they would like it to be treated on a regional basis -either as a single region, or as several regions whose boundaries ignored existing political borders between the two parts of Ireland. For both governments, their role in allocating funds disbursed on a regional basis was a vexed question. For the British, the political implications of involving Ireland in Northern policy provided an additional complication, and for Ireland the question of whether money spent on the North would come out of money which it would have otherwise obtained posed a stumbling block. Progress on this issue has been minimal, and commentators in Ireland often claim that Northern Ireland is at a disadvantage because it lacks direct representation at Brussels. However, as the peace process showed signs of progress after the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, these obstacles were outflanked by the establishment of a European Community (later Union) fund for advancing peace rather than economic development. By 1997, according to Foreign Minister Burke, the EU had made a budgetary provision of 100m ecu (£80 million) for its Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland and the border counties of Ireland" for the following year. 19
The other source of peace money was, of course, the United States, and here Irish diplomacy was engaged on a broad front. Since 1969, Irish governments have found very little support from their American counterparts for putting pressure on Britain, a state of affairs about which Irish diplomacy is little surprised and, likely, quite relieved. At the level of state-to-state relations, this is a matter of power politics; Britain was, and remains, more important than Ireland to the United States. Indeed, when Irish sensibilities got in the way of American strategic priorities, for example, Ireland objected to US troops arriving in the North without its permission being requested during the Second World War, US governments have manifested considerable impatience.
Hence, Irish diplomacy restricted itself to seeking a declaration of US concern at the conflict and violence in Northern Ireland. This it secured in 1977 when President Carter declared that the US was, indeed, concerned, looked forward to a just solution peacefully arrived at, and acknowledged the role of both the British and the Irish government in working for such a solution. The reference to an Irish role was a gain for Irish diplomacy, and the promise that US would work with others to provide resources for the province in the event of a settlement was an important step on the road to Irish diplomacy’s preferred way of trying to end the conflict. A leading member of international society had provided a potentially definitive statement of the terms in which the rest of that society should regard the problems of Northern Ireland.
Beyond that, Irish diplomacy secured (and probably sought) little from the executive branch of the US government until there was some evidence of progress in the North itself. In 1980, the attempt of the new Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, to transfer Ireland’s successful ambassador, Sean Donlon, from Washington to the UN was countered by pressure from Congress rather than the White House which restricted itself, especially in the Reagan-Thatcher era to largely symbolic gestures like visits to the Irish embassy on Saint Patrick’s Day. 20 After the 1985 agreement, however, US interest began to grow with Congressional bills providing limited financial assistance on an annual basis as the spearhead of what was to become a major program of private American investment in the Irish economy. As the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, expressed it in a speech in 1997 to the American Chamber of Commerce, Ireland with the US ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith present, US involvement in the peace process helped to "focus minds" and to "increase levels of confidence." However, the accompanying barrage of statistics which he provided about US involvement in the Irish economy -accounting for 60,000 jobs, 27 percent of all manufacturing employment and 40 percent of all Irish exports- provided a clear signal of the terms in which Ireland really valued US involvement. 21
Indeed, too much "focus," as when candidate Clinton promised that he would appoint an Irish peace envoy on becoming president, was not welcomed. After he became president in 1993, the Irish government joined those who convinced him that it would not be helpful, 22 and it is difficult to ascertain Irish diplomacy’s position on the visits of Gerry Adams and Joe Cahill to the US and the American ambassador’s lobbying to this end before the cease fire in 1994. One suspects that it shared the doubts expressed by the State Department and, more vociferously, by the British, although the terms in which the latter expressed their high dudgeon made it politically impossible for the Irish to be associated with them on what was, after all, a close call. By the time of Clinton’s visit to Northern Ireland the following year and his subsequent telephone calls to encourage the negotiators, the fact of the US executive’s involvement had been established but, more importantly, its extent had been stabilized by the unpredictability and slowness of the peace process, much to the relief of Irish diplomacy. The IRA had decided to abandon its cease fire before, or possibly during Clinton’s visit. In 1999, his visit to Norway to celebrate the anniversary of the Oslo accords on the Middle East did not include a detour to provide a boost to the Belfast negotiations.
In many ways, however, Irish diplomacy’s attempts to harness the American executive’s fluctuating interest in Northern Ireland to its own efforts was only a small part of its US campaign. A critical aspect of Carter’s 1977 statement was that it included an appeal to Irish-Americans to refrain from supporting those prepared to use violence in Northern Ireland. This was the product of intense activity by Irish diplomacy directed not so much at the White House as at senior members of the Congress and the Senate and Irish-American organizations. Its purpose was to change American images of Ireland and, as such, it was part of a broader attempt to redefine Ireland’s identity which was eventually to be conducted at all levels and sectors of society in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
One of the oldest tasks of diplomats is to represent those for whom they act, not just in the sense that a professional may represent his or her clients interests, but in that they stand in the place of and thus stand for or constitute them. The best diplomats have always enjoyed a reputation for, in some way, capturing the essence of their countries, but to do this well has always involved an element of creativity, imagining and presenting a version of one’s country which is attractive and impressive to one’s host. When identities are stable, this may be a relatively straightforward affair. A British ambassador to Washington, for example, knows the essentials of what he needs to project in terms of American expectations, whatever nuances the "re-branding" exercises of successive governments may compel he or she to consider. When identities become unstable or unsatisfactory, however, then the business of representation become a more complex matter, as much a negotiation as a projection. Irish diplomats had been engaged with re-branding exercises since the Lemass era. With Ireland’s accession to the European Community and Britain’s revival of the shadow of an Irish dimension to the problems of the North, in 1973, however, the question of what kind of Ireland they represented became at once more urgent and more complex. Irish diplomats increasingly found themselves involved with all sorts of other actors both at home and abroad engaged in the difficult process of creating an idea of Ireland, modern yet acceptable, or tolerable at least, to all the parties engaged in the dispute over the North.
Irish Diplomacy, the North and Transnational Society Relations
The general image was that originally promoted by the Lemass administration in the 1960s of a modernizing and outward-looking Ireland which sought to build upon (and beyond) its identity as a Catholic and Celtic victim of British imperialism. At the heart of the battle between modernizers, traditionalists, and radicals in the Irish case, however, was the question of the North. At the start of the 1960s, all three groups shared the assumption that the British were the cause of the problem. If the British left, then the problem would be solved. The modernizers could not see them leaving and so hoped that their staying would not get in the way important business. Indeed, they hoped that with interdependence and its associated prosperity perhaps the significance of partition, if not partition itself, might simply fade away. For the traditionalists, the North helped validate the Ireland they sought to preserve by providing a standing reminder of how bad things once had been for nationalists and catholics. For the revolutionaries, ending British rule in the North would not only be the final chapter in Ireland’s struggle for national liberation; it might also break imperialism’s hold on both the government in London and its collaborator in Dublin.
The great change began when, as a result of the continuing deadlock in the North and the increasing difficulty of attributing British policy there to economic self-interest, the assumption that it was a British problem began to be called into question. This possibility first received sustained attention in Ireland in the late 1970s when the British, after the failure of their constitutional initiatives and in the face of severe economic difficulties at home, floated the possibility of cutting their losses and leaving. The prospect of the increasing disorders in which this would result and the burden, possibly unmanageable, that this would place on Ireland, permitted a more serious hearing for the view that the problems of the North were problems of both parts of Ireland, rather than just British-inspired and maintained.
For Irish diplomacy, this shift manifested itself first in the need to counter the efforts of the IRA and its supporters to raise cash and procure arms within the Irish-American community. The latter had broadly shared the republican-radical view that Northern Ireland was essentially a piece of unfinished business in Ireland’s long struggle for freedom from Britain. The remembered circumstances of their own families leaving Ireland, the American desire to identify who, rather than what, is right in political contests, the activities of IRA supporters in the US and, after 1969, of the Unionists and the British in the North, all served to sustain a dated and simplified image of the problem. It was an image which American politicians in constituencies with significant Irish-American populations ignored at their peril and on occasions, like Congressman Mario Biaggi of New York, sought to exploit.
From the embassy in Washington and from the consulates in primarily New York and Boston, in the mid-1970s, therefore, Irish diplomacy embarked on educating all levels of Irish-American society about its counterpart back home with the principal object of demonstrating that nothing about the Northern Ireland situation exempted it from Americans’ strictures on the use of violence to effect political change. Initially, the embassy targeted leading Irish-American politicians, notably, Senators Edward Kennedy and Patrick Moynihan, Congressman "Tip" O’ Neill, and Governor Hugh Carey, to get them to speak against violence in Northern Ireland and, more importantly, against Americans providing financial support, out of a misguided sentimentality, for those who contributed to the violence. From 1977 onwards, the same year that Carter made his statement, the "big four" (so named by Michael Lillis at the Irish embassy) began to issue an annual Saint Patrick’s Day statement which called for an end to violence and to support for those like Noraid and the Irish National Caucus who directly or indirectly assisted some of its perpetrators. Then, they and the consulates began the more difficult task of addressing Irish-American organizations whose members were often far less receptive to the case they were trying to make.
Their efforts in this regard had two objectives: to secure financial support from private American citizens with Irish backgrounds for those who were seeking reconciliation or working for a peaceful settlement in the North; and, to publicize the Irish government’s emphasis on a "two traditions" approach and its associated proposal for an Irish-British joint administration which emerged from the New Ireland Forum talks in the early 1980s. In the face of firm and, at times, strident opposition from the British, the joint administration proposals, in their original conception, went nowhere, and it was perhaps a cost to Irish diplomacy that it was stuck with promoting them for some time after it was clear that they were a non-starter. However, after the initial setback of the confrontation between the IRA and the Thatcher government over prisoners’ political status in the early 1980s, the effort to create an American constituency for new approaches to the North was much more successful, possibly because of the utterly sterile outcome of the hunger strike campaign. Prominent and, more importantly, rich Irish-Americans began to come forward to lobby American political candidates to support progress along these lines, to offer financial support to those in both Ireland and America who would work for this approach, and to serve as citizen diplomats in the fine old American tradition of going over "to see for themselves" what might be done. 23
In the immediate aftermath of the 1985 agreement, there seemed little upon which to build.
The British seemed to regard it as the conclusion of a process by which an Irish dimension was conceded in return for greater security cooperation, while the Irish had assumed that it was but the first step on the road to somewhere. The people in the North, meanwhile, faulted it either for giving away too much, too little or for being ignored by it. In the absence of forward momentum, the conflict in Northern Ireland seemed to resume its normal rhythms of terrorist and counter-terrorist outrages and arguments about the degree of honesty, resolve and fairness with which the British and Irish governments pursued the quest for security and peace in their respective jurisdictions. And Irish diplomats in the US, like their British counterparts, were left with getting their political masters’ message across to the American people without making things worse by so doing. In retrospect, however, it may be seen that the 1985 agreement, while but the latest iteration of attempts to create an all-Irish dimension to the North dating back to the Home Rule struggles, provided the outlines of the door which the antagonists would eventually walk through. For them to do so, however, required other developments, specifically the end of the Cold War and the accompanying general sense, right or wrong, that if that big argument could be settled or, more accurately, shrivel up and die, then so could others.
In Ireland, as elsewhere, the new uncertainties brought about a complex mix of transformational, opportunist and ring-holding politics, with no movement or agent possessing a monopoly on any type. The most obvious and possibly most important example of this new politics was the process by which the Hume-Adams agreement was reached between them, and was co-opted or reclaimed (depending on one’s point of view) by Dublin and London, before becoming the basis of the present power-sharing executive and the accompanying attempt to return to "normal" politics in the North.
From the point of view of those who favor a united Ireland, at the heart of the agreement lies a substantive concession and a bet. The concession is that the right of the Irish to self-determination includes the right of the majority in the North to refuse to join with the rest of Ireland. For the purposes of Irish self-determination, therefore, the six counties of the North have been recognized as a separate Irish political community by those who previously regarded it as the product of a fraud or power politics. The bet is that with this concession made, with help from London, Dublin, Washington, Brussels, and with the emerging patterns of familiarity and confidence-building made possible by the Irish dimension to its new institutions, Northern Ireland will float, sail or be blown towards its "natural" destination as part of a united Ireland.
For example, Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach responsible for Ireland’s acceptance of the Good Friday agreement, claimed that "everyone" is getting "...more all-Ireland minded," 24 that the "soft Unionist vote" would be won over to Irish unity in ten to fifteen years, and that the British government was now "...effectively out of the equation." Neither the British parliament or British people could now impede the achievement of Irish unity. 25
The extent to which Irish diplomats would agree with this assessment is unclear. What is clear, however, is that they were fully engaged in bringing it about. They were so in three ways: negotiating with the parties especially over the drafting of agreements; representing Ireland, and especially a conception of Ireland, to the various protagonists; and recognizing certain protagonists and what they stood for by working with them.
Diplomats, it is generally agreed, play an important part in negotiating and drafting agreements. However, it is generally assumed that there role in this regard is of both a technical and a secondary nature. The politicians work out the basic principles of a deal; the diplomats provide the right words which make it watertight. Thus, for example, Mallie and McKitrick speak of a draft of the Hume-Adams proposal being turned over to Martin Mansergh who "...embellished it with diplomatic language." 26 Only rarely does drafting in this sense reach the attention of the public. On one occasion, for example, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dick Spring gave a press conference on the possibility of changing Articles Two and Three of the Constitution at which he referred to the continuing right of the Unionists, rather than the majority (possibly a very different thing at some point), to withhold consent. His assistant, Fergus Finlay, attributed the error to working in a hurry and neglecting to let what he called the "theological experts" of the Department check their draft. 27
It is clear from accounts of the evolution of the Hume-Adams agreement, however, that senior Irish diplomats were centrally and creatively involved in negotiating its successive drafts. Donlon, O’hUiginn, Donlon and, especially, Mansergh did not merely provide the right form of words to give expression to what the politicians wanted. The politicians often did not know what they wanted. They were more preoccupied with finding out what others would settle for. Therefore, the diplomats often found themselves engaged in creative exercises, arguably to render a very old formula -autonomy for the North within the Union, with and Irish dimension and with no future options foreclosed- acceptable to the protagonists. Thus, if one can think of Ireland in these terms, and think of self-determination in these terms, you can see how what we are proposing is entirely consistent with your objectives and principles. Repackaging could result in substantive shifts. For example, the republican concession in the original Hume-Adams document was accompanied by a demand not just for a British declaration that it had no selfish interest in hanging on to the North, but a definite commitment to be out by a certain date. In successive versions this was watered down to asking for a British declaration of intention to quit at some point, to accepting the British position that there could be no change without the agreement of the majority. This was made possible, in part, by Irish diplomacy’s emphasis on the new and dynamic context in which this old guarantee was to be situated. It was this which provided the sense of forward momentum to those republicans already convinced that the strategies of the past were leading nowhere and becoming unsustainable.
Playing a leading role in negotiations and drafting in this way necessarily involved Irish diplomats in representing their conceptions of Ireland as a modern, bourgeois republic. The image itself was not particularly new. The Lemass strategy, it could be claimed, had produced not only a wealthy Ireland but, thanks to the European context, an increasingly influential one capable of mobilizing international support to engage the British. Perhaps the image of a Ireland as a player, more than that of it as a commercial success, had the most impact on republicans. Not only did the strategy of sinn fein appear to be going nowhere for the time being, the Free State route appeared successful enough to give it its head. Even doubters could concede that, if only to have their doubts confirmed.
Irish diplomacy also represented Ireland more mundanely. The work of the consulates in the US was mirrored and expanded upon in Britain and elsewhere by a new focus on the Irish diaspora, both as those whom in some sense Ireland had failed (emigrants) and as some great reservoir, both practical (investors and, latterly skilled labour) and cultural (Ireland’s gift to the world) upon which it could draw for sustenance and self-affirmation. To this end, for example, new consulates were opened in Edinburgh and Cardiff in 1999. 28 While the claim to represent a broader Irish nation found most of its expression at the level of symbols such as the light maintained by President Mary Robinson for the emigrants in Áras Uachtaráin, it had substantive diplomatic consequences. First, it offered the Irish government a less confrontational point of access into the affairs of the North than the territorial claims embodied in the old Articles Two and Three of the Constitution. If Irish ministers and diplomats could visit Irish communities in Manchester and Liverpool to discuss their concerns with living in Britain, then surely the prospect for visiting Belfast and Derry without appearing to mark out old political claims would be increased. Under the revised Article Two, the people of the North could occupy a place somewhere between the Irish nation (although they might claim Irish citizenship as their birthright, should they so choose) and the people of Irish ancestry living abroad with whom the Irish nation "...cherishes its special affinity." 29
Secondly, it involved Irish ministers and diplomats in talks with Irish people in the North and Britain whose concerns were not scripted into the dominant discourses of republicanism and unionism. President Robinson played her own part in explicitly trying to redefine both what it was to be Irish and to whom official Ireland does and does not talk with the help of Irish diplomats, if not always their political masters. From the North, peace people, community and youth workers, women’s groups and others who did not fit the categories were invited to Dublin, while the facts that many Irish people had served with distinction and pride in the British armed forces and many lived happily in Britain and did not see its monarchy as the embodiment of all evil were officially acknowledged, by a series of state ceremonies. 30
The purposes of this sort of activity were to get people talking to each other who normally did not and to get them to do so in unaccustomed or re-defined settings even, on occasions, at the highest level. For example, the all party talks surrounding the Good Friday Agreement were held in the Castle Buildings at Stormont, the seat of the former Northern Ireland government. A regular participant in these talks was the Irish deputy foreign minister, Liz O’ Donnell who, as a consequence, was present when the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, visited in 1999. The DFA report on these events was headed "Minister of State Welcomes Visit of Prime Minister Blair," which could be taken to mean that she thought it was a good thing (which she did), but which also drew attention to the fact the a member of the Irish government was welcoming a British prime minister to Belfast. 31
Whether or not such creativity, symbolic or substantive, will bring people closer together in the long term remains to be seen, but the exercise had more immediate consequences. By "talking to terrorists," for example, Irish diplomats may not have convinced them of the merits of peace and understanding, but they did draw them into a process which accepted the fact of, if not the legitimacy of, existing political arrangements of international society. The IRA and Sinn Fein were transnational actors avowedly seeking a new political dispensation, but they were not recognized as such. Instead, they were recognized as the voice of a current in one of the communities in the existing scheme of things, and were persuaded into letting agents of the existing arrangements represent their case for a more effective place and voice in those arrangements. By talking to others, the representatives of new or would be social movements, Irish diplomats diluted the republicans’ claim to represent a counter-hegemonic alternative to existing political arrangements. Northern Irish politics, it could be demonstrated, were not just about either union or unity. However, the representatives of these other movements and ideas were much to weak to pose challenges of their own to existing political arrangements. Indeed for many of them, the particular flag under which they regarded themselves as neglected, marginalized or exploited was a matter of considerable indifference. As a consequence, the principal immediate effect of recognizing them and engaging them in talks was to strengthen the effort to make sure that those talks would be about changes inside the existing political arrangements, a divided Ireland, not changes of the arrangements themselves.
Conclusion
According to the Irish socialist and nationalist revolutionary, James Connolly,
...diplomacy has a code of honour of its own. It has a standard by which it tests all things. That code has no necessary relation to the moral code, that standard has nothing to do with the righteousness of any cause. 32
To be sure, he was writing in 1915 and talking mainly about British diplomacy which he believed had used deception to out-manoeuvre what he took to be the more dynamic and powerful, if also more naive, German Empire, but the references to diplomacy’s own standard and its distance from causes, righteous or otherwise, remain pertinent. Professional diplomats do, indeed, tend to be conservatives out of self-interest and on the assumption of their profession that creating, destroying, expanding and curtailing states generally present more problems than they solve. It may be added that they are also conservatives because they are simply so busy with so many different things. A glance at the press section records of any foreign ministry with it stream of statements on virtually every and any issue is a useful corrective to the tendency to assume that diplomacy is primarily a calaculative and strategic activity. Self-interest, conviction and busyness combine to put them at the forefront of the defense of the way things are and the ways things get done.
Irish diplomacy on the Northern Ireland question embodied this conservatism. Since the creation of the Free State it worked to dampen the irredentist appetites of its own political elite at home while seeking to mitigate the consequences of their expression abroad. It did so the grounds that what was sought, Irish unity, was probably unattainable while the seeking it would be highly dangerous to the state and people they represented. When the source of that irredenta itself began to pose costs and risks which would just not go away in the late 1960s and, indeed, presented Ireland with the nightmare that its premier official dream might actually come true, Irish diplomacy was at the forefront of efforts to redefine the basic elements of the problem -Ireland’s and Irish identity- in such a way as to lead the protagonists into a search for solutions within the existing political arrangements.
The results were impressive in terms of both purely professional diplomatic criteria and in terms of what most experts think is happening to international relations and the place of diplomacy within them. The servants of a small, weak state managed to coral a vast array of sub- and transnational actors of the new types into accepting the sovereign state system, and this unsatisfying particular manifestation of it -a partitioned or incomplete national state- as the basic context in which they would pursue their political agendas. Some, like women’s groups and community associations needed little persuasion as they regarded arguments about the scope and identity of the political framework within which they operated as either unimportant or part of the problem. Their concern was with redefining and improving social relations within whatever political community they found themselves. Others, the nationalist and republican groups which existed to promote and achieve new framework within which old and new arguments could be conducted, were courted with more difficulty for obvious reasons and their commitment to what Irish diplomacy had to offer them remains tenuous. However, what is impressive, is the extent to which these groups now accept that the choice before them is not between alternative basic political arrangements, but between the existing arrangements and war. To say that they may eventually choose the latter again, is not to minimize this achievement or Irish diplomacy’s part in bringing it about.
Of course, it may be objected and, no doubt, James Connolly would have objected that the present state of affairs has been brought about by a diplomatic finesse which promised all things to all people. The nationalists were lured in by the promise that everyone important was ensuring that subsequent developments would move in a direction favourable to them. The unionists were lured in by the promise that their veto on new arrangements remained intact. Nothing substantive was settled or, worse, one or both parties believed things to have been settled, in effect, on their terms. Once they realize this is not so, it may be plausibly claimed, the agreement will disintegrate. Perhaps so, but this is to judge the agreement in terms of its capacity to deliver a final settlement in accordance with the conception of "righteousness" offered by a particular cause. This is a criterion which is rarely, if ever, applied by good diplomacy, especially if the grounds for a lasting settlement, by agreement or imposition, are absent. Then it is perfectly acceptable, indeed one might say it was righteous in the moral code of diplomacy, to seek to engage parties in ongoing conversations, if not by deception exactly, then by not countering their own best cases for by they should participate. In such circumstances, it is better than the alternative, violent conflict in which no party possesses an effective preponderance of force, and, the odds against it notwithstanding, such talks may lead to a solution, or come to be seen as a solution themselves.
There is, however, one problem with applying the diplomatic criteria alone to an assessment of Irish diplomacy on the Northern Ireland question. Professional diplomats may accept that an agreement settles far less than it claims. Politicians, paramilitaries and community leaders have a far harder time doing so, especially when agreements are conducted and sold in the glare of the publicity provided by the mass media. Then, expectations may be raised to the point where it becomes very difficult to settle for less than success or, worse, victory. Publicity, while inescapable, remains the enemy of effective diplomacy. However, as more and different types of people become drawn into the business of diplomacy -negotiating and re-negotiating identities- as they were in Northern Ireland, they may acquire their professional counterparts’ hard learned habits of restrained ambition and treating publicity with caution. As is also the case in Northern Ireland, whether those whom the new diplomats represent can be persuaded to share these traits is another matter.
Endnotes
Note 1: Luc Reychler, "Beyond Traditional Diplomacy," Discussion Paper, Diplomatic Studies Program (DPDSP), Leicester, 1996 Back.
Note 2: William Crotty, "Democratisation and Political Development in Ireland" in William Crotty and David E. Schmitt (eds.), Ireland and the Politics of Change, Longman, London, 1998, p.3. Back.
Note 3: Richard Langhorne, "Current Developments in Diplomacy: Who Are the Diplomats Now?" in Diplomacy and Statecraft, 8, 2, 1997, pp.1-15. Back.
Note 4: Diplomacy: Profession in Peril? Wilton Park, 1997, Virtual Diplomacy, United States Institute for Peace, 1997 and Reinventing Diplomacy in the Information Age, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1998. Back.
Note 5: See Andrew Cooper (eds.), Niche diplomacy, Basingstoke, UK, 1997 for examples. Back.
Note 6: The Republic of Ireland Act (1948) and the Ireland Act (1948). Back.
Note 7: The Free Trade Area Agreement (1965). Back.
Note 8: Press release 29 August 1997, "Minister Burke Underlines Foreign Policy Priorities to Heads of Irish Missions Abroad," Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). Back.
Note 9: I am indebted to Peter Catterall for this point. Back.
Note 10: Adrian Guelke, "Northern Ireland: international and north/south issues" in William Crotty and David E. Schmitt (eds.), Ireland and the Politics of Change, Longman, London, 1998, p.200. Back.
Note 11: Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick, The Fight for Peace: the inside story of the Irish Peace Process, Heinemann, London, 1997, p.26 for details of British taking the initiative in drafting the 1985 agreement. They say it was "crafted" by Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong, Sir David Goodall from the Foreign Office, and Sir Alan Goodison, the British ambassador to Dublin. An Anglo-Irish committee was subsequently set up with senior Irish diplomats Noel Dorr, Sean Donlon, Dermott Nally, and Michael Lillis (see below). Back.
Note 12: Mallie and McKittrick, pp.121 for details of his service at the New York Consulate during the hunger strikes, at Maryfield (the centre for civil servants near Belfast set up under the Anglo-Irish Agreement) and as Director of the Anglo-Irish Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs. Seán O'Huiginn is at time of writing, Ireland’s ambassador to the US. Back.
Note 13: Minister Andrews in interview with Mark Simpson, Belfast Telegraph, 5 September 1997, cited in DFA Press Section.. Back.
Note 14: Press Section, 27 November 1997 Back.
Note 15: I am grateful to Philip Davis for this point. Back.
Note 16: See for example, David W. Harkness, The Restless Dominion, London, Macmillan, 1969. Back.
Note 17: Cited in "Crotty" in Crotty and Schmitt, p.17. Back.
Note 18: For a fuller discussion of the following see Paul Sharp, Irish Foreign Policy and the European Community, Gower-Dartmouth, 1990. Back.
Note 19: DFA Press Section, July 22, 1997, speaking in Brussels. Back.
Note 20: For details of the Donlon affair see Richard B. Finnegan and Edward T. McCarron, Ireland: historical echoes and contemporary politics, Boulder, Westview, 2000, p.326. Back.
Note 21: November 24, 1997, Press Section.Back.
Note 22: "Guelke" in Crotty and Schmitt, p.202. Back.
Note 23: See Mallie and McKitrick, p.279, for details of the work of Dermot Gallagher, Ireland’s ambassador to the US , in helping to set up the Irish-American Advisory Board, and for the activities of Bill Flynn in support of Gerry Adams being allowed to enter the US and Niall O’Dowd lobbying Clinton to become involved in the Irish question. Back.
Note 24: Ken Whelan and Eugene Masterson, Bertie Ahern: Taoiseach and Peacemaker, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 1998, p.204. Back.
Note 25: Ahern, Arbour Hill Commemoration, 26 April, 1998, DFA Press Section. Some British, at least, those who regarded themselves as such in the North, were certainly in a position to impede the achievement of unity. For evidence that the previous British government, at least, did not see itself as nudging the Unionists towards the "obvious" solution, see John Major, The Autobiography, London, Harper Collins, pp.431-494. The position of the Blair government at time of writing is less clear. Back.
Note 26: Mallie and McKitrick, p.121. Martin Mansergh was an Irish diplomat who came to enjoy the confidence of Charles Haughey, perhaps the most republican or "greenest" of the constitutional politicians of the period. Mansergh’s combination of political views and diplomatic skills is at odds with the sense of a diplomatic service with its own orientation towards the identity and interests of the state it serves presented here but, on this occasion, the exception appears to prove, rather than test, the rule. Back.
Note 27: Mallie and McKitrick, p.207. Back.
Note 28: The Department of Foreign Affairs noted that Andrews would be the first Foreign Minister to visit Scotland and meet its First Minister since the setting up of the new Scottish executive and said that his visit marked "...the important links between the two countries." DFA Press Section, 26 May 1999. Back.
Note 29: Robinson’s foray into symbolic diplomacy resulted, in part, from her attempts to revitalize the presidency. She wished, for example, to take the initiative on foreign visits rather than waiting for requests from the political executive which rarely came. Robinson would not ask for government clearance before visiting Northern Ireland saying the North was not abroad and citing the old Article Two in support of her position. It is not clear whether the revised Article Two would provide the same degree of support. Olivia O’Leary and Helen Burke, Mary Robertson: the authorized biography, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1998, p.190. Back.
Note 30: She consulted with Ted Barrington, the Irish ambassador to London, before visiting Manchester after the bombing, but criticism of the Irish embassy’s reluctance to become involved with Irish community workers also appears in her biography. O’Leary and Burke, p.198.Back.
Note 31: DFA, Press Section, 13 October 1997. Back.
Note 32: James Connolly, "Diplomacy," first published in Workers' Republic, November 6, 1915. Back.
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