Northern Ireland's European peace

Never say never: Paisley (left) and McGuinness finally gave
peace a chance. Photograph: Reuters

I never realised quite how important history was to Northern Ireland’s problems till I began to work on the issue in No 10 Downing Street as chief of staff to the prime minister in 1997. After the first two months I used to joke with Tony Blair that if we ended a meeting with any of the political parties after just half an hour we would have only reached 1689 and there would still be three centuries of grievances to go before we got to the current day.

But what really brought home to me the different timescale they were operating on was our first meeting with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein at No 10 in December 1997. We had been trying to put off the meeting for as long as possible and Alastair Campbell, director of communications in No 10, had even sent me a memo suggesting we remove the Christmas tree from outside the building so that the occasion didn’t look too festive (we didn’t).

It was a big occasion and there were more TV cameras on the street even than there had been on May 1, the morning we entered Downing Street after the election. Adams and McGuinness were nervous when they entered the grand Cabinet room at the end of the corridor and I noticed their hands were shaking slightly when I directed them round the Cabinet table to the far side of the room. They had their backs to the window over the gardens and standing behind their chairs McGuinness tried to lighten the mood by saying, “So this was where all the damage was done then”. We were taken aback by this opening gambit, and I said “Yes, the mortars landed right behind you in the garden and blew the windows in. My brother Charles was sitting here next to John Major in a meeting on Iraq and he dragged the prime minister under the table. Four rather overweight policemen rushed into the room and waved their guns around rather ineffectively.” It was McGuinness’s turn to look appalled. “Oh I didn’t mean that”, he said, “I meant this was where Michael Collins signed the treaty with Lloyd George.”

This misunderstanding nicely illustrated the gap between us. We were thinking about the IRA mortar attack on No 10 in 1991 and they were talking about the Treaty of Independence in 1921 which had kicked off the Irish civil war.

As a historian by training I am fascinated by the way in which peace in Ireland was the result both of big historical forces and of the actions of individuals. It is hard to see how there would have been peace if Ireland had not been transformed economically from a poor backward country into the Celtic Tiger, and it is hard to see how it would have happened without the political change in Britain from siding with the unionists to taking a more impartial role following then Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Brooke’s speech in 1990 saying that “Britain had no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”.

And it would not have happened without the British army realising fairly early in the 1980s that they could not win militarily. They could keep violence at "an acceptable level" indefinitely but not completely close down the IRA. They started looking for a political solution. The IRA had a similar apotheosis only a little later in the mid 1980s. Adams and McGuinness had joined the Republican movement very young but by the mid 1980s they were long past fighting age. They too saw that while the IRA could keep going indefinitely they could never achieve their goals by violence alone.

But one of the most significant changes that made peace possible, as John Hume has pointed out, was Europe. In all the legitimate praise for the US for their role in helping bring about peace, the role of Europe has been overlooked. It was not just the very significant economic assistance that the EU has given to NI and the border areas of Ireland and the political support that European leaders offered but even more importantly the impact of the development of the Union on the significance of borders. The border between Ireland and the UK just came to mean much less once we were both in the EU. This was particularly brought home to me when Ian Paisley, the fire-breathing DUP leader, came to see Tony Blair in the midst of the 2005 Foot and Mouth crisis in the UK and in an attempt to take advantage of the looser restrictions on movement of cattle in the south than in the north said, "Our people may be British but our cows are Irish".

Jonathan Powell’s Great Hatred, Little Room was published in paperback in April 2009.