Northern Ireland: Topic 5 - The practice of negotiations

The formal Belfast talks that led to the Belfast Agreement in April 1998 were unusually long, lasting nearly two years. At many points the talks became stuck and there were many occasions when the negotiators had to experiment with different methods to keep the talks progressing. As Durkan’s article states “the mechanisms were not new in themselves but the participants were occasionally able to use them in innovative ways to overcome obstacles when the talks became bogged down”. In the extracts he briefly describes a variety of approaches which were used. They can also be tried in many other situations.

Exercise 1

1. Read the extracts below. (15 minutes) Imagine you have been asked to prepare a briefing paper on practical procedures for facilitating talks. Individually, list all the mechanisms described by Durkan. You may also find it helpful to look at the extracts under topic 7 to see if there are other mechanisms described there.

2. For each approach state the circumstances when it seems to you to be most useful, what impact it has and factors which may make it less effective. (30 minutes) 3. You may wish to present your conclusions in the form of a chart or diagram. (10 minutes)

Exercise 2

1. Take the list of approaches referred to by Durkan and in small groups compare with the personal experience of group members. Have any members of the group used any of them? Have they been effective? (20 minutes)

2. What lessons were learnt from the experience of group members? (15 minutes)

Exercise 3

Durkan describes a number of ways in which the participants in the talks tried to improve the process and make the talks more effective. Yet he also says that when signs of “chemistry” became evident in early 1998 it was not entirely clear why this was so.

1. As a group discuss how much the improvement might be attributed mainly to time. (15 minutes)

2. Discuss how far the deadline imposed had the effect of concentrating minds on the need to reach agreement and sharpening the discussion. (15 minutes)

3. From the discussion do you conclude that it might have been possible to shorten the period until that state was reached and could a deadline have been set sooner? (15 minutes)

Extracts

The talks got off to an acrimonious and inauspicious start with sessions dominated by the issue of rules of procedure. The unionist parties were resentful that the British and Irish governments had published a set of ground rules on 16 April and appointed the three independent chairs without consulting them. They argued that this set the precedent for the governments to control the talks. Consequently the first day was characterized by delay and uncertainty as the unionist UUP, DUP and UKUP parties rejected both the ground rules and the appointment, in particular, of former US Senator George Mitchell as the senior independent chair. The arguments regarding the rules were more than just pedantic points about procedural preferences. They were about the working ethos of the process and its political potential.
Mark Durkan (SDLP)

Under Rule 5 liaison sub-committees on confidence building and decommissioning were eventually established in order to separate out topics which threatened to undermine the ability of the parties to work together.
Mark Durkan (SDLP)

Everyone agreed on the need to get the negotiations to move up a gear or two but not on how to achieve this. Proposals tended to be about getting stuck into an issue or locking on to one Strand to get some substance established. It was not just the agenda that mattered but format, with all parties seeming to agree on the limited value of the big room sessions.

During the long Opening Plenary bilateral and multilateral meetings were the favoured channel for real negotiations. However, these also had a questionable success rate. Successive bilateral discussions with all the parties in turn were hardly stimulating. Impressionistic accounts of other parties’ positions or intentions were exchanged at second and third hand and different parties focused on quite different things in the same round of bilateral or multilateral discussions...

In 1997 a smaller Plenary sub-group format was established with two representatives from each party to identify key issues for resolution and to propose an appropriate format for dealing with them.
Mark Durkan (SDLP)

One shared tactic to avoid difficulties in dealing with specific substantive issues was to review widely all the issues or “surf the agenda”. The intention was to allow parties to air and share all the issues that mattered to them and to gain some measure of the approach being taken by others. Parties were invited to submit papers on each item on which they were entitled to speak in the large negotiating format.

.... With limited written submissions from some, conflicting historical analyses and a shortage of actual proposals this “surfing the agenda” exercise had little substantive value. It did, however, mark some sort of graduation in the negotiation process with parties starting to get a sense of how serious others were about given issues. Some significant points were made and with some passion. The importance of good listening was now more apparent and relevant - at least to some.
Mark Durkan (SDLP)

In early 1998 signs of “chemistry” became evident as parties and personalities got back to each other’s points or ideas in other than negative tones. It is not entirely clear why this was so but a number of developments may have helped. Responding to the difficulties during and before the recess, the two premiers in January prepared their own “heads of agreement” paper similar to the “key issues” drafts on the table before the recess. The aim was to give the resuming negotiations some measure of focus as the proposed May deadline came closer.

At this stage the smaller negotiating format was used but with only two assistants allowed in support of the two representatives per party. Some parties fielded different negotiators according to the issue under discussion that, at times, had the effect of giving mixed messages. Parties canvassed their various proposals, concepts and models but, more importantly, with some tactical exceptions, they explored each other’s ideas, seeking further explanations or offering explanations for their own reservations or objections. The SDLP and UUP eventually had language proofing sessions where they could identify and explain for each other their sensitivities about the sort of terms they were respectively using or likely to use. These sessions lapsed into discussions of substance but this was hardly a problem in the circumstances.

Mark Durkan (SDLP)One of the most significant and poignant personal contributions of the talks process was made in London by Reg Empey of the UUP when he struggled to show some appreciation of the attitudes and calibre of the republican negotiators, and asked for something similar for unionism. The genuineness of the terms in which he spoke had an impact on the other parties that they tried to reciprocate.
Mark Durkan (SDLP)

The government-ordained 9 April deadline was needed. With the deadline in place parties began to press on the issues which had not been substantively pursued in the negotiations to date. They stressed issues and ideas of particular importance to them such as policing, prisoners, civic forum, decision-making and safeguards, and the UUP returned to the decommissioning question.
Mark Durkan (SDLP)

When the two premiers arrived the UUP and Sinn Féin concentrated on Strand Two but negotiations also continued on prisoners, policing, equality, human rights as well as the other Strands.

There was therefore no collective or round table negotiation as such. In all probability no one participant – not even the independent chair or either prime minister – knew everything that was going on throughout this period. It was not perfect traffic management but it beat the gridlock. Instead of the stalemate of a zero-sum game we now had a complex matrix of negotiation.
Mark Durkan (SDLP)

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