23.3.2007
Reports obtained from:
(1) Belfast Telegraph, (2) The Guardian
Wednesday, 14 March, 2007
Saturday, 17 March, 2007
Row grows after Mandelson's talks comment tapes released
By Chris Thornton
A row over Tony Blair's handling of the peace process rumbled on when a London newspaper released the tape of an interview with former Secretary of State Peter Mandelson.
The Guardian tape includes Mr Mandelson's comment that the Prime Minister gave too much credence to republican demands which "in my view were excessive and unreasonable".
He also indicated that Mr Blair went too far in offering republicans a controversial deal for IRA fugitives.
Mr Mandelson was Secretary of State from October 1999 to January 2001, a crucial period that included the first, failed period of devolution.
In that period he was known as one of the Prime Minister's closest political confidantes.
The newspaper released the tape after Mr Mandelson, currently the EU trade commissioner, said published remarks attributed to him were not a "true reflection" of his position.
The tape is available on the newspaper's website here.
Asked if Mr Blair made any mistakes in his handling of the peace process, Mr Mandelson responded: "One problem with Tony, Tony's fundamental view of Northern Ireland, is that the process is the policy, that as long as the process is being sustained and nurtured and as long as you are giving plenty of evidence that you believe in the process, even if you can do nothing else, that is sufficient policy. The process is the policy, he used to say."
He added: "The only thing I would say about that is that what Tony would sometimes do, in order to keep the process on track, would be to appear to, or, in reality, accept, or indicate that he was giving proper consideration to, in a way that it was likely to be agreed and happen, republican demands which in my view were excessive and unreasonable.
"But secondly, more importantly, calculated to push the unionists off the other end of the table. So, in order to keep the republicans at the table - you know they would be constantly tugging the blanket their way - I would say, 'Look, they're having too much of the blanket. We've got to allow the unionists to tug it back a bit their way'."
Mr Mandelson also said that he refused to enter into a side deal about the on-the-runs.
He said Mr Blair had asked him to write a letter making promises to Sinn Fein about the return of the IRA fugitives.
The Guardian interview created a stir yesterday, prompting Mr Mandelson to claim his remarks were taken out of context.
"This report amplifies something I said out of all proportion to its content and makes a generalised judgment totally unsupported by the remarks I made," he said.
"What they present as news is very old hat to anyone with a passing familiarity with Northern Ireland's recent history."
He added: "You see what the Guardian are doing is taking a snapshot of my views and what I said - with some care and caution, I might say, in a very long interview - and extrapolating from a particular instant and applying it to a policy as a whole. And I don't think they are justified in doing so."
Mr Mandelson said he regarded Mr Blair's record in Northern Ireland as being among his greatest achievements in office. He said there had been a risk in the negotiations that offering concessions to Sinn Fein would undermine the nationalist SDLP.
"Whenever you appeared to be making concessions to republicans, you risked alienating unionists and/or upsetting nationalists because on that side of the community they are in competition for the same votes," he said.
He refused to be drawn on suggestions that his second resignation was linked to his views on Northern Ireland.
"It is an interesting theory. At the time I was forced to resign I was involved with the Prime Minister in dawn-to-dusk negotiations with the Northern Ireland parties at No 10 on the very day that this media squall was being whipped up around me," he said. "If others around the Prime Minister made certain judgments or jumped to certain conclusions in connection with what I was doing in Northern Ireland, that is something only they can answer. I really can't comment."
Copyright © Belfast Telgraph 2007
In a British fairyland
The portrayal of Sinn Féin as a reluctant partner in peace is a fiction that did not fool the Irish voters
Comment - Link to article with discussion
By Ronan Bennett, The Guardian
Does Sinn Féin deserve no credit for the extraordinary transformation that has taken place in the north of Ireland over the past 15 years? From Peter Mandelson's account of the prime minister's handling of the peace process, one would think that the British government had to drag a stubborn republican leadership kicking and screaming to the negotiating table, and that once there they could only be kept on board by repeated capitulation to republican demands.
The former secretary of state for Northern Ireland has played no significant part in Irish politics since his forced resignation in 2001 over the Hinduja affair, but his portrayal of republicans as reluctant partners in peace - which the British media has eagerly picked up - not only rewrites history but helps to perpetuate an atmosphere of distrust and bad faith as the March 26 deadline for the return of power sharing approaches. For this reason alone it is worth getting the facts straight. The peace process pre-dated the advent of Tony Blair to power by almost a decade. It does not detract from Blair's commitment to a settlement to recall that in 1988 Gerry Adams and John Hume, the former leader of the nationalist SDLP, began a series of private talks in an attempt to agree a joint strategy to take the gun out of Irish politics.
When the so-called Hume-Adams document was delivered in June 1992, it was greeted not as a promising avenue but with hostility. Hume, who went on to become a joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, reacted with hurt incomprehension. A man of Gandhian commitment to non-violence, he was accused of being everything from an IRA stooge to an outright villain. Unionists reviled him, and his British allies in the Labour party deserted him. The message from John Major's government was clear: there could be no negotiation with "the men of violence", only more war, more death, more misery. If the enemy was genuine about peace, all it had to do was surrender. This may have made Major feel strong, but as a strategy for peace it wasn't going to work.
Reflecting on the response to the Hume-Adams initiative, republican leaders could have been forgiven for falling back on the old dictum that nationalists in the north of Ireland never achieved anything by politics. It could easily have been the signal to give the physical-force tradition its head. But, undeterred, the IRA called a three-day ceasefire, on December 23 1993.
The intention was to show that the IRA had the discipline and cohesion to maintain a ceasefire and that the republican leadership was serious about finding a settlement. But such was the fury provoked by the Christmas ceasefire that Adams wondered aloud if the IRA had declared an intensification of the war. The message was the same: peace had to be on British/unionist terms.
When the IRA declared a "complete cessation of military operations" on August 31 1994, the response was no less hostile. Adams in particular came in for vicious and sustained criticism, including on these pages. Gerry Adams "is a coffin-filler strategically deciding to desist from filling coffins", wrote Edward Pearce in 1994. "Even if his heart is in peace, his words and his actions suggest a man who has neither the confidence nor the courage to drive events," an Observer editorial claimed in the same year. Later Roy Hattersley reflected in the Guardian that "Gerry Adams is part of the Troubles ... by treating him as if he is essential to a permanent settlement, we glorify intransigence, bigotry and extremism". It was as though nothing whatsoever had changed from a year earlier when the Sunday Telegraph, for example, declared that Gerry Adams was "one of the ... most formidable enemies to peace in Ireland's bloodstained history".
Given subsequent events, what lesson do we take from these quotations, apart from evidence of the writers' prejudice and inaccurate judgment? It is the same one that echoes throughout Mandelson's interview, which is that the British government is a patient, reasonable, much put-upon and disinterested party to the whole sorry affair.
In this smug, patronising and valedictory view, the British government can maintain the fiction that the conflict arose of nothing, that the nationalist community never had genuine grievances, that the whole thing was - to quote Jeremy Paxman during his coverage of the recent elections - "tribal" and therefore irrational, beyond politics. Or as the former Tory MP Edward du Cann said: "The English find [the Irish] impossible to understand - why they fight each other, why they speak with such a total lack of logic. There's no reality in Ireland. It's a land of fairies, of pixies and leprechauns."
Mandelson's Ireland may be inhabited by "bloody hard" people, but he colludes with Du Cann in propagating the self-exculpating myths that allowed both Labour and Conservative governments to shore up one side - the unionists - while waging war against republicans and still claiming to be impartial.
The elections last week saw Sinn Féin register its largest vote since partition. The lesson Mandelson and those who nod so approvingly at his interview have still to learn is that the party's success is an acknowledgment by voters that the republican leadership drove the peace process, while the British government and unionists have proved - and in the case of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist party continue to prove - dilatory in pursuit of a settlement.
· Ronan Bennett's latest novel, Zugzwang, is published by Bloomsbury in July
Guardian Unlimited Copyright © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007