7th Annual Harri Holkeri Lecture 2019 Queens University

I am delighted to join you all today to deliver the Annual Harri Holkeri Lecture for 2019.

It is an honour to be asked by the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice to attend this event and keep the memory and legacy of Harri Holkeri alive.

The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice strives to create dialogue within which all voices can be heard and to underpin the pursuit of peace through world class research.

The Institute connects the perspectives of all those who seek to contribute to conflict transformation and social justice – from the insights of world leading researchers to the experience of practitioners, policy makers, politicians and activists.”

Harri was Prime Minister of Finland 1987 – 1991
Speaker of the UN General Assembly 2000 – 2001
and headed the United Nations Administration Mission in Kosovo from 2003 – 2004.

Harri played a major and constructive role in Northern Ireland securing the Good Friday Agreement he was a man of peace, wisdom and a very good friend to Ireland.

As we meet today the British Government is considering The Prime Minister
“Bold and New Initiative”

Which she hopes will enable the withdrawal legislation to pass parliament in two week’s time.

As always, I am sure the Irish Government will play a constructive part in the proposals.

The main issue for us on this Island is that the summer is not allowed to pass with no progress and forcing the issue of No Deal Brexit once again on to the table, as the end of October deadline approaches.

A few weeks ago, the Brexit debate was full of sound and fury and shrouded in what we might call the fog of war. This meant that in many ways we in these islands lost sight of each other to some degree and could only see our own script. Like people lost in a fog, we also started to raise our voices at each other, not just because we were angry but because we were afraid in different ways.

The British were afraid of the anarchy that would follow either failure to implement Brexit or failure to find a consensus to support the withdrawal agreement.

The Republic was fearful of the consequence to our open economy of a British failure to find a parliamentary consensus not to mention the consequent threat of a hard border.

But it was Northern Ireland that suffered most from poor perception of its complex concerns. Because both communities had different fears. Northern nationalists were angry that the fact that a majority voted Remain seemed to be ignored by unionist parties as well as being fearful of being isolated from the Republic and from the EU.

But in many ways it was the fears of unionists that got the least sympathy which is why I want to address them here, honestly and frankly, by making the following three points.

First, in the immediate aftermath of Brexit some of the language from Dublin in speaking to unionists lacked the empathy we extended to nationalists.

Second, while nationalist concerns were sympathetically covered by the European and American media as well as the pro Remain British media the same was not true of unionists whose real fears about being cut off from full communion with the UK were ignored, dismissed and poorly reported.

Just as the views of the Irish Government and the people was totally ignored during the Referendum in 2016 by the British press when they correctly highlight to danger of a Brexit vote.

Some of the blame, but not all of the blame, for unionism’s poor press, was of the DUP’s own doing and arose from what seemed like an abrasive indifference to the concerns of northern nationalists as well as those of the Irish Republic, once they had made an alliance with the Tories. It was as if the DUP had stopped listening not just to nationalists but to many middle Unionists. Sinn Fein’s calls for border polls as well as the instant implementation of a liberal agenda -an agenda we in the Republic only passed recently in a referendum, made agreement on handling Brexit on this Island all the more difficult.

There is no point in pretending that because we see no problem with the backstop this means that unionists have no problem with it. But they must acknowledge that it was the British Government that negotiated and agreed the Withdrawal Agreement including the Back Stop with the European Council

That is why, in the short fog free space we now enjoy I believe we must do our best to look at every angle of approach to explaining our views to Unionist fears around the backstop.

The Backstop plan is essentially a safety net if there is no Brexit trade deal it would avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Also, it would ensure that no tariffs quotas rules of origin or customs processed would be applied to the UK/EU deal.

I can or could not see any circumstances where there will not be a trade agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom after Brexit.

In that event there would in my view be no requirement for the Backstop

The first step is to accept that any step towards dialogue on this island is crucial to creating a climate of cautious trust. Here the positive response by the DUP and Sinn Fein talks on restoring the Assembly are a welcome and necessary condition.

But they are not sufficient conditions unless we remove the threat of border polls in the near future. If the removal of such a demand was matched by a similar move on the Irish language, we would get momentum and momentum is crucial making peace. The longer you don’t talk to an estranged neighbour the harder it is to begin.

I want to turn now to the future and what I feel is going to be needed if we are to move forward.

On the day before the 21st Anniversary of the historic Joint Referenda North and South when the Good Friday Agreement became the Will of the People of Ireland, it is certainly a timely moment to pause and take stock.

The mood that day back in 1998 was very much around a New Beginning and the opportunity that the Agreement provided to break the moulds of the past and build a future for our children and our children’s children that would be very different.

I suppose in truth if we were doing a Performance Review of the Agreement today, it would be a mixed bag.

At many levels, transformation has taken place.

One of the things that gives me a lot of satisfaction as a politician who was involved in the whole Process back then is when I hear parents say “my son or daughter was a child at that time in 1998 and it is wonderful for me and them that they have been able to have an upbringing in a Northern Ireland that was very different to mine”.

There are lots of positives to point to – first and foremost,

the many lives saved,

the normalisation of daily life,

the way Belfast in particular has changed,

but most parts of Northern Ireland in truth, the advances made by great old institutions like Queen’s, the arrival of new ones like the Titanic Centre,

the huge surge in Tourism,

the success of Game of Thrones,

the ease with which one can travel between Dublin and Belfast – the list goes on.

There is one statistic that particularly sums it up for me – 30 years ago, the number of visitors to the Causeway Coast was 100,000 per year, in 2017 it was one million.

And by the way, that huge rise in Tourism, which applies to both sides of the Border, has been driven by Tourism Ireland, the all-island Tourism promotion body, which is itself a creation of the Good Friday Agreement.

Let nobody say that Peace hasn’t brought its dividends.

But I said the Performance Review would show a mixed bag.

The other side of the ledger is called Politics.

And there, things are not so rosy.

In truth, progress in the Political Process has been a lot slower than we had hoped back in those heady days 21 years ago.

Maybe we were being unrealistic about what was feasible in what time frame. Maybe this is what a real living Peace Process looks like, warts and all, 21 years after the Deal.

In fairness, there aren’t too many examples from History where the end of conflict has been followed rapidly by sustained political progress, with no backward steps. Look at South Africa, look at the Middle East, look at the Balkans.

At the same time, understanding for the challenges of Peace Building isn’t the same as excusing not taking them on.

Now let me be clear from the outset that my remarks today are not going to be a long moan-fest about the current generation of leaders and how we did things so much better in our day!

Is there anything more boring than an ancient hurler on the ditch muttering on about how the current crowd are useless?!

I have real sympathy for today’s generation of leaders and I totally agree that they most certainly don’t have it easy.

I get it, for instance, that Brexit has been a huge shock to the system in both parts of Ireland.

I get it that the demographics are changing significantly and all that that entails. I get it that both sides in Northern Ireland have real issues with each other.

I even get it that it is very tempting to view the other side as impossible to deal with.

But what I don’t get is the conclusion that apparently was being reached by both sides until very recently that they had the luxury therefore of giving up on each other and giving up on the task of finding solutions.

That is why I am so pleased and relieved that, however belatedly, there is now once again a serious Process of Engagement underway between the Parties under the leadership of the two Governments to try to find solutions to the issues before us.

I wish those Talks at Stormont very well and I really hope that they can produce an outcome that leads to the Institutions being restored and the ground we have lost being made up.

Of course, we all know that part of the backdrop to the Talks was the horrific recent murder of Lyra McKee in Derry.

While first and foremost Lyra’s murder was a tragedy for her partner Sara, her mother Joan and her family and close friends – and I express my deepest personal sympathies to them –

it has also been a profound moment for all of us living on this island. Despite all the advances we have made in the 21 years since the Agreement, it turns out it was not enough to ensure that no further lives would be lost because of the conflict.

I am a believer in the maxim that in life and in politics there is no standing still – you are either going backward or forward.

In my view, and I am sorry to say this, we have been moving backward this past few years.

And that isn’t all.

In moving backward, we replaced political movement and progress with a vacuum.

Which brings me to another maxim of life and politics – Nature abhors a vacuum.

Put all that together and we are now in my view at a serious cross-roads moment.

We saw clearly in Creggan last month what some people want to do with that vacuum.

As we did in East Belfast some months before with the murder of Ian Ogle.

And while the loss of life is at the extreme end of what happens in a vacuum, there have been other consequences as well.

The growing backlog of decisions left unmade across a whole range of public policy areas in Northern Ireland from Education to Health to Infrastructure to the Economy to the Environment is slowly but surely decaying the fabric of public life here.

Even more worryingly perhaps, the vacuum is leading to a clear and marked erosion of confidence and trust in politics itself.

On my regular visits to Northern Ireland over the past few years I have noticed the settling in of a kind of fatalism about it all – that nobody was that surprised about the impasse between the parties and nobody seemed to have any great expectation that Stormont would return any time soon.

Or even more worryingly, that it would make any difference if it did.

Now that is a real and concerning vacuum.

To me, it’s a matter of history.

We all know that the roots of the Northern Ireland conflict lie deep in history.

They are ancient and they are powerful.

They are not dead roots.

They are living and they exercise their power right up to and through the present.

We ignore them at our peril.

The right thing to do with them is to treat them with respect and manage them carefully.

I feel that over the past two and a half years a kind of slow amnesia has set in and we have been gradually falling into ignoring or forgetting about the roots and lessons of history.

The deaths of Lyra McKee and Ian Ogle are shattering reminders of the reality of what messing with or being casual about the roots and lessons of history actually looks like.

We need to do a bit of waking up.

The fundamentals of the Northern Ireland conflict have not changed.

The hand that history dealt of a deeply divided society in political terms remains the hand that has to be played.

And deep inside that divide lies the virus of political violence – dormant but not dead.

The sudden flaring of that virus in Derry on Holy Thursday night was shocking proof of that grim reality.

Yes, as I have pointed out, the 25 years since the Ceasefires, and the 21 years since the Agreement and Referenda have seen huge progress in terms of bedding in Peace – and for that we are profoundly grateful.

But they have not, as I say, changed the political fundamentals.

That means that the requirements and challenges facing the political leaders of today are basically the same as those facing my generation over 20 years ago.

I call them the twin imperatives of the negotiator –

(a) to represent the views of your own side fully and faithfully yes, but

(b) also, and equally, to bring to bear a profound commitment to finding accommodation and agreement.

Both imperatives are supposed to carry the same weight.

My observation from my vantage point removed from day to day politics is that with the rough and tumble of the last 21 years, and perhaps lulled by the absence of violence for the most part,

the first of those imperatives – representing strongly the viewpoint of your own side – has tended increasingly and incrementally to predominate to the detriment of the second, the commitment to finding agreement.

That imbalance needs urgently to be corrected and hopefully is being done in the current Talks.

Now not for a second am I suggesting that juggling those two requirements is an easy task for political leaders.

I recall a visit to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin Castle in the mid-nineties by FW de Klerk, then fresh from the historic breakthrough in South Africa with Nelson Mandela. Mr de Klerk said something that day which has remained with me always.

It went like this – “in negotiations, the toughest conversations are not with your adversary across the table, they’re with your own side”.

My sincere hope is that some of those difficult conversations with one’s own side are going on at the moment up at Stormont and will do so over the coming few weeks.

Because if they aren’t, we are in big trouble.

There are no solutions in the comfort zone of one’s own absolutist position.

But before you start thinking that Bertie Ahern has turned all pessimist in his senior years, let me also make clear I remain hopeful that we can find solutions here and get back on track.

However to do so, we need to get back to some of the Home Truths that guided us to the Good Friday Agreement and the overwhelming approval of the people of Ireland 21 years ago this week.

The first of those is that the way forward, just as it was 21 years ago, can only be guided by Partnership.

There is no single-narrative solution here, no victory for one side or the other.

Just the painstaking and often boring task of finding solutions that take account of, respect and accommodate our differences, and doing so day-in, day-out, no matter how frustrating that process may be.

If that sounds like John Hume-speak it’s because it is.

John Hume is my North Star on all this. Always has been.

My first appointment to the Irish Cabinet was as Minister for Labour. This time 30 years ago the Southern economy was going through a tough time and there were many difficult employer-worker conflicts to be addressed as a result.

I was in the middle of it.

As the Minister with responsibility for Industrial Relations, I saw that the only solutions lay in compromise and ensuring both sides could live with the way forward. It was a lesson I have never forgotten.

Ten years later as Taoiseach confronting the huge challenges of the Northern conflict, I knew that, although the context was very different, the way forward was the same.

Accommodation of difference was the only path.

Luckily for me, there was somebody out there who had thought this through, who had the language for what the future for Northern Ireland and Ireland as a whole could look like and should look like.

John Hume’s vision for a future based on partnership, peaceful politics and the accommodation of difference was my guiding light and the guiding light of thousands of others through the dark years of the 60s, 70s, 80s and into the 90s.

And then in 1998, in that moment where Heaney’s Hope and History finally rhymed, Hume’s brilliant analysis of the centrality of Partnership was at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement.

Apart from his razor-sharp intellect, another quality John had in abundance was a dogged persistence in relentlessly pursuing and articulating his vision.

And he needed it. He was often mocked for being the man with the single transferrable speech. But he was forced into that position because, despite the logic and truth of his vision, it was defied at every turn for so long.

And now I fear that, 21 years after his vision became the will of the people of Ireland, it is in danger of being defied again.

I see the point-counterpoint of Northern politics as being between Partnership and Partisanship.

Partisanship is the traditional default position of expressing the views of your own side and doing so loudly, hard and often.

Partisanship is about victory – either implementing it or waiting for it.

Partisanship is about operating as if the other side doesn’t exist.

Partnership, on the other hand, is about acknowledging the reality that the hand that history has dealt Northern Ireland requires an accommodation to be secured on every single issue, large and small, every single day.

As I said, it is a slow, laborious, painstaking process, full of frustrations but driven forward by the knowledge that it is the only sustainable way.

There is another truth in play also and it is a variation of the old joke about asking a man for directions and being told “if I were you I wouldn’t start from here”!
Very few would pick the reality of Northern Ireland’s complexities as their ideal starting point. But as I say that is the hand History and Geography have dealt the place.

We must start from where we are.

My concern is that over the last few years more and more people have been slipping away from that truth and back to the old bunkers of Partisanship.

Folks, we need to start getting real here.

For Unionism, that means actually taking on board what Parity of Esteem means.

And when you talk about “our Precious Union”, actually appreciating that your neighbours have an entirely different definition of the phrase and one that is just as legitimate as yours.

For Nationalism, that means recognising that writing off Unionism as unworkable-with is every bit as cancelling and destructive as any act of discrimination your forebears ever had to put up with at the hands of theirs.

That there is no such thing as “moving beyond Stormont” if we want a healthy, vibrant next Ireland for our children and children’s children.

That there is no skipping a step in the sequence.

The journey to a new Ireland cannot jump over the need for working on reconciliation and partnership in Northern Ireland, no matter how challenging and difficult that may be.

Saying “hump them, we’ll wait” is not the vision of John Hume. And it’s not the vision of Wolfe Tone who dreamed of uniting Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.

So, Stormont it must be, difficult as that is for many to contemplate.

The issues hanging in mid-air can’t stay there much longer. In regard, as I said, to the Economy, Education, Healthcare, the Environment, Agriculture, Housing to name but a few sectors, big decisions are on hold.

Besides – and it is an important “besides” – power-sharing at Stormont is a fundamental pillar of the Good Friday Agreement, an Agreement, as I say, that tomorrow 21 years ago became the Will of the People of Ireland, North and South.

When I see commentators and others casually suggesting Stormont is done, over, I wonder by whose authority do they make that claim?

Or are they making the case for a kind of a la carte Good Friday Agreement – we’ll stick with the bits we like and ignore and walk away from the bits we don’t.

That’s not how serious, grown-up politics works.

And, of course, there is the whole issue of continuing Paramilitarism.
The Fresh Start Agreement came up with an energetic and holistic way forward on that in 2015, the Three-Person Panel did a very good Report and it was adopted in a good Executive Action Plan in 2016.

The Independent Reporting Commission is playing its part in monitoring all that and I think its First Report last October contained important road-signs to success – that ending Paramilitarism can only be achieved by a Twin Track approach that combines a policing and justice response with an aggressive tackling of the socio economic issues facing the communities where the Paramilitaries operate.

Otherwise the cycle will begin all over again.

Fr Martin Magill’s brilliant and powerful eulogy at the Funeral of Lyra McKee quoted the IRC analysis and stressed that this is the only way forward – that what young people need in their hands are jobs not guns. I couldn’t agree more.

But all of that will require Stormont back.

Definitively ending Paramilitarism can only be done by a Process with a political wind at its back.

The message will need to go out that the vacuum is over, that politics is the future and that it is time for the gun to be gone and gone for good.

In fact, way past time.

Taken all together, that is some In-tray facing Ministers and MLAs and I sincerely hope that in the coming weeks the Governments and the Parties will find the will and the way to get Stormont back up and running as intended 21 years ago.

My friend Seamus Mallon,

like his partner John Hume, a giant of our Process, once used to call the Good Friday Agreement Sunningdale for Slow Learners.

Well, Seamus, folks could do with a few choice reminders from you in that straight-arrow way of yours again that there are no magic solutions here, no quick fixes and no walking away in despair.

Just the same medicine that you and John prescribed for us day in day out over so many years – partnership and accommodating our differences.

And when you have had a tough day at it, you come back again the next one and work at it again.

And again.

Over the coming days and weeks – and I know this as a veteran of negotiations – there will be lots of moments for the participants in the Stormont Talks where a wall will be hit, where the whole thing will be stalled and where it will all look hopeless.

My plea is that when those moments come, as they undoubtedly will,
the answer won’t be “well, we gave it our best shot, but the other crowd are impossible and we are going to stand firm on this or that point or other”.

And they will all be worthy points on which people are standing firm, sincerely felt, I can assure you.

Here’s what I say: that is the moment to remember Lyra McKee, her partner Sara and her mother Joan. That is the moment to remember the words of Fr Martin Magill at St Anne’s Cathedral. And very particularly, as politicians, that is the moment to remember the will of the people of Ireland as expressed 21 years ago tomorrow.

So instead of folding your arms and digging in, my plea is you will roll up your sleeves, get stuck back in there again and find solutions everyone can live with.

That will be politics back working, that will be you providing real leadership, and that will be the Good Friday Agreement firmly back on track again.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s all to play for.

Thank you very much.