A Farther Shore: Ireland's Long Road to Peace by Adams Gerry

Author:Adams, Gerry [Adams, Gerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-11-03T23:00:00+00:00

19

Seizing the Moment

John Major was under enormous pressure by those in Britain and Ireland and internationally who wanted to see progress. In the aftermath of my three-week trip to the U.S.A. and Canada, the order barring me from traveling to Britain looked more ludicrous than ever. It was October 21 before Major announced he was lifting the banning orders on Martin McGuinness and myself. In the face of a mounting campaign by local people along the border, he also announced the opening of all cross-border roads.

Exactly one week later, the political representatives of 82 percent of the Irish people—that is, everyone except the unionists—came together at Dublin Castle for the inaugural meeting of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation. It was chaired by Catherine McGuinness, a wonderful and exemplary Irish woman. Dublin Castle had been the administrative center of British rule in Ireland for centuries. It had witnessed many dark deeds. Now, from within its opulent splendor, we were building a process which I believed would lead eventually to the end of British rule in Ireland. One of my memories of this time was when one of the attendants ushered me into a side room to use the toilet. To my surprise, a wall plaque proclaimed that this was the room in which the badly wounded 1916 leader James Connolly was held before his execution.

Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and the Ulster Unionist Party predictably refused to attend. The British government also snubbed the event by refusing to send either the British ambassador to Dublin or Peter Temple-Morris, then the co-chair of the Dublin-London Inter-Parliamentary Body. The decision by Major was petty, but not unexpected. The British were still reluctant participants in the peace process.

Two days later, nationalist children on the Lower Ormeau Road were batoned by the RUC as they protested against a planned Orange march through this nationalist area. The RUC’s political bosses raced to defend this action. Patrick Mayhew assured unionists that he had no plans to change either the name or the structure of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Instead, Mayhew chose to press the issue of IRA weapons and to erect it as an obstacle to substantive negotiations.

The peace process suffered its first serious blow with the unexpected resignation on November 17 of Albert Reynolds. The collapse of his coalition government centered around a controversy involving a Catholic priest, Father Brendan Smyth, who subsequently served a prison sentence for sexually abusing children. There were allegations that someone in Dublin had tried to prevent Smyth’s extradition to face these charges in the north. Reynolds’s Fianna Fáil party and Dick Spring’s Labour Party came to loggerheads on the issue and the Labour ministers on the government resigned. Reynolds resigned as leader of Fianna Fáil and was replaced by Bertie Ahern. In the weeks that followed, intense negotiations took place between the major parties in the Irish Parliament. I was concerned that the loss of Reynolds at a time when John Major was still not engaged in the process could seriously, or even fatally, damage what had been put together.

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