Published: February 5, 2010
LONDON — Ending months of dispute that threatened to bring down Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, the prime ministers of
Britain and Ireland on Friday hailed a breakthrough agreement to transfer the province’s police
and justice system from Britain to local control on April 12.
Skip to next paragraph Gathering at Hillsborough Castle near Belfast, Prime
Ministers Gordon Brown of Britain and Brian Cowen of Ireland met with Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Roman Catholic
leaders after a late-night announcement that the main unionist party seeking
continued ties to Britain had agreed to the handover — the most important and by
far the most contentious of the issues still outstanding in the long-running and
still fragile effort to bring peace to the six British-ruled counties of Northern
Ireland.
“We are closing the last chapter of a long and troubled story, and we are opening a
new chapter for Northern Ireland,” Mr. Brown said at a joint news conference with
Mr. Cowen. The men spoke alongside Peter Robinson, the head of the predominantly
Protestant Democratic Unionist Party, committed to the province’s role as a
permanent part of Britain, and Martin McGuinness of the Sinn Fein, the mainly Catholic party that has been the historic standard-bearer for
a united Ireland.
“I think people have looked over the abyss and said, ‘There is no return to the
past,’ ” Mr. Brown said.
Reaffirming the crucial role the United States has played as a mediator in the years
of peace talks that ended 30 years of bloody conflict in the province, Mr. Brown and
Mr. Cowen announced that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will build on the new accord by presiding over an investment
conference to be held in the province later this year, at a date that remains to be
set.
British officials said that Mrs. Clinton had been an important behind-the-scenes
influence in reaching the accord on police and justice powers, and that her
international stature could be decisive in drawing support for investment. Behind
the plan for the conference lies the hope in London, Dublin and Belfast that
creating jobs, particularly for unemployed youths, could help stem a rising
incidence of violence, including attacks on the police, by so-called dissident
republicans opposed to the power-sharing deal in Belfast.
The news conference announcing the agreement to shift to local control of the
police, the prosecution service and the courts reflected another element in the
political matrix that has kept Northern Ireland on the peace track ever since the
watershed Good Friday agreement of 1998 — the role played by the Irish government.
Giving Ireland a direct role in the peace process has been one of the crucial
factors in sustaining the peace process through years of crises and setbacks, and
preventing a slide back into the widespread violence that killed about 3,500 people
during the years of the so-called “troubles.”
Mr. Cowen, the Irish leader, called the deal “an essential step for peace, stability
and security in Northern Ireland” and said the fact that unionists and republicans
had “stretched out their hands and made sure that we got over the line together” on
the police and justice issue — negotiating for over 120 hours over the last 10 days,
and reaching the brink of failure on several occasions — boded well for the future
of power sharing.
For Mr. Brown, the late-night deal offered a rare political triumph as Britain
approaches a general election expected to be called for May 6. With Britain’s
economy still to begin any significant recovery from the global recession, the
57-year-old Mr. Brown has been relishing opportunities to engage in high-profile
activity on issues like Northern Ireland and Afghanistan, perhaps in the hope of
offsetting the political liability he suffers from his 10 years as Britain’s finance
minister before 2007, when British banks began taking the unsustainable risks that
have contributed heavily to the country’s economic woes.
In the years of convoluted negotiations and crises that have characterized the peace
process in Northern Ireland, there have been few issues as fraught, politically, as
the control of police and justice powers. Against the background of decades of
communal violence, the question of where ultimate control over law-and-order issues
resides — until now, with Britain, but henceforth with a yet-to-be-created justice
ministry in Belfast — has carried momentous emotional and symbolic significance.
While many Catholics came to view the police and courts during the years of strife
as a tool of the unionists, many Protestants took a mirror-image view, seeing
Britain’s control of law-and-order issues as a crucial bulwark against republican
violence, and as a guarantor of the province remaining part of Britain.
With the main political parties now agreed on the transition to local control, the
next hurdle will be a vote on the agreement in the provincial assembly at Stormont
on March 9, where it is expected to pass handily, despite the bitter opposition of
diehard unionists. In the wake of Friday’s announcement, political commentators in
the province were saying the pact would make little practical difference to the way
that police and justice issues are handled, at least in the near term, not least
because the peace accords have already seen the establishment of a police
supervisory board based in Belfast, with unionist and republican appointees, and
arrangements that see the province’s police chief directly accountable to the board.
Skip to next paragraph The key to the political breakthrough on the issue appeared
to lie in a shift of political calculus by Mr. Robinson, the unionist leader, who
serves as the province’s first minister under arrangements that require agreement
on all major issues between him and Mr. McGuinness, representing Sinn Fein, who is
effectively Mr. Robinson’s equal as first deputy minister. Sinn Fein had demanded
for more than two years that the law-and-order powers be transferred to local
control, and had threatened in recent weeks to collapse the power-sharing
government over the issue. Mr. Robinson, fearing a unionist backlash, had insisted
that “community confidence” among unionists would not permit it.
Partly as a negotiating tactic, Mr. Robinson demanded a quid-pro-quo from Sinn Fein
before any concession on police powers — the disbanding of the province’s parades
commission, which has frustrated unionists by curbing the marches that the Orange
Order, a powerful body among Protestants, has sought to stage every July through
Catholic neighborhoods. That issue was finessed as part of Friday’s accord, with an
agreement that Mr. Robinson and Mr. McGuinness will set up as six-member working
group that will seek new ways of achieving “cross-community support” for future
marches, with a mandate to bring in recommendations before the “marching season” of
2011.
Political commentators said the parades issue was of less importance to Mr. Robinson
and the Democratic Unionists than the threat of Sinn Fein collapsing the Belfast
government and precipitating a new provincial election that would expose Mr.
Robinson’s party to possible defeat by right-wing unionists opposed to any
concessions on police and justice. With power-sharing now saved, these commentators
said, Mr. Robinson will be hoping for a political “bounce” in the British national
election, in which the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein will be the province’s
leading contenders.
On Friday, at least, the mood at Hillsborough was one of unusual — not to say
exceptional — good will between the province’s historic foes. Mr. Robinson and Mr.
McGuinness stood at ease beside each other at the news conference, each praising the
other’s flexibility in reaching the agreement, though carefully avoiding any public
handshake, as they have throughout the nearly two years they have in their
government partnership.
Mr. Robinson struck the more somber note, referring to the pact as one involving
“life and death issues” for the people of Northern Ireland. But he also heralded the
agreement as a historic breakthrough for power sharing, saying it marked a break
with what he called “the stop-start devolution and continual crises” that have
marked the peace process. “Not this time,” he said.
Mr. McGuinness, a former chief of staff for the Irish Republican Army, was more effusive — as befitting the principal spokesman for
the party, Sinn Fein, that was widely regarded as the principal beneficiary of the
pact. He said the agreement with the unionists had made it “absolutely clear that we
are not going back to the past, and that we are going to go forward together.” He
added, “This might just be the day when the political process in the north came of
age.”