Inside Accounts, Volume I by Graham Spencer

Author:Graham Spencer [Spencer, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Peace, History, Europe, Ireland, Great Britain, 20th Century, General
ISBN: 9781526142535
Google: 0XS5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-10-24T16:14:50+00:00

6

Back-channels and the possibilities of movement: an interview with Martin Mansergh

Graham Spencer: Where do you think the origins of the peace process actually lay?

Martin Mansergh: Well, this is a contentious matter. My view would be fairly close to the Sinn Fein view on this. Some people would say it goes back to the prisons in the mid-1970s, others to the hunger strikes, and the SDLP would tell you it goes back to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, but my view is it happened in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. I wouldn’t be giving the Agreement exaggerated credit for this, because it was an exclusive initiative, whereas the peace process was in principle inclusive, but I think the origins of it were in the 1986 to 1987 period. I suppose the first phase in 1988 was exploration of the possibility of an alternative, which I would date to August 1986, when Father Reid first met Charlie Haughey as leader of Fianna Fail in opposition.

Can you tell me about when you were asked to meet Sinn Fein in 1988 and the context that surrounded that?

I’ll give you the context as I knew it then, and how I know it now, because they are a bit different. I was with Charlie Haughey, who was Taoiseach at the time, and he asked me if would I meet Father Alec Reid and, as far as I recall, he explained, as a bit of the background, that the SDLP were meeting with Sinn Fein and he wanted to complement this with a secret Fianna Fail delegation to meet with Sinn Fein. From that I would have met Father Reid, and arrangements were made to go to the Redemptorist Monastery in Dundalk with Dermot Ahern, who was a newly elected deputy from the previous year, and Richie Healey, a party official who was one of the party’s honorary treasurers from County Meath. I was involved in two meetings at Dundalk, the first on 2 May and the second on 24 June. If you go back to the previous year of September 1987, Charlie Haughey was contemplating directly meeting Hume and Adams himself, but various dramatic events in the autumn of 1987 made that impossible. There was an intercepted importation of arms from Libya that autumn, the kidnapping of a dentist and a subsequent rampage through the countryside by ‘the border fox’, and, worst of all, the Enniskillen bomb on Remembrance Sunday that killed eleven people. Earlier in the year we had also had Loughgall, where eight IRA men had been shot dead. The net point in September 1987 is that Haughey was seriously considering not renewing the Extradition Act, which had been passed by the outgoing FitzGerald Government in December 1986 and was renewable on an annual basis. Again, I think his attitude was that so many things happened in the autumn of 1987 that this also became quite impossible. So he moved from Plan A, when he might have been directly involved, to Plan B, where all that would be involved would be a low-level delegation.

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.