Agreement!
The state, conflict and change in Northern Ireland

Introduction: A thing of beauty

Emerging out of the brutalising colonial redoubt of Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement was a product of great creativity born of conflict. The state's adversaries improvised a unique template for governance. At the end of the twentieth century, when the legitimacy of representative democracies all over the world was fading, Northern Ireland invented a newly dynamic model of democracy. This was thrilling.

This book is about how the Agreement became a thing of beauty. It is about the tributaries that contributed to the most generous and egalitarian prospectus for government perhaps anywhere in the world - though their journeys into the text confronted a government that had habitually invested in war rather than redress. They prescribed reforms that were reasonable and respectful and yet - if implemented - promised a fundamental challenge to traditional power.

The novelty of the Agreement lay in its description of the duty of the state to engage the people, and particularly the constituencies of the marginalised and the maligned, in the work of making the settlement 'take' - making a new heart to revive the body politic. For the first time Northern Ireland could imagine solidarity as co-operation, as a practice of engagement rather than exclusion.

Even after it was overwhelmingly endorsed and inscribed in legislation, however, the Agreement's constitutional innovations were sabotaged. This book is therefore not just about the ending of the conflict; it is also the story of the struggles to implement the Agreement. The historic resistance to redress, and the obstacles mobilised during the defining years of implementation, continued to be dominated by Britain, through capricious and sinister suspensions of Northern Ireland's elected government at Stormont - manoeuvres that encouraged suspicions that counter-insurgency and collusion were not finished business. The book appears ten years after the deal was done, at a moment when an unexpected historic partnership between former enemies inaugurated a new era in politics - and there is a possibility that Northern Ireland might at last begin to do what it had promised itself a decade earlier.

The Agreement was, in part, a treaty between the British and Irish governments. But more than a peace treaty was needed to resolve the thirty-year conflict. Peace had to be a promise of a new society founded on practices hitherto denied or demonised - equality, human rights and social justice.

The Agreement was a conflicted people's riposte, finally, to the scornful exercise of power - to disrespect that demanded so much and gave so little to people who had been prepared to lay down their lives for it; and to power that gave so much less - and so much worse - to those who dared to challenge the state, the 'narrow ground' of the centre and the political culture that sustained it.

The text was the product of women and men who in April 1998 slept on floors in Belfast's Castle Buildings, under desks, in corridors, hungry, cold, but keen - keener than they'd ever been in their lives to meet a deadline and come to a consensus about change; they were feminists, former warriors, scholars, human rights experts, diplomats from Dublin and London. They didn't do it alone, they were arriving at a destination - an agreement - that could never have been reached without potent friends on 'the out', including the Americans and the Irish on the island and throughout the vast diaspora who had given their vigilance, patience and finally power to the process; and they were supported by civil society's unorthodox coalitions that saw difference as something to be dealt with and not denied. These were movements where gender, class, race, religion, sexual orientation and anti-sectarianism converged. It was their ardent quest for non-violent solutions to injustice and inequality that had exposed a rigid state that appeared to offer no means of remedy - no normal access to courts or elected forums - a state whose extravagant investment in violence had projected the problem as the people themselves.

So this is the story of the people who made the text the novel constitution that it became, and it is also the story of the resistance, of a repressive state apparatus that favoured the defeat of its enemies over consensus and change. (This is not to suggest that the British state was necessarily coherent - it wasn't. But at decisive moments perfidy prevailed.)

The search for non-violent ways to address and redress socio-economic causes harvested an equality movement that gathered momentum at precisely the point when the political wings of armed militias were themselves canvassing a settlement. But Britain all too often blocked progress towards peaceful change: by inertia or sabotage of socio-economic equality, and by the bleak dominion of the repressive security state. Even after the Agreement had been endorsed on both sides of the border as the settled will of the people, they had a way to go. It took almost a decade before intimations of the Agreement's potential became palpable, and this was only after those elements of the establishment that had manoeuvred for defeat rather than a deal had been chastened or controlled; only after the Assembly was enabled to get on with the business of government without interruption or the suspension of its sovereignty by Britain. The Agreement could only appear as fully the settled will when its warrant was embraced even by its enemies, who had contributed nothing to its production and then opposed its implementation; its best chance finally arrived when the purported extremes of Northern Ireland's party politics succeeded where the centre had failed - when the extremes became the centre. Only then could the new constitutionalism test the habits of governance, and only then could it begin to contribute to the creation of consensus where there had been none.

This great story is not widely recognised as the story of the peace process. This book therefore - which is not the story of the entire peace process - is about parallel peace processes and the novelty of the treaty that has been obscured.

There is a tendency to render invisible the political interventions of feminism; but it was women who came up with a template that translated from the specific to a general constitutional duty to address inequalities. There is a tendency to see human rights advocates as oppositional; but in Northern Ireland their concern with the abuse of power connected them with the economy, and with the most powerless - women - and with pro-active institutional solutions. Part I of this book tells the story of the contribution made to the peace process by a wide range of advocates for equality.

There is also a tendency in Britain to represent the period known as the Troubles as a squalid interregnum, a descent into barbarism by religious fundamentalism, republican cruelty and loyalist intransigence, as the bare-knuckle business of tribal paddies. Northern Ireland came to be represented as Britain's burden: Britain was tasked with managing its rowdy and incomprehensible neighbours. The way the deal was represented echoed this view of the conflict. It was seen as the outcome of exhaustion, weary militias needing peace, polarised parties cajoled by benevolent diplomats and wise politicians from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish Sea. It was hailed as the triumph of sensible chaps rather than the ingenuity of the society itself. But the Agreement was not just the outcome of politicians guiding the hand of history from on high. It was a moment when popular movements from below converged with statecraft to make history. These included those regarded as the pariah, the paramilitaries from both communities. (Their long journey to the agreement is discussed in Part II of the book.)

For sure, the Agreement was blessed by ingenious diplomacy. The text and its earlier prototypes, Sunningdale in 1974 and more importantly the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, had produced a new historic compromise between Britain and Ireland, its former colony. The settlement established the terms of the jurisdiction of the governments in London and Dublin in Northern Ireland, and in so doing transcended traditional concepts of borders, nations, states and sovereignty. But the significance of the Agreement was much more than this, and this is what will be explored in this book.

Difference, equality and the state
The great achievement of the Agreement was its acknowledgement of the legitimacy of both protestant/unionist and catholic/nationalist political aspirations, and of the people who had taken up arms to defend those aspirations. That marked one of the first breaks with earlier peace processes. The civil rights campaigner Michael Farrell argues that the process that produced Agreement was not, as the nationalist politician Seamus Mallon dubbed it, 'Sunningdale for slow learners': the fundamental difference was that the Agreement was 'designed to bring in the republican and loyalist paramilitaries, whereas Sunningdale was designed to defeat them'. Histories, aspirations, circumstances that had been so loaded with practices of privilege and humiliation were to be addressed anew. Differences were not denied, they were named. This recognition has often been misrepresented as regressive, but I believe that the Agreement's ingenuity was to affirm difference and diversity by creating structures that aimed to deny any - and indeed all of them - the power of dominion. By naming them it was proposing to deal with difference and diversity as problems of power. Furthermore, the national and religious categories that had defined the arc of the armed conflict were named in the electoral and constitutional arrangements as political affiliations; everyone understood these histories as blocs of ideologies. And so identity and ideology were available for fresh interpretations in the shaping of citizenship. Affiliations, interests, orientations, ethnicities and circumstances - advantages and disadvantages, too - were categorised in the electoral arrangements and in the state's constitutional duties in new ways. 'The Agreement makes the question of national identity up for argument in the future', commented Michael Farrell.

And here is the crux: some critics have seen the Agreement's naming of interests and identities as fixing them. I disagree. They could now be conceived not as ways of being but ways of becoming; they could be imagined as ways of operating within social relationships that would no longer be organised around dominion and humiliation. The Agreement enabled 'identities' to be specified not as being or biology, but as regimes, as relationships. The Agreement prescribed limits on their powers. That, simply, was the point of power-sharing.

Linked to this recognition, citizenship was refreshed within the Agreement as activity in arenas within and beyond the state. At a time when the global political ascendancy of neo-liberalism was promoting the withdrawal of the state, the new Northern Ireland state was expected to be interventionist, re-distributive, and disciplined by a generous dialogue with the civil society. Civil society, which had flourished during, and in response to, the conflict, now expected to be an organic presence in a process of renovation. The state now had a positive duty to engage with, to work with, the new social movements that activated its busy civil society. The Agreement inscribed their right to participate in a new civic space where sectarianism, inequality and injustice 'from whatever source, public or private, can be addressed in a new emancipatory project'.

These possibilities were released, in the first instance, by the Agreement's arrangements for sharing power and entering the Assembly, which obliged elected Members to designate themselves as unionist, nationalist or 'other'; it offered the parties not only their place in the Assembly, but their proportional place in the departments and the executive. So, the significant parties - inevitably both nationalist and unionist - were entitled to share government. The historic blocs - unionist and nationalist - had to manage power co-operatively and consensually. This, too, has been criticised, as muting the normal conflicts of democracy. Again, I disagree. The Agreement was a response to the not-normal. It could not wish away that history; it had to be a product of it. Furthermore, the specification of the historic blocs allowed majorities and minorities. The Agreement allowed them to remain in their blocs, but not only in their blocs - it allowed them to be more than their blocs. Unionists could no longer rule, therefore, without nationalist consent: Unionism could no longer operate unilaterally. Contrary to myth, Members could refuse the dominant alignments, they could be Other, but no one could escape definition in relation to the decisive polarisation that had created in Northern Ireland a failed state and a thirty-year war. And Members who chose to designate themselves as 'Other' always had the option to re-designate within the major blocs, so the Agreement simultaneously specified identities and yet ingeniously allowed the possibilities of multiple and mobile identities. This was dramatised in a moment of grave crisis in the Assembly, when the unionist bloc lost its internal majority, and the Women's Coalition proposed the creative re-designation of its two Members to keep the government alive (see pxx). Furthermore, these themes of borders and identities and balance of power did not exhaust the Agreement's innovations. The arrangements assumed that everyone was positioned somewhere in the sectarian discourse, but this discourse was now to be mediated through the constitutional duty to practise equality and social justice. The Agreement constitutionalised the duty to promote of equality, and then to engage those with an interest in the assessment of it and in policy-making processes. It did so across a span of circumstances and conditions beyond the defining arc of sectarianism. It reached to places where the foundations of modern western democracy - the American Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the informality and incrementalism of the British tradition - did not reach; though it was, of course, a product of their limits. It inscribed equality, human rights and socio-economic justice as a duty of the state: the state was to promote equality through all policy-making processes. Egalitarianism was, therefore, to change the state. And equality was to be an achievement of the state, an outcome.

So, in an era of laissez faire and shrinking states the Agreement proposed an interventionist state, a state with the duty to make a difference, to do something about the deficits between catholics and protestants, men and women, straights and gays; between White Anglo-Saxon Protestant men - the masters of the universe - and everyone else, between bodies, faiths, faculties, ethnicities and responsibilities. Though class was not named as a specific category (which made it intolerable to some critics), class was present in the re-distributive duty to address the matrix between class, sectarianism and sexism that had compromised everything in Northern Ireland. It was also specified in a specific commitment to target poverty in general, and the greater poverty of catholics in particular.

The surprise was that these links had been initiated not by the categories of religion or class, but by gender. Ethno-national conflicts are, of course, always deeply gendered, but peace processes in general conceal that central contradiction. Making it visible involves a 'radical reconception of the nature of the state', and this was the genesis of some of the Agreement's originality. We shall see how the class-religion dimension derived from gender politics and the indispensable creativity of both feminists and human rights advocates, whose concern was not gender but the abuse of power: their shared quest was for ways to make power-holders change the form and content of policy-making.

The duty written into the deal to factor equality proofing into policy-making was accompanied by the duty to engage those with an interest in the process of policy-making. The implementation of policy was to be monitored and measured. Tangible outcomes were the objective. The purpose was to make equality a mission of government, shared with civil society. The implications, therefore, went beyond institutional duty - and moved towards cultural revolution.

Egalitarianism had the potential to infuse 'a new constitutionalism of process, partnership and value'. Equality could be conceived of not as a thing, goods and possessions, but as an ambition vested in social relationships between citizens, and between citizens and states. This approach transcended the limits of classical political philosophy, and envisaged rights not so much as the distribution of goods but as relationships. It was not what catholics and protestants did, or did not, own or earn or receive that was be transformed by the Agreement, but their relationship to each other. Thus, within the new egalitarianism protestants weren't losing anything - except dominion over catholics. Of course, relative privilege had scarcely mitigated working-class protestants' disadvantage within the Unionist universe. That was why the parties representing poor protestants were enthusiastic the equality duty.

All of this radically re-interpreted the British state's account of itself and its narrative of the conflict. The history of the Agreement's egalitarian discipline had flushed out the state's real interest; and in the promise of partnership civil society gave the state the duty to change itself. It recognised that it had not previously been neutral, as it had claimed; it had not been merely an agent, an arbitrator. It was a subject. It had dominated the place. Inez McCormack summarised the promise of the Agreement as creating the context for transformation. 'None of us have the right to be who we were', she said. Not least the state.

But could the deal do what the society itself had been unable to do? As feminist legal scholar Christine Bell argues, the Agreement encapsulated 'an overtly-value driven constitutionalism'. It did not codify an existing consensus, its aim, rather, was to effect that consensus.

Obstacles to implementation
The obstacles in the way of implementation, like the provisions of the Agreement itself, were obscured behind the propaganda that Northern Ireland's problem was the paramilitaries. Their reluctance to give up their arms and their practice of rough justice in the most insecure and unprotected communities was mobilised as evidence of their bad faith. Though the paramilitary organisations may have been an obstacle to peace, they were not the problem of implementation: this was an international treaty that depended for its implementation not on the paramilitaries but on the polity, whether the devolved state in Belfast or the big British state. If the paramilitaries exasperated the governments who were the Agreement's guardians, it has to be admitted that the British state retained its intransigence and power to thwart, compromise and corrupt the great enterprise.

The legislation to implement the Agreement, like any constitution, was contingent on power and political will. But no sooner was the ink dry than the bureaucracy reasserted its old self, re-interpreted its duties and began the work of betrayal. The equality, human rights and social justice provisions weren't optional, they were the law. But the provisions were located in processes, and in reluctant and unready administrations that often felt affronted by the new duties - and there were no sanctions against the refuseniks.

There was also the major problem of what was not allowed to enter the Agreement: policing, security, justice and public safety. The Agreement did not deal with sectarianism in public space: the seemingly unregulated, though of course intensely regulated, realm in which we all live; the space of community; the 'space of enunciation', in which speeding and sex and sanitation are regulated, in which pavements and traffic and retail and the quality of air can be controlled - but not, apparently, the performance of sectarianism. Somehow this eluded the public authorities charged with the management of public space. Part III of this book analyses the fatalism of public authority in face of the sectarianisation of space - a phenomenon that was grotesquely rehearsed during the unionist blockade of Holy Cross girls' school, an episode which once more foregrounded the importance of gender in this story, and which is analysed in some detail in this section. Part IV looks at wider aspects of the Agreement's failure to adequately address the issues of policing and security.

An over-arching and corrupting feature of the conflict was the symbiotic partnership between the security state and paramilitarism. Counter-insurgency begets collusion. I describe the dismal effects of collusion, its impact on Northern Ireland's politics in the prelude to the deal, and its implications for the Agreement itself, in Part V. This section focuses on murder, state secrets and the securocrats' struggle to escape scrutiny or censure - during the peace process, the talks and then the re-construction. It concentrates on the murders of two defence lawyers who were killed by unionist paramilitaries in collaboration with British security services. These murders are analysed as exemplars of Britain's secret assassination strategy. It is the argument of this book that while the combatants were mooting peace towards the end of the 1980s, the state was secretly directing an assassination strategy at its political - in contrast to military - enemy, through the agency of the protestant paramilitaries. The death squads showed the dangerousness of elements within the British state, but also its dependence on confederates that left it vulnerable to disclosure: ultimately these liaisons dangereuses exposed a state that was prepared to go too far. They therefore became a source of revelation that challenged Britain's burnished reputation as a neutral arbitrator, a peacemaker; they became the raw material - that the British secret state had never expected to see the light of public scrutiny - that showed where the British state had positioned itself in the conflict. These revelations helped to explain the government's implacable resistance to truth as the condition of reconciliation. Yes, the British government set up the vital Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday, and yes, with the greatest reluctance, Britain bowed to international pressure and conceded inquiries into some emblematic cases of collusion. But it would not subject itself to scrutiny over the pattern, the system, the purpose of collusion as a strategy, and perhaps even as a raison d'etre.

Britain has a tried and tested habit of narrating warmongering as peacemaking. This has endured into the twenty-first century and the era of the new imperialism. Northern Ireland is the classic case; and it counsels a re-consideration of the purpose of Britain's internationalism, and a retreat from the militarism that by the twenty-first century we knew - if we did not know it before - to be a herald of havoc and destruction. Britain's modus operandi in Northern Ireland was to defer and thwart the remedies injustice while stewarding sectarian terrorism. Thus the state poured scorn on the violence of its subjects while simultaneously sponsoring it.

The story of the Agreement is also, therefore, the story of its limits: Northern Ireland needs remedy, truth and reconciliation as the terms of its modernisation - and they are all equally relevant to the renovation of the bigger state across the water.