Northern Ireland: Constitutional Settlement from Sunningdale to Good Friday

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Northern Ireland: Constitutional Settlement from Sunningdale to Good Friday

There is a tendency to see a connection between the Sunningdale settlement of December 1973 and the Belfast Agreement of April 1998. Indeed, one of the clichés is that the latter was simply "Sunningdale for slow learners." This implies that there was not much more on offer in 1998 than could have been secured in 1974 and that the interim was a period of wasted years and lost lives. The sentiment has a certain superficial attraction but misses the vital point that both content and context need to be examined: peace agreements are only a part of a peace process. And it raises the question, Who were the slow learners?

The Sunningdale Agreement was innovative because it established a coalition government in Northern Ireland and recognized that the Irish government had a role to play in ending the conflict (the "Irish dimension"). The executive that took office on 1 January 1974 was composed of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) led by Brian Faulkner, the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) led by Gerry Fitt, and the biconfessional Alliance Party led by Oliver Napier. It was the first time in the history of Northern Ireland that a nationalist party had a share in power. That very fact contributed to its undoing. Ostensibly the executive collapsed because many objected to the Irish dimension: "Dublin is only a Sunningdale away" was the popular dissident slogan used in the British general election one month later. Northern Ireland returned eleven anti-Sunningdale candidates and only one in favor. The executive was redundant in less than five months, having been brought down by a loyalist uprising known as the Ulster Workers' Council (UWC) strike. Key workers (particularly those in the gas and electricity industries) withdrew their labor during May in protest over the Irish dimension. It was a masterful strategy because it crippled the Northern Ireland economy. The power-sharing executive ceased activities, and the first bold example of constitutional innovation in Northern Ireland's history collapsed.

Over the next decade successive governments moved with more caution. The Labour governments of 1974 to 1979 placed greater emphasis on security and the economy than on constitutionalism. There was one attempt—in July 1974—to establish a constitutional convention "to consider what provisions for the government of Northern Ireland would be likely to command the most widespread acceptance throughout the community." Seventy-eight members were elected to the convention, which met during 1975 and 1976, but it split on the issue of partnership government versus simple majority rule. It was only when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives came into office in May 1979 that constitutionalism and innovation were revived. They came in two forms—two further attempts at an internal settlement, and the creation of more formalized links between the British and Irish governments.

The attempts at settlement were associated with two secretaries of state, Humphrey Atkins and James Prior. Atkins established a conference of the constitutional parties which met in 1980 to examine the future governance of Northern Ireland. This initiative succeeded in narrowing the political options to a form of power-sharing, or a system of majority rule with a minority blocking mechanism. The conference had been boycotted from the outset by the largest party (the UUP) on the grounds that it was a dereliction of the government's policy of integrating Northern Ireland more fully into the British system. Atkins was succeeded by Prior, who introduced a more ambitious scheme of "rolling devolution" in April 1982, whereby an elected assembly was invested with inquiring and consultative powers to make direct rule more accountable. Powers were to be devolved to the assembly incrementally if it could win cross-community agreement by 70 percent. But the SDLP and Sinn Féin (SF) boycotted the assembly proceedings, and there was no cross-community consensus. The assembly struggled on until 1986; by that stage the process had moved on to another (Anglo-Irish) dimension, especially after the signing of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.

In formalizing interstate cooperation, the 1985 agreement changed the nature of the debate from the endogenous to the exogenous. Henceforth dialogue would be conducted between the two governments of Britain and the Republic of Ireland rather than among the bickering parties in Northern Ireland. Unionism's failure to destroy the agreement led to a period of its internal exile which was only properly addressed in the 1990s, but within a British-Irish context. In essence, this meant that there were two strands to the peace process—one between Northern Ireland's constitutional parties and the second between the British and Irish governments. (Another strand—dialogue between North and South within Ireland—was added later.) Finally, the first strand was enhanced by the inclusion of SF and the small loyalist parties, the Ulster Democratic Unionist Party (UDP) and the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP)—parties close to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Their entry became possible after the British and Irish prime ministers produced the "Downing Street Declaration" in December 1993, which led directly to republican and loyalist cease-fires by October 1994. The declaration offered the opportunity of negotiating the political future to "democratically mandated parties which establish a commitment to exclusively peaceful methods and which have shown that they abide by the democratic process" and referred (ambiguously) to the "right of self-determination" of the Irish people.

To advance the process, the governments sponsored the "Framework Documents" in February 1995, which outlined a blueprint for future discussions, but they had little immediate impact because the IRA abandoned its cease-fire in February 1996 in protest against British insistence that it decommission its weapons. On 30 May 1996 elections were held for a Northern Ireland forum to enable the politicians to engage in interparty negotiations. Eleven months later, the Labour Party defeated the Conservatives in the British general election, and a new opportunity for inclusive dialogue was created. SF was permitted to join interparty talks on 9 September 1997. (The IRA's cease-fire had been reinstated on 20 July.) Intensive negotiations under the chairmanship of former U.S. Senator George Mitchell (and with the blessing of the Clinton administration and the European Union) followed the now established three-strand formula: strand 1 dealt with internal Northern Ireland institutions, strand 2 with North-South relations, and strand 3 with East-West (British-Irish) relations. The negotiations culminated with the signing of the Belfast Agreement on 10 April 1998.

The Belfast Agreement was much more comprehensive than Sunningdale, and crucially it introduced the prospect of the total cessation of violence, a prospect not offered by Sunningdale. It was based on the doctrines of consent (Irish unity was conceivable only in a peaceful context) and sufficient consensus (crosscommunity cooperation). It created sophisticated institutions that linked the three strands together. It built on the earlier failed initiatives of 1974 by learning from their defects and had a full-fledged equality and human-rights agenda. The agreement had been achieved through an inclusive process without any form of coercion. It had the warm support of the international community and reflected changing conceptions of identity by moving away from the narrow designations of (simply) unionist or nationalist. Above all, in two referenda held throughout Ireland on 22 May 1998 it was endorsed by 71 percent of Northern Ireland's voters and by 94 percent of the Republic's. It offered a comprehensive peace that had eluded Ireland in the twentieth century and was hailed as a model for conflict transformation in other intractable struggles.

SEE ALSO Adams, Gerry; Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 (Hillsborough Agreement); Decommissioning; Economic Relations between North and South since 1922; Hume, John; Northern Ireland: History since 1920; Northern Ireland: The United States in Northern Ireland since 1970; Trimble, David; Primary Documents: Anglo-Irish Agreement (15 November 1985); Irish Republican Army (IRA) Cease-Fire Statement (31 August 1994); Text of the IRA Cease-Fire Statement (19 July 1997); The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (10 April 1998)