The Triumph of Ambiguity: Ulster's Path towards Peace

Abstract

On Aug 31, 1994, twenty-five years after British troops were first deployed on the streets of Belfast and Londonderry/Derry in aid of the civil power, the Provisional Irish Republican Army declared a cease-fire. The "Good Friday Agreement" (officially the "Belfast Agreement") provides for cross-community government in Northern Ireland, a North-South Ministerial Council overseeing the operation of cross-border bodies in a number of fields, and a British-Irish Council promoting co-operation among the devolved governments of the UK, the British and Irish governments and the political authorities in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. Even if the peace does not survive in the long run, one might reasonably argue that the agreement has been a triumph for constructive ambiguity, made possible by a redefinition of sovereignty in less all-or-nothing terms in the context of European integration, the end of the Cold War and globalization.

On 31 August 1994, twenty-five years after British troops were first deployed on the streets of Belfast and Londonderry/Derry in aid of the civil power, the Provisional Irish Republican Army declared a cease-fire. The main loyalist paramilitary organisations followed suit on 13 October, raising hopes that Northern Ireland's latest "troubles", as eras of violent instability in Ireland are known, were over. However, these expectations were shaken on 9 February 1996, when the Provisional IRA announced the end of its cease-fire shortly before its volunteers detonated a bomb at Canary Wharf in London. This was followed by further acts of violence in England and at the British army's main base in Northern Ireland. Despite this, the peace between the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland itself held. The Provisional IRA restored its cease-fire on 20 July 1997 on the same terms as its first cessation of 1994.

Against the backdrop of this second ceasefire, talks took place among Northern Ireland's main political parties, apart from two unionist parties which boycotted the process on the entry into the negotiations of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional IRA. These were brought to a successful conclusion on Good Friday 1998 (10 April) when the chairperson of the talks, former US Senator George Mitchell, was able to announce that the parties had arrived at an agreement.

The "Good Friday Agreement" (officially the "Belfast Agreement") provides for crosscommunity government in Northern Ireland, a North-South Ministerial Council overseeing the operation of cross-border bodies in a number of fields, and a British-Irish Council promoting co-operation among the devolved governments of the United Kingdom, the British and Irish governments and the political authorities in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. The agreement also provides that Northern Ireland remain part of the United Kingdom and shall not cease to be so without the consent of a majority in the province. It also contains commitments to the promotion of equality and social inclusion.

Referendums in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland followed the achievement of the settlement. The Belfast Agreement won overwhelming support in the Republic. The vote was not simply symbolic as it entailed changes to Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution, subject to implementation of the other principal elements of the Good Friday deal. The claim embodied in these articles to sovereignty over Northern Ireland had long been a grievance of the province's unionists.

In Northern Ireland, 71 per cent of those who voted supported the agreement. However, the vote in favour was less overwhelming than it seemed. While the Catholic minority (constituting approximately 43 per cent of voters) endorsed the agreement solidly, the Protestant majority was split down the middle. Further, it quickly became evident that proagreement nationalists and pro-agreement unionists had widely differing views on what the agreement meant.

The Weapons Hurdle

Implementation of the agreement has proven difficult. Admittedly, the main obstacle to effecting it has been an issue which has no direct relationship to the constitutional compromises embodied in the agreement. This is the provision that paramilitary organisations should decommission their arsenals of weapons. The demand of the proagreement Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) that the Provisional IRA should make a start to decommissioning before the formation of a Northern Ireland executive including Sinn Fein representatives was encapsulated in the slogan "Guns before government". From a unionist perspective this was an entirely reasonable demand, given that the British Conservative government under John Major had originally laid down as a condition of Sinn Fein's participation in settlement talks that there should be a start to decommissioning. Talks ultimately began on the understanding that decommissioning would take place in tandem with the settlement negotiations, but this did not happen. The Belfast Agreement itself commits all the participants to the total disarmament of paramilitary organisations and, in particular, to use any influence they may have "to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years" of the referendums on the agreement.

The attempt by the UUP to secure a start to decommissioning by delaying the formation of the executive not only failed to win the support of most of the other pro-agreement parties, but also allowed the (Provisional) republican movement to argue that the necessary climate for achieving decommissioning was being undermined by failure to implement other elements of the agreement in full. After deadlock over the issue for nearly eighteen months, the UUP agreed in November 1 999 to the prior formation of the executive on the understanding that reciprocation on decommissioning by the republican movement would follow. When this failed to happen by the end of January 2000, it prompted a crisis. On 1 1 February 2000, the British government suspended the operation of the devolved institutions which had been set up under the agreement, to the dismay of nationalists but to the relief of pro-agreement unionists.

At this point, to the surprise of most political commentators, the republican movement made a concession. On 6 May 2000, the Provisional IRA issued a statement that in the context of the full implementation of the Belfast Agreement it would initiate a process which would "completely and verifiably put IRA arms beyond use". The statement also committed the IRA to permitting the inspection of a number of its arms dumps by third parties. This proved sufficient to persuade the UUP to re-enter a power-sharing executive with Sinn Fein, allowing the British government to lift the suspension of the devolved institutions on 30 May 2000. At the end of June the former president of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, and the former secretary-general of the African National Congress of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, carried out an inspection of a number of IRA arms dumps.

Despite these developments, confidence in the long-term survival of the Belfast Agreement is far from total. The issue of decommissioning has still not been fully resolved. For the unionists, the inspections represent simply a confidence-building measure, not a substitute for decommissioning, which they argue must be completed by a new deadline of June 2001. By contrast, both republicans and the Irish government appear to view the inspections as meeting the requirement that arms be placed beyond use.

A Fragile Agreement

But perhaps even more significant has been continuing disagreement among the parties over the interpretation of the agreement. In this context, a major source of friction is the inability of the moderate nationalist party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), to agree with the UUP on questions such as the reform of policing. Seemingly minute differences over the wording of the Police Bill (the legislation the government has put forward to implement the proposals of the Patten Commission on policing) have prompted angry exchanges between the parties and the threat of resignations, which, if carried out, would effectively cause the agreement to collapse. At the same time, the hold of David Trimble over the UUP remains tenuous. A good indication of the weakness of his position has been the selection by constituency associations of anti-agreement figures to contest Westminster seats for the party.

Both unionist and republican opponents of the Belfast Agreement have derived encouragement from its failure to become institutionalised and to develop roots more than two years after Good Friday 1998. Conflict over the routes of parades by the militant Protestant organisation, the Orange Order, has enabled anti-agreement unionists to mobilise support on the streets. Meanwhile, republican opponents of the peace process have increasingly gravitated towards the "Real IRA", formed by Provisional dissidents who broke with the leadership over its acceptance of the conditions for Sinn Fein's participation in the multiparty talks in 1997. The Real IRA gained notoriety in August 1998 with the Omagh bombing, in which twenty-nine people were killed. In the aftermath of the atrocity it declared a cease-fire. However, in 2000 it resumed its campaign, in July disrupting transport in London with a small explosive device on a railway line and a series of false warnings.

Yet despite the weaknesses of the agreement - its ambiguity, its fragility and its vulnerability to deadlock because of its mechanisms for ensuring that major decisions enjoy widespread support across the province's sectarian divide - there remain grounds for expecting the Northern Irish peace process to survive all its travails. To understand why, it is necessary to delve into the major changes that have taken place in the thinking of the Provisional republican movement, the chief force in sustaining the conflict in Northern Ireland from the early 1970s.

The Evolution of IRA Strategy

The Provisional IRA was formed in December 1 969 as a result of a split within the IRA, by this time a small sect of militants who regarded themselves as the authentic descendants of the rebels of Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising against British rule. The split was followed in January 1970 by a similar division in Sinn Fein, the political wing of the republican movement.

The Provisionals represented a revival of the physical force tradition within republicanism that had seemingly been discredited by the failure of the IRA's border campaign between 1956 and 1962. The campaign's abandonment for lack of support from the Catholic community had led to a reaction against militarism within the republican movement. A new leftist-oriented strategy of political mobilisation on social and economic issues replaced the previously single-minded commitment to end by force the partition of Ireland. Regarding Northern Ireland the hope was that the strategy's emphasis on social and economic issues would help forge a classbased alliance capable of transcending the province's sectarian divide. The onset of the troubles in 1968/9 not merely destroyed that hope, but created a need for an organisation capable of defending Catholic ghettos from the attacks of "loyalist" Protestants. As Catholic defenders, the new organisation grew rapidly and soon outstripped the Official IRA in size and influence. It was not until February 1971 that a British solider was killed by the Provisional IRA.

During the first decade of the troubles, the Provisional republican movement operated in the belief that the key to its goal of a united Ireland lay in bringing about a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. In August 1971, the movement's popularity received a massive boost when the British authorities introduced internment, jailing suspected IRA members without trial. The movement's largely southern Irish leadership subsequently made the crude calculation that just as Britain had been forced to withdraw from Aden because the number of British soldiers being killed in that conflict became politically unacceptable, so, too, it could be forced to withdraw from Northern Ireland.1 The Provisional IRA conducted its campaign of violence against the security forces on the basis that victory lay just around the corner. The Provisionals welcomed the failure of successive political initiatives by the British government during this period, believing such failure increased the disillusionment of UK mainland opinion with Northern Ireland a disillusionment that was bound sooner or later to result in British withdrawal.

The weakness of this analysis became apparent when the British government opted for a policy of direct rule on a long-term basis in 1976. The Provisionals were forced to recognise that they had to adjust their strategy to take account of the strength of the British commitment to remain in the province. This shift in thinking broadly coincided with changes in the movement's leadership which saw southerners gradually displaced by a new generation of northern radicals. The goal remained the same: a united Ireland. In fact, it could be argued that it was strengthened. The northern radicals had no time for notions of a federal Ireland through which the southern leaders had attempted to woo loyalists. The big change was the commitment by the northern radicals to sustain a "long war" to achieve a united Ireland. This commitment brought other changes in its wake. The Provisional IRA was partially reorganised on a cell basis so as to improve the security of its Active Service Units (ASUs) that carried out bombings and shootings. Obtaining the resources to sustain the campaign of violence took precedence over the number of operations mounted by the ASUs at any one time. The result was a fall in the number of operations carried out by the Provisional IRA.

The lower level of violence confronted the leadership of the Provisional republican movement with a problem: how could it sustain the political credibility of the "armed struggle" in these circumstances? A solution soon presented itself. The British commitment to direct rule - offering the two communities a form of government that was the least unacceptable - was accompanied by a policy of criminalising political violence by treating paramilitary offenders in the same way as ordinary criminals. The policy produced a crisis in Northern Ireland's prisons. Although the Provisional republican leadership was accused of manipulating the prisoners for its own political ends, the initiative for the prison protests came in fact largely from the prisoners themselves. In 1980 and again in 1981, republican prisoners went on hunger strike in support of their demands to be treated differently from ordinary criminals. In 1981, ten prisoners died before the hunger strike was called off.

The 'Ballot Bomb'

The hunger strikes generated mass support within the Catholic community for the prisoners. Many who disagreed with the strategy of political violence nevertheless identified with the aspiration for a united Ireland that motivated those who took up arms, and they tended to be sympathetic to the prisoners' demands. Hunger striker Bobby Sands's stunning victory in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone parliamentary by-election in April 1981 underlined the strength of support for the prisoners. It also demonstrated to the Provisional leadership that it might be possible to secure mass support for Sinn Fein through the ballot box. An electoral strategy had two obvious attractions for the Provisionals, which overcame anxieties that it would blunt their commitment to revolution: it gave political meaning to a sustained campaign of violence at a lower level; and it also provided an avenue for employing the political energies of the multitude of sympathisers drawn into campaigns on behalf of the prisoners, but who could not be absorbed into the Provisional IRA, particularly in the context of the strategy of the long war. At the same time, the fact that the Provisional IRA's campaign of violence continued through the course of the prisoners' protests reassured the leadership that involvement in elections would not necessitate the abandoning of the "armed struggle".

The strategy of what the Provisionals called the "ballot bomb" was initially very successful, deriving much of its impact from the assumption on the UK mainland that there would be negligible support for Sinn Fein, given its characterisation in the media as the political wing of a terrorist organisation. Consequently, the vote for Sinn Fein in the elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1982 exceeded all expectations. That Sinn Fein was able to secure over 1 0 per cent of the vote among the electorate in Northern Ireland was in itself shocking to British opinion. Little comfort was drawn from the fact that Sinn Fein had attracted the support of a minority of the Catholic minority. Further, when Sinn Fein followed up its success in the assembly elections by increasing its share of the vote in the 1983 Westminster general election to over 13 per cent, while also securing the election of its president, Gerry Adams, as the member of parliament for West Belfast, it even seemed possible that Sinn Fein might overtake its nationalist rival, the SDLP

One of the main aims of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985, whereby the British government institutionalised consultation with the Irish government on its policies in Northern Ireland was to boost the electoral fortunes of the SDLP. In this it was successful. The SDLP made gains, though these were only partly at the expense of Sinn Fein. But perhaps even more importantly, the AngloIrish Agreement survived attempts by the unionists to force its abandonment. The result was that unionists began to re-evaluate their position of total opposition to any form of power-sharing in government with nationalists. As an important assumption behind the strategy of the long war was that polarisation between unionists and nationalists ruled out any possibility of political agreement across the sectarian divide, this was a significant development. Evidence of a degree of convergence in the positions of Northern Ireland's main political parties encouraged the British secretary of state, Peter Brooke, to launch an initiative in January 1990. Its aim was to establish the basis for comprehensive negotiations on Northern Ireland's future among the province's constitutional parties (i.e., excluding parties such as Sinn Fein that were connected to paramilitary organisations).

Pressures for Change

The initiative raised expectations of a political settlement among the general public. That possibility threatened the republican movement with marginalisation, since it was questionable whether the credibility of the long war could be sustained in such circumstances. There were a number of other pressures on the Provisionals to change course during the early 1990s:

* An important dimension of republican analysis was the belief that the motivation for the British presence in Northern Ireland was both strategic and economic: Britain saw it as important to have a foothold in Ireland in the context of the Cold War, and partition facilitated maintaining the island in a position of economic dependence. After the Anglo-Irish Agreement the SDLP leader, John Hume, had tried to persuade the Provisionals that Britain had become neutral on the question of the future status of Northern Ireland but without success. The end of the Cold War made it much more difficult for republicans to sustain the strategic argument, while the economic miracle in southern Ireland undermined their economic argument. Both arguments were addressed by Peter Brooke in a speech in November 1990 in which he declared that Britain had no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland a statement that became an important building block in the peace process.

* During the 1980s, in order to sustain the credibility of the long war, the Provisionals had repeatedly compared the situation in Northern Ireland to the conflicts in South Africa and the Middle East, so that slogans linking the IRA and the ANC or Palestine Liberation Organisation became commonplace. The start of the transition to democratic rule in South Africa in 1990 and the agreement between Israel and the PLO in 1993 obliged the Provisionals to find a peace process of their own to sustain the credibility of these analogies.2

* Irish-American groups provided an important external source of support for the Provisionals. At the start of the troubles the predominant view among Irish-Americans was that partition was the cause of the conflict and that Irish unity after a British withdrawal would end it. However, when their expectations of an early end to the conflict were disappointed their view of its nature started to change, so that their priority became a negotiated settlement rather than the achievement of Irish unity as such. At the same time, IrishAmerican support for Sinn Fein remained strong, so that an incentive for the Provisionals to adopt a peace strategy was the knowledge that it would aid their efforts to secure financial and political support in the United States.

* A fundamental assumption of the Provisionals had been that a united Ireland could only ever be achieved by a strategy in which violence was an integral element. This was because in their view Northern Ireland had been gerrymandered at the very outset so as to ensure there would never be a nationalist majority in the province. Consequently, the pursuit of nationalist aims by constitutional means using the ballot box was essentially futile. The marked growth both of the proportion of Catholics in the Northern Ireland electorate and of those voting for nationalist parties during the 1990s started to undermine the argument that violence was indispensable to the achievement of Irish unity. In fact, the opposite appeared to be the case. Thus, in contrast to previous British secretaries of state who had vaingloriously promised the military defeat of the Provisional IRA, Peter Brooke emphasised that the Provisionals could not win through violence - a much more credible proposition, as an IRA spokesperson acknowledged in an interview in 1990.3

The IRA Shifts Course

In February 1992, Sinn Fein published a document, Towards a Lasting Peace in Ireland, which set out the party's latest thinking on the way forward. At the time, it attracted relatively little attention. It was only in retrospect, with the development of the peace process, that it came to be seen as an important pointer to a change in thinking of the republican movement, paving the way to the 1994 cease-fire.

Outwardly, the approach of the 1992 document was not markedly different from that of previous Provisional pronouncements. It sought a declaration by the British and Irish governments "outlining the steps they intend taking to bring about a peaceful and orderly British political and military withdrawal from Ireland within a specified period". However, although convincing Britain to withdraw remained a central aim of the republican movement, the document raised the possibility of a change in strategy to achieve this end, by posing the alternative of "an effective unarmed constitutional strategy" to that of "continuing armed resistance". Because elsewhere the document envisaged the continuation of the Provisional IRA's campaign of violence for the foreseeable future, the significance of this passage was not widely recognised at the time, at least publicly.

In fact, by this time, a high-level channel of communication had been opened up between the British government and the republican movement. It dated back to a meeting between Sinn Fein's chief negotiator Martin McGuinness and a leading government official in October 1990.4 One of the purposes of these contacts was to attempt to persuade the republican movement of British neutrality on the constitutional issue. The possibility that the republican movement might be drawn into a peace process attracted greater interest from the British government and the SDLP following the failure of the second round of talks among the constitutional parties in the autumn of 1992. There were further exchanges of messages between the British government and the republican movement early in 1993, and in April 1993 SDLP leader John Hume entered into talks with Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams. When news of these talks quickly leaked out, political commentators greeted them with a large measure of cynicism. They tended to be seen as a ploy by the SDLP to counter criticism of its stance during the second round of negotiations among the constitutional parties in j 992 5 j}jat tjjere was ramer more to the talks became apparent in September 1993 when Hume and Adams announced that they had reached agreement on a set of proposals to put to the British and Irish governments.

The reaction of nationalist opinion to the possibility of an end to the violence overcame the initial caution of the Irish and British governments. However, the unacceptability to unionists of any initiative originating from Sinn Fein prompted the governments to bypass the unpublished Hume-Adams proposals. They issued their own set of proposals in the form of 'the Joint Declaration for Peace (often known as the "Downing Street Declaration") on 15 December 1993. This clearly fell short of what the republican movement was seeking as the basis for an end to the campaign of violence against British rule. Sinn Fein asked for clarification of the terms of the declaration, which it received in May 1994. That was followed by rejection of the terms of the declaration by a special conference of Sinn Fein in July 1994. Despite this apparent setback to the peace process, the republican leadership had in fact become persuaded that this was a propitious moment to adopt an unarmed strategy, especially in the light of support for such a step from influential elements of the Irish-American lobby. On 3 1 August 1 994, the leadership of the Provisional IRA issued a statement that from midnight there would be "a complete cessation of military operations".

Conflicting Interpretations

In justifying the cease-fire, Sinn Fein leaders emphasised the strength of nationalist forces. They also made much of the comparison between the peace process in Northern Ireland and the democratic transition in South Africa. The general view among nationalists both in Northern Ireland and the Republic was that these were important considerations in Sinn Fein's thinking and not mere attempts to rationalise failure of the long war strategy. It was a view shared by many analysts of the cease-fire at the time of its announcement. For example, the journalist David McKittrick wrote:

What is clear is that this is not an IRA surrender. The organisation has the guns, the expertise and the recruits to go on killing; it has not been militarily defeated. Rather, it has allowed itself to be persuaded that in the circumstances of today it stands a better chance of furthering its aims through politics than through violence.6

An example of the Provisional IRA's capacity fresh in everyone's minds was the huge damage done by two bombs in the City of London in 1992 and 1993.

Yet ironically, the positive response of loyalist paramilitary organisations to the Provisional IRA cease-fire actually rested on a very different interpretation of its causes. From the perspective of the loyalists, a major escalation of their campaign of violence during the 1990s had played a significant role in bringing about a change in the Provisionals' strategy. As a consequence of that escalation, the Provisional IRA had been drawn into a war with the loyalist paramilitaries, resulting in an increasing toll of civilian deaths in Northern Ireland. At the same time, few members of the security forces were being killed in Provisional IRA attacks. In this context, the resumption by the Provisional IRA of bombings in England could be seen as a sign of weakness rather than of strength. Thus, the cease-fire called by the Combined Loyalist Military Command, representing the main loyalist paramilitaries, rested very largely on the assumption that the republican movement's turn to an unarmed strategy was dictated by its recognition that the long war had failed.

Grounds for Hope

These differing perceptions of the origins of the paramilitary truce of 1994 and their incompatibility explain in part why doubts persist about the durability of the peace process, even among strong supporters of the Belfast Agreement. However, the point can be overstated. Further evolution of the parties' thinking has taken place since 1994. Indeed without such change, there would have been no agreement on Good Friday 1998. As regards the shaping of republican attitudes, an increasingly important factor since 1994 has been the electoral success Sinn Fein has achieved as a result of the party's championing of a peace strategy. In Northern Ireland Sinn Fein's share of the vote has increased by almost 50 per cent, while in the Republic of Ireland 1 997 saw elected the first Sinn Fein member of parliament since the party dropped its policy of abstentionism. Because the overall vote for nationalists has risen, Sinn Fein has not overtaken the SDLP, though the possibility of its doing so in the near future cannot be ruled out. The extent of political fragmentation in the Republic means that even with the few seats it is predicted to win at the next Irish general election, Sinn Fein may occupy a pivotal position in the Dail (parliament).

The fact that the republican movement took the initiative in May 2000 to end the impasse arising from February's suspension of the devolved institutions appears to owe much to the desire to sustain Sinn Fein's electoral prospects in circumstances in which the party might have been blamed had the Belfast Agreement collapsed. The republican dissidents linked to the Real IRA argue that the current leadership has betrayed all the historic goals of Irish republicanism and that the agreement copper-fastens partition. In contrast, unionists opposed to the agreement argue that it has been designed to lever unionists into a united Ireland and that it is the UUP leaders who are the sellouts. The position of the Sinn Fein leadership is that the agreement has the potential to be transitional to a united Ireland while that of the pro-agreement UUP leadership is that the agreement represents, at long last, complete nationalist recognition of Northern Ireland's place within United Kingdom.

In so far as the agreement stipulates that a referendum should be held if it appears that it will yield a bare majority in favour of a united Ireland and that that wish should be effected if the referendum produces that result, the question of who is right about the tendency of the agreement can be seen as a matter of demographic calculation. Will Catholics constitute a majority of the Northern Ireland electorate in the next two decades? And if so, will this translate into a nationalist majority? Alternatively, if there is peace, will Protestants who have left the province in large numbers during the troubles return? Will prosperity result in such contentment with the status quo that Northern Ireland's future no longer depends on an ethnic head count? Despite nationalist confidence that history and demographics are on their side, the safer prediction would seem to be of a further narrowing of the gap between the two communities but not its elimination or reversal over the next twenty years. In that case, will Northern Ireland's Catholics be content to conclude that the troubles began over the issue of civil rights and that with the achievement of equality under the agreement they have secured what the demonstrators in 1968 were seeking?

It is tempting to conclude that there are too many uncertainties about the future of Northern Ireland and of the Belfast Agreement to derive lessons for other conflicts from the Irish peace process. However, it would be wrong to ignore the benefits that the relative peace has brought to the people of the province. And even if the peace does not survive in the long run, one might reasonably argue that the agreement has been a triumph for constructive ambiguity, made possible by a redefinition of sovereignty in less all-or-nothing terms in the context of European integration, the end of the Cold War and globalisation. It is also difficult to arrive at definitive judgements on the role of violence, although the association of violence and the threat of violence with political polarisation provides grounds for suggesting that its main effect has been to prolong the province's political instability.

Footnote

1. See Maria Maguire, To Take Arms: A Year in the Provisional IRA (London: Quartet, 1973), pp. 69-70.

Footnote

2. The role of these analogies is the subject of chapter 16 of Michael Cox, Adrian Guelke and Fiona Stephen, eds., A Farewell to Arms? From "Long War " to Long Peace in Northern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

Footnote

3. An Phoblacht/Republican News (Dublin), 28 June 1990.

4. Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966-1995 and the Search for Peace (London: Hutchinson, 1995), p. 338.

Footnote

5. During the second round, the SDLP put forward a proposal for Northern Ireland to be governed on a model derived from the institutions of the European Community, providing for European, British and Irish input in the government of the province. The proposal failed to get support from any of the other constitutional parties, including the middle of the road Alliance Party.

6. Independent (London), 1 September 1994.