Inside Accounts: The Irish Government and Peace in Northern Ireland, From the Good Friday Agreement to the Present Day by Graham Spencer

Author:Graham Spencer [Spencer, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, 20th Century, Ireland, Political Science, Peace
ISBN: 9781526143907
Google: 0zyOwwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 49411676
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

6

Putting arms beyond use: an interview with Tim Dalton

Graham Spencer:Can you provide some background on your early role with the peace process?

Tim Dalton: My earliest involvement, not so much with the peace process, but with people who later became important in advancing the process, was when I was Head of Prisons in the Department of Justice from 1989 to 1991. What I became more familiar with during that period was the whole approach of those who were involved in republican paramilitary activity. I met some of those who were imprisoned and began to develop a better understanding of the way they think. Most Irish people over a certain age, of course, have some innate understanding of republican thinking because Irish history – especially as taught by some of our teachers – tended to result in our having anti-British sentiment embedded somewhere in our DNA. This understanding, by the way, is not to be confused – as I think British authorities sometimes tended to do – with support for the violence campaign we saw in the final decades of the twentieth century. I began to have a much closer contact with the peace process when I was assigned to the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in Belfast in 1991, on secondment to the Department of Foreign Affairs from the Department of Justice. There was a justice and security side to the Secretariat’s role and I was the senior justice representative there. I returned to the Department of Justice in 1993 as Secretary General and, from that time onwards, I was part of the senior-level Civil Service team on the Irish side who engaged in the bulk of the background negotiations that supported the political process.

When you first met republicans in 1990 do you remember where it was and what was discussed?

Well, I didn’t meet them at that time to have discussions about the peace process. I would have met with various republican representatives to discuss problems that were arising in the prisons. I cannot now remember what all these conversations were about, though I do remember, on one occasion, at the behest of Father Alec Reid, meeting with representatives of the Irish Republican Socialist Party about issues arising in Portlaoise Prison, where republican prisoners of various shades were held. At that time two of my justice colleagues, Ken O Leary and the late Frank Dunne, with myself, met four people including the person who, according to intelligence, was the then leader of the Irish National Liberation Army. The meeting took place in the Department of Justice. On our side we were interested not just in resolving the issue they came to discuss with us but in the possibility of opening a wider conversation with them about the INLA campaign – where they thought it was going etc. That conversation never developed because, unfortunately, two of the people we met, including the alleged leader, were shot dead in the course of what may have been an internal disagreement, though, as far as I know, that has never been established.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.