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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Great Hatred, Little Room

Paying the price of peace

Jonathan Powell was the most durable of Tony Blair’s inner circle — and, in the affairs of Northern Ireland, much the most influential.

Powell’s account is therefore dominated by two questions. Firstly, were Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness serious about making peace? Secondly, having tacitly accepted there wouldn’t be a united Ireland in this generation, how vulnerable were they to internal challenge within the republican movement — and how much of a price had to be paid to sustain them?

Inevitably, one can only write truly interestingly on dealings with a clandestine militaristic elite such as the Provisionals by reference to secret intelligence. Powell is not a naturally discreet man, but he has learned the virtues of professional reticence. In consequence, he self-censored heavily. In some cases, the official knife further cut interesting material. The understandable exclusion of highly classified information lends the entire enterprise a slight feel of ‘apart from the assassination, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?’ Indeed, considering that the vulnerability of the Adams-McGuinness leadership is the salient theme of the book, should it have been written at all so soon after the events concerned?

Nor does Powell seem much interested in people — or, if he is, his professional carapace precludes even moderately gossipy pen portraits. For a man who has spent thousands of hours in the company of the republican leadership, he tells us remarkably little about the personalities of Adams and McGuinness beyond the fact that their first demand in any negotiation is to be fed. The references to their motivations — that they were tired of a campaign of armed struggle that wasn’t yielding sufficient fruit — may be true but don’t take us much further forward than some of the standard analyses did at the time of the first IRA ceasefire of 1994.

The account of Ian Paisley’s motivation for doing the deal is equally banal: Powell states that he underwent a near death experience in 2004 and didn’t want to die as ‘Dr No’. But there is little detailed new material about the burgeoning Blair-Paisley relationship, often conducted on a one-on-one basis through 2006/7. During the course of this bizarre tryst, the DUP leader and Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church gave a Bible and assorted theological tracts to the Prime Minister, whom he considered to be a ‘very troubled spirit’.

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