‘For peace comes dropping slow ....’

25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement

The cathaoirleach of Meath County Council, Cllr Nick Killian, recalled last week how very local politics played a small part in the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

Speaking at the launch of the Meath Archaeological and Historical Society's launch of its annual journal, Ríocht na Mídhe, alongside society president, Julitta Clancy, he recalled how one evening he got a call from a local resident, Maeve Gallagher, asking if he could organise for some potholes to be fixed in Harlockstown, “as some important people were coming to visit from Northern Ireland”.

The councillor didn't say who these important visitors to Ratoath were, but Maeve Gallagher's late husband, Dermot, was the Secretary General of the Department of Foreign Affairs, a former Irish Ambassador to the United States, and a key player in the Peace Process. So it was no ordinary high tea.

In fact, one of the last public appearances of Martin McGuinness, the former Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, before his own untimely death in 2017, was at the funeral of Dermot Gallagher in Ratoath only two months earlier.

The presence of Julitta Clancy at last week's launch had reminded Cllr Killian that another group she has been involved with for decades - the Meath Peace Group - and the county council together are hosting the Dermot Gallagher Memorial Lecture next week, with guest speaker, Rory Montgomery, also an architect of the Good Friday Agreement, who worked on Northern Ireland affairs in the Anglo-Irish division of the Department of the Taoiseach from 1993 to 2001.

In 2004, Julitta Clancy received a honorary Member of the British Empire (MBE) from Britain's Princess Anne at a ceremony in the British Embassy in Dublin, in recognition of the work of the Meath Peace Group, whose aim was to ‘promote peace through the fostering of understanding, mutual respect, trust, co-operation and friendship, through dialogue between people North and South’.

In the newly-launched Ríocht na Midhe Volume XXXIV, Ms Clancy writes that 2023 marks the 30th anniversary of the Meath Peace Group, which was founded in the spring of 1993 following a peace service and rally on the Hill of Slane.

The group, while campaigning for an end to the violence which had been raging since 1969, realised that there was work to do in building understanding, trust and friendship, in educating themselves, and in empowering themselves and others to play a part in bringing about a just and lasting peace, she explains.

Work expanded to include study and cross-border exchange visits with cross-border and Northern groups from both traditions; exhibitions; observing disputed parades; public talks and seminars (mainly in Dalgan Park, Navan); transition year school programmes; and submissions and participation in initiatives such as the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin Castle.

Members of Meath Archaeological and Historical Society greatly assisted in many of the activities and discussions. The society is to host a seminar in Dalgan Park on Saturday 14th October next, looking back on 50 years of the Northern Ireland Peace Process, with the retrospective including a presentation on the 50th anniversary of the Sunningdale Agreement by Athboy native Sean Donlon, also a former Secretary General of the Department of Foreign Affairs, and an Irish Ambassador to Washington, followed by a panel discussion on the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

And while it is Albert Reynolds, and later, Bertie Ahern, who receive much of the credit for their work on the peace process as Fianna Fáil leaders and taoisigh, it was their predecessor, Charles Haughey, who set the ball rolling, albeit in a low-key and confidential manner.

In 1988, he dispatched Navan man Richie Healy, a member of the Fianna Fáil national executive at the time, along with Louth TD, Dermot Ahern, and his advisor on Northern Ireland, Martin Mansergh, to Dundalk for secret meetings with representatives of the SDLP and Sinn Fein, including Gerry Adams. It was a high risk strategy as this was not long after the Enniskillen bombing and the contacts were to be denied by Government if they were revealed.

These meetings took place in the Redemptorist Order’s Monastery in Dundalk, hosted by the late Fr Alex Reid who had also been working to bring Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, and John Hume, the SDLP leader, together.

The trio met with Adams, and two other senior republicans, Pat Doherty and Mitchel McLaughlin, in Dundalk. Haughey told Ahern that if the Louth meeting was made public, those attending it would be disowned. There was no official sanction – no government fingerprints would be evident.

When Fine Gael's Austin Deasy asked Haughey in the Dáil if the Government was in contact with Sinn Fein, the Taoiseach gave an ambiguous reply that no 'member of the Government' had any contact.

Paying tribute to Richie Healy in later years, Brian Cowen said that “Charles Haughey knew that Richie Healy would treat it with the privacy and discretion that was necessary at the time, within the constitutional and democratic principles of the party". And he said that while many others worked on the process later and moved it on, someone had to start it."