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17 December 1998 Edition

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Review of 1998

Holding tight - a year of living dangerously

Brian Campbell looks back on a year when the political landscape changed in the Six Counties

If 1998 in the Six Counties was a white-knuckle rollercoaster ride, then don't unfasten your seatbelt just yet. The ride isn't over. Not by a long way.

The year began with the shooting dead of eight nationalists and reached its historical high point on Good Friday with agreement in the multi-party talks after a final 36 hours of non-stop negotiations.

Following referenda to endorse the Agreement and elections to the Assembly the summer was dominated by the events at Drumcree when violence in support of the Orange Order led to the deaths of three small boys, burned to death in Ballymoney. That violence continues.

In August a group opposed to the peace process, the self-styled Real IRA, exploded a bomb in Omagh which killed 29 people.

The final months of the year has seen the effective stalling of the peace process as the Ulster Unionists refuse to form the institutions specified by the Good Friday Agreement until the IRA disarms.

There is no doubt the Agreement was a truly historical moment. But it wasn't historical in the way that many commentators gushed about at the time - it didn't change everything utterly. Rather, it changed the context in which the same forces as before faced each other.

Some cynics might even be saying now that it changed nothing. Certainly as the year ends the spectacle of Unionists refusing to implement what was agreed in April - refusing to countenance equality for nationalists - harks back to an era when everyone knew who held power in the Six Counties.

But there is nothing new or mysterious in these Unionist tactics. Their strategy has been there to see throughout 1998 - and for many years before.

During the course of the entire peace process the Unionists have sought to play the game long and slow. They want to delay change and, when change is inevitable, to shape it to their liking. That has been their way since the first IRA cessation over four years ago. It was because of the delaying tactics of the Ulster Unionists that it took so long to bring about talks.

And those tactics continue to this day. David Trimble, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, put it in more homespun language: ``we will go on all the better if we walk, rather than run''.

Trimble's engagement in the process has always been a pragmatic one. He realised that the days of old-style Unionist rule would never return and that he had to redraw the political map, however painful it was to himself and to his supporters.

And to minimise the pain, their second main objective has been to seek to exclude Sinn Féin because the demands for real change come from that party. It has been a constant Unionist refrain from the start of the peace process that the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists should cut a deal and exclude Sinn Féin. It surfaced in March, before the final lap of the talks, when Trimble appealed once again to the SDLP to do a deal. It has characterised Trimble's performance as First Minister Designate. And it was written all over the Nobel acceptance speech which urged constitutionalists to reject republican ``fanatics'' and ``fascists''.

Against the background of these two Unionist objectives - to delay change and to exclude Sinn Féin - can be viewed the issue which has consumed more ink and more newsprint than any other in 1998: decommissioning.

The issue of decommissioning has been raised for three reasons: to further delay progress, to try to unite all other parties against Sinn Féin, and to unite Unionism on a reactionary platform.

Trimble knows he is going against the Good Friday Agreement (and that will be his current tactic's eventual undoing) but he is playing for time. And he is doing it because he can. The political strength of the Ulster Unionists allows them to hold up the process for as long, effectively, as the British government allows them to.

It is only a stalemate because the governments are not prepared to push for the full implementation of the Agreement. It is a dangerous game which is based on the false asumption that if an Executive were formed with Sinn Féin, Trimble would be removed as UUP leader. By whom and with what alternative policy is not speculated on (because it is not a realistic scenario).

In effect, the Good Friday Agreement - an international agreement signed by two governments - is being put aside on the spurious grounds of internal difficulties within Unionism. That is unacceptable and it will lead inevitably to angry demands from nationalists that the Agreement be implemented.

The current difficulties draw the rather obvious comment that politics is conducted according to the political strength of the various forces involved. Agreements can be made and can be put to one side by those who have the political strength to do so. That is as true in Palestine as it is in the Six Counties.

The only sure guarantee of progress is to build political strength. It is a lesson well learned by Sinn Féin in 1998. They received their highest ever poll in the Six Counties - 17.6% in the Assembly elections - and in three bye-elections in the 26 Counties they increased their vote.

In the Six Counties Sinn Féin is now the largest party in Belfast and west of the Bann. That strength limits Trimble's room for manouevre and makes it harder for those who would return to the politics of exclusion.

The rollercoaster year also saw Sinn Féin take other, less obvious, strides forward. The mobilising, lobbying, protesting, and the rallying of international support which backed up the negotiations, together with the six weeks of debate around the Good Friday Agreement (supported by comrades from the ANC) followed by the Assembly election campaign was an intense learning experience for all the activists involved. It has left the party much more advanced in terms of its ability to make change than it was at the beginning of 1998.

That ability will be needed in 1999 as the political struggle turns on whether the Good Friday Agreement will be implemented. The only way to ensure the primacy of politics is to set up the political institutions specified by the Agreement and that will put the onus on Tony Blair. His government can see the Agreement and all the goodwill which it generated drain away as the Ulster Unionists cling to the old agenda. Or Blair can be a persuader for change.

On his decision the future will turn. We'll soon know how rocky the ride will be in 1999.



Dúirt Siad i 1998


It is obvious to everyone that terror is being used against the nationalist community in an effort to force that community to accept less than they are entitled to at the negotiating table.

SF's Mid Ulster MP Martin McGuinness in January when eight nationalists were killed by loyalist death squads

 


The nationalist nightmare - trapped in a state without our consent; abused, victimised and killed - has not changed in 75 years, as recent events on our streets have tragically illustrated.

SF Chairperson Mitchel McLaughlin in January

 


[RUC Chief Constable] Ronnie Flanagan has emerged as the new supergrass. Here is a man who is incapable of explaining how his officers could sit by and watch as [Portadown nationalist] Robert Hamill was kicked to death. He is incapable of answering allegations that one of those officers was personally friendly with a number of those involved in Robert Hamill's murder. He is incapable of explaining how his officers allowed valuable forensic evidence relating to the murder to be lost. Yet when it comes to the most recent killings [of a senior loyalist and a drug dealer] he suddenly has all the facts at this fingertips.

John Gormley of Cearta on Ronnie Flanagan's allegations of IRA involvement in two killings which led to Sinn Féin's expulsion from the multi-party talks in February

 


The RUC Inner Force - which was in turn controlled by an elite corps of RUC officers, the Inner Circle - routinely assisted the loyalist death squads to assassinate republicans and Catholics whom the committee had selected for elimination.

Sean McPhilemy in his best-selling book, The Committee

 


The great problem was allowing the 26 Counties to secede from the Union and from that a lot of difficulties have stemmed... The British Isles is the natural social and economic unit.

David Trimble in Washington on St Patrick's Day

 


``No one else could have gotten you this far,'' thunders Big Ian. ``Stick with me. Follow my leadership and if anyone is to fall in this battle, I'll be the first to fall.'' Then he climbs into the back seat of his armoured Ford and his two-car cavalcade zooms off down the mile-long road [from Stormont] and off into the night. As the crowd left behind in the shadow of Carson's statue watches its leader's red tail lights disappear a mile away at the exit, the realisation dawns on them in the darkness that they face a long walk home.

An Ireland on Sunday report on a Paisley rally at Stormont as the Good Friday Agreement was being finalised

 


We talk about liberated zones. You liberate one zone and it is yours and from that zone you advance. You prepare your forces to advance and at some stage you retreat but you have safe zones to retreat to. Negotiation is about one liberated territory that we could surge forward from. The fact that they allowed us into the country, they allowed our prisoners out, they legalised the ANC, they talked to us - that was a liberated territory.

ANC Deputy Secretary General Thenjiwe Mtintso at the SF Ard Fheis during the debate on the Good Friday Agreement

 


Today's decision that successful Sinn Féin candidates should participate in the Assembly in the north is an historic one. It must be underpinned by a strategy wedded to mobilisations, campaigning, street activism and the international dimension.

Gerry Adams at the reconvened SF Ard Fheis on 10 May

 


It cleared up for the Orangemen, who finally got to parade past the Catholic houses in a march notable not for its festive joy, but for the frenzied, triumphalist, head-wrecking aggressiveness of the drummers (playing with such ferocity that one shattered his drum); the children being whipped up to roar out the Sash at the `appropriate moment'; the sinister UVF colour party (which a police commander claimed not to have seen); the RUC dog handler winking at an Orangeman; and the few whooping harridans taunting residents with their Union Jacks.

An Irish Times report on an Orange march in the Whiterock area of West Belfast in June

 


Croppies lie down

Banner displayed by Orangemen at Drumcree

 


Shame on you

Banners held by nationalists as Orangemen walk down the Ormeau Road on 12 July following the death of the three Quinn brothers


 


It is clear that this small group's actions were an attack on the peace process. Their actions were the working out of pure militarism - a philosophy that is deeply anti-political and anti-people. They ignored the political objective for which they claimed to be struggling and raised military actions to an end in itself.

An Phoblacht editorial following the Omagh bombing

 


To say there can be no executive, no institutions, no structures unless we deliver decommissioning - that's not in the Agreement. Nor is it something Sinn Féin can deliver.

Gerry Adams in September

 


The object of the exercise, as far as Sinn Féin is concerned, is to decommission the injustices and inequalities of the past and to decommission all the British and Irish guns

Martin McGuinness

 


The RUC's role since its inception, particularly over the past 30 years, places it beyond redemption in the eyes of this community. The resentment and indeed hatred of the RUC runs long and deep in this community leaving many scars and wounds. When the RUC was formed in 1922 it was used to underpin the northern state, was inextricably linked to unionism, was sectarian in nature, and used its force ruthlessly on the people of West Belfast and elsewhere to uphold the state.

Community worker Danny Power giving his view to the Patten Commission on Policing

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