Ambassador Mulhall's Remarks on The Good Friday Agreement and 25 years of peace in Northern Ireland
Speech
14 July 2022This speach was deliverd on the 13th of July 2022 to the Executive Council on Diplomacy
Next month, I will step down as Ambassador of Ireland to the USA and will bring to a close my 44-years as a member of Ireland’s diplomatic service. I wish to thank the Executive Council on Diplomacy for providing this morning’s opportunity to reflect on one of the major challenges that has confronted Ireland throughout the four decades I have spent representing my country around the world. I refer to the situation in Northern Ireland, which continues to be a source of serious concern for the Irish Government.
Disagreements in, and about, Northern Ireland have a long history. It is all part of Ireland’s fraught, complicated historical relationship with Britain which goes back deep into our past.
My generation tends to trace the roots of the current situation to the late 1960s, when violence erupted in Northern Ireland, and to that historic day in April 1998, when the Irish and British Governments and the Northern Ireland parties signed the Good Friday Agreement. This paved the way for a peaceful future for Northern Ireland, and ushered in a new era for relations within the island of Ireland.
My early memories of Northern Ireland are of watching the conflict there unfold on our TV screens night after night in the early 1970s. I remember the shock we felt at the time of Bloody Sunday, when thirteen unarmed protestors were shot dead by the British military in Derry in 1972. I recall attending a demonstration in response to Bloody Sunday, which attracted the largest crowd I ever saw at any event in my home place, which is situated more than two hundred miles from Derry. Passions ran high at that time and threatened to spread the conflict across the island of Ireland, but that did not happen and people, in my part of Ireland at least, remained appalled observers of the spiraling violence in the North.
For the first fifteen years of my time with Ireland’s Foreign Service, I had little direct professional involvement with Northern Ireland although many colleagues were deeply immersed in repeated efforts aimed at conflict resolution and political agreement. Successive attempts – including the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 - failed to stem the tide of violence. My first direct professional engagement with Northern Ireland came in 1994 when the IRA and the Loyalist paramilitary organisations declared ceasefires and a serious peace process took off with strong encouragement from the United States.
I served on the Secretariat of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, which sought to engineer political dialogue between the parties although Ulster Unionists stayed away from its deliberations. At the time, I was struck by the disenchantment of even the moderate northern nationalists about their treatment in Northern Ireland. There was great resentment against what was viewed as partisan policing, while the lack of respect for markers of nationalist identity also galled representatives of that community. This made me realise what a steep climb it would be to reconcile the positions of the two traditions in Northern Ireland.
As Press Counsellor in the Department of Foreign Affairs between 1995 and 1998, I had the sad task of issuing late-night statements on behalf of our government condemning violence and the loss of life it inflicted on a divided community. I also had the privilege of being involved as part of the Irish Government’s delegation in all the crucial phases of the negotiations that resulted in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Almost 25 years later, I am perhaps the last person still active in politics or the public service who was part of those crucial negotiations at a relatively senior level.
I therefore have personal experience of just how important the American role was in securing that precious agreement. I remember nights at the talks in Belfast when word would go around that the White House was on the phone. President Clinton often called to urge the parties to make the moves needed in the search for a political compromise. His representative, Senator George Mitchell, played a masterful role in brokering agreement. There were days when all appeared to be lost, but Mitchell invariably managed to settle the ship by applying the patience and persistence he had evidently learned during his tenure as a leading figure in the US Senate.
The Good Friday Agreement represented a tremendous achievement. It was an ingenious compromise designed to accommodate the interests and aspirations of the different traditions in Northern Ireland. As part of a complex compromise, the Irish Government agreed to change the Irish Constitution relinquishing its erstwhile territorial claim to Northern Ireland and replacing it with an aspiration to unity by peaceful means and with the consent of a majority of the people in both parts of Ireland. Acceptance of the ‘consent principle’ when it comes to constitutional change was a vital ingredient in the 1998 settlement and remains a core principle to this day.
The Agreement provides for democratically elected institutions in Northern Ireland designed to reflect the interests of all sides of the community there. The Agreement provided for a North-South Ministerial Council and cross-border bodies designed to facilitate all-island cooperation in agreed areas of public policy. The most high-profile of these activities involves Tourism Ireland which promotes tourism internationally for the island of Ireland. There are also provisions on a British-Irish Council and on rights and equality of opportunity based on the incorporation into Northern Ireland law of the European Convention on Human Rights. That is why suggestions that the UK may now decide to turn its back on that Convention are such a big concern for us because the Convention is explicitly embedded in the Good Friday Agreement.
In the almost 25 years since 1998, there have been many twists and turns, with sustained periods when the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive have been suspended on account of political stand offs. At other times, with the institutions functioning in the manner provided for in the Good Friday Agreement, something resembling a normal political framework has prevailed in Northern Ireland. During my time as Ambassador in London, I remember sharing a table with DUP and Sinn Féin leaders at British-Irish Council meetings when they appeared to relate to each other quite well. The DUP’s Ian Paisley and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness formed an unlikely personal bond during their time in office together despite their very different backgrounds. The most recent Northern Ireland elections, which saw Sinn Féin emerge as the largest party in the Assembly, also witnessed the emergence of a stronger political middle ground with an increase in support for the cross-community Alliance Party.
Vitally, Northern Ireland has been spared systemic conflict for more than two decades, which means that many lives have been saved and a generation of people has grown up in Northern Ireland in an environment free of sustained violence. In the 25 years preceding 1998, more than 3,000 people lost their lives due to conflict in Northern Ireland but, by contrast, there have been very few fatalities this past 25 years. No one would claim that Northern Ireland is fully at ease with itself. The project of reconciliation to match the peace established in 1998 still has a long way to go, but the process set in train by the Good Friday Agreement remains the best hope we have for coming to terms with the historical legacy of division on our island.
The UK’s decision to leave the European Union brought unfortunate new fissures into play in an already fractured Northern Ireland. The consequences of Brexit for Northern Ireland were absent from the debate that took place ahead of the UK referendum in 2016, but Brexit changed the character of the border in Ireland. It moved from being an internal EU frontier to a border between an EU country (Ireland) and a third country (Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom). After the referendum, all sides agreed that there could not be a hard border in Ireland as it would be both impractical, economically damaging and politically risky.
After other potential solutions failed to command support in Britain, in December 2020 the EU and the UK agreed a protocol that provided for an open border in Ireland coupled with provision for checks on goods moving across the Irish Sea in order to protect the European single market. Much of the difficulty that has arisen in the past few years derives from the fact that the British Government chose to pursue a version of Brexit that was bound to maximise the challenges with regard to the border in Ireland.
It is true that the provisions of the Protocol have caused anxiety and opposition within the unionist community. Our Government has done everything it can to reassure unionists that the Protocol has no constitutional implications. For its part, the EU Commission has been assiduous in seeking to iron out those practical difficulties generated by the Protocol’s implementation.
In recent months, the British Government has threatened unilateral action and has now introduced legislation in parliament, which, if passed, would give British Ministers authority to override the provisions of the Northern Ireland protocol. This unilateral action has been sharply criticised by the EU and, if persisted with, will serve to damage relations between the EU and the UK. 52 of the 90 elected members of the Northern Ireland Assembly have publicly opposed unilateral action on the part of the British Government. The Northern Ireland business community is understandably keen to exploit the economic opportunities afforded by the Northern Ireland Protocol.
The EU has shown repeated willingness to compromise on this issue. While it is not prepared to renegotiate an agreement that is just 18 months old, the Commission has made proposals that would serve to implement the protocol in the most flexible way possible. The EU’s negotiator has said that it is willing to reduce checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea to the bare minimum.
With a new British Prime Minister on the way to being appointed, there are now fresh opportunities for pragmatic solutions to be found. We earnestly hope that constructive options can flourish as part of a reset of relations between the EU and the UK. There is, we believe, a landing zone for an agreement that can benefit all sides, one that will retain an open border in Ireland, that will benefit the Northern Ireland economy by giving it access to the European Single Market, and that will minimize inconvenience for people and businesses in Northern Ireland. The Protocol makes it plain that it has no impact on Northern Ireland’s constitutional status within the UK.
We look to our friends in the USA to play their customary role as an advocate for peace, political progress and economic advancement in Northern Ireland, perhaps by means of the appointment of a Special Envoy for Northern Ireland to engage with the various stakeholders there. I want to pay tribute to politicians on both sides of the aisle, and, in particular, to Congressman Richie Neal, co-chair of the Friends of Ireland and Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who has been a steadfast friend. I also want to salute Congressman Brendan Boyle for his unstinting support. Speaker Pelosi and President Biden have consistently displayed a positive interest in Ireland and have been strong in their commitment to protecting the Good Friday Agreement. Long may this positive US engagement with Ireland continue, founded as it is on the unique historical ties of kith and kin that bind our two countries.