Topic 2
Challenging existing assumptions
Parties to the Northern Ireland conflict reached a point where they felt that a process of negotiation might be more useful than the continuation of strategies of confrontation and conflict. However they were unwilling to take any risks in moving towards negotiations because they did not believe that their opponents had reached similar conclusions or were ready or willing to shift their positions. This was the situation of the republican movement in the early 1990s in the period leading up to the IRA ceasefire. In the extracts below Mansergh documents some of the ways in which the Irish government and the moderate nationalist SDLP attempted to demonstrate to the republican movement that circumstances now favoured a negotiated settlement and Mag Uidhir describes the later debate within the republican movement about whether a ceasefire was the right way forward. Papers were prepared, discussions took place and public statements were made. They also describe the arguments, which were used in the debates. Nesbitt shows the unionist need for reassurance that their assumption would not happen and republicans would not go back to violence.
Topic 3, 'Building confidence', is closely related as it is one means to challenge assumptions.
Exercise 1
1. Look at the extracts on below. (10 minutes) 2. In small groups identify examples of different strategies for clarifying the current political realities. Who applied each strategy? (15 minutes)
Exercise 2
How best can existing assumptions be challenged? Carry out a role-play to test out different approaches.
1. Allocate roles to member of the group. (3 minutes) A minimum of four participants are needed, two will play the parts of leading members of Sinn Féin, and two will play leading members of the Irish government. 2. Prepare for the role-play in separate groups, Sinn Féin and the Irish government. (10 minutes) Imagine you are involved in a discussion between the Irish Taoiseach and Gerry Adams in the early 1990s. The Sinn Féin members are suspicious of British intentions and do not feel that they would be willing to consider a settlement that would respect the interests of Sinn Féin. The Irish government believes that the British government is prepared to be flexible about negotiations and their outcome. The first three extracts should help in understanding the arguments on each side. 3. Act out the role-play. (10 minutes) 4. Discuss how the role-plays worked out. (15 minutes) What approaches were most effective in challenging the members of the republican movement? Which approaches were less effective? Why should that be the case? Did the members of the republican movement try to influence the Irish government? Why and with what effect? 5. The role-play can be repeated replacing the Irish government with John Hume and his colleagues. (25 minutes)
Exercise 3
Carry out a similar exercise using the situation in part two.
1. Allocate roles to member of the group. (3 minutes) A minimum of four participants are needed, two will play the parts of leading members of Sinn Féin, and two or more will play IRA volunteers. 2. Prepare for the role-play in separate groups, Sinn Féin and the IRA members (10 minutes) Imagine you are involved in a discussion between the leadership of the republican movement and volunteers in the IRA about the proposal to have a ceasefire. The Sinn Féin leadership believes that the time is right to create a political process of negotiations and a ceasefire is essential to allow it to pursue its goals. The ordinary members of the IRA are suspicious and feel that a ceasefire would not be in the interests of the movement. The fourth extract should help in understanding the arguments on each side. 3. Act out the role-play. (10 minutes) 4. Discuss how the role-plays worked out. (15 minutes) What approaches were most effective in challenging the members of the IRA? Which approaches were less effective? Why should that be the case? Did the volunteers try to convince the leadership that they were wrong? What was the effect?
Exercise 4
Imagine that you are an adviser to Gerry Adams. Prepare a one page briefing paper, listing the reasons why the UK government might be willing to open up negotiations with the republican movement and the reasons why it would not be in its interests to do so. Also list the risks involved for the republican movement in acting on the assumption that the UK government is willing to negotiate and advise Adams on how to minimise those risks. (25 minutes)
Exercise 5
Unionists have tended to assume that republicans will return to violence if they do not achieve enough by democratic methods while republicans feel that they have shown their positive intentions by maintaining the ceasefire even when progress has been slow and tension has been high.
1. Discuss if there was anything more that republicans could have done after the Belfast Agreement was reached in words or actions that would reassure unionists of their good faith. (15 minutes)
2. Were any of these ideas likely to be acceptable to the republican community? (10 minutes)
3. Were there any factors that indicated that it would not be in the interest of republicans to support a military strategy? (10 minutes)
4. Do you think unionists would have been aware of these considerations? If not, would it have made a difference if they had been able to consider them? If these ideas did not fit with unionist assumptions at the time, can you think of ways in which these considerations could have been introduced and discussed by unionists? (10 minutes)
Extracts
The SDLP were keen to challenge the assumptions underlying the republican struggle. Papers were exchanged between the SDLP and Sinn Féin in 1988. The SDLP maintained that the British government had become neutral and were prepared to back a united Ireland based on consent. The challenge was to win that consent. Sinn Féin contested British neutrality and held to a doctrine of self-determination that required the British government and the unionists to accept the majority will of the people of the whole island of Ireland without regard to the partition which had divided the island for over sixty-five years.
On two occasions Fianna Fáil, the party in government in the Republic, in parallel, ancillary and largely exploratory but secret talks with Sinn Féin leaders sought to convey to them the unacceptability of violence to the people of the South. Violence not only divided nationalist opinion in the North but also created divisions between nationalists north and south of the border and among Irish Americans.
Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fáil)
Any remaining public tolerance of continuing paramilitary atrocities was sharply diminishing. The physical capacity to continue had to be distinguished from the moral and psychological capacity to sustain an armed struggle that increasingly had no obvious point. Sinn Féin needed to break out of political isolation and clearly hoped to form a pan-nationalist front that would reinforce its demands without necessarily requiring the complete abandonment of the armed struggle.
Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fáil)
The Downing Street Declaration of 15 December 1993, while recognisably retaining many features of the draft proposal passed by Reynolds to Major the previous June, also represented a challenge to the IRA. The British government's acceptance of the right to self-determination, subject to concurrent consent, its renunciation of any selfish strategic or economic interest, its commitment ëto encourage, enable and facilitateí the achievement of agreement between the people of Ireland and its promise to accept the admission of Sinn Féin to political dialogue with the other parties, and not just in a Nationalist Forum, challenged the whole rationale of continuing the armed struggle. It took another eight months for the republican movement to be convinced.
Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fáil)
After the 1974-76 ceasefire, the IRA had come closer to defeat than at any other time during the conflict. ......... 'Ceasefire' had became a dirty word in the Republican vocabulary, and therefore the steps to the 1994 cessation had to be slow and patient, ensuring that the movementís unity and cohesion were maintained above all else. It took a great leap of faith to convince the republican base that a cessation could actually advance its position. The republicans' chief fear was that any protracted cessation would be used by the British government to sap the will and ability of the IRA to wage war - as had been their experience of 1975. Others worried that Sinn Féin would be sucked into a process and become indistinguishable from parties such as Fianna Fáil and the SDLP, who had failed to achieve an end to partition.
Séan Mag Uidhir (Republican)
However, it is not enough to merely subscribe formally to international democratic norms. All sections of the Northern Ireland community must feel at ease with each other. The psychological barriers of distrust and lack of confidence must be broken down. There is no place in a functioning democracy for equivocation on violence or the threat of violence. The right to be in government carries with it a responsibility: the responsibility to demonstrate absolute commitment to peace, democracy and therefore stability.
It goes beyond accepted international norms for a political section of any movement to participate in the government of a region when its paramilitary section has done no more than declare a ceasefire: by the end of 1999 the threat of a return to violence by the IRA was undiminished.
Dermot Nesbitt (Ulster Unionist Party)
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