Decommissioning stand-off damaged Good Friday Agreement, says senior diplomat

Dermot Gallagher Memorial Lecture by Rory Montgomery

I am immensely honoured to have been asked to give this lecture in memory of the late Dermot Gallagher. I am particularly glad that Dermot’s widow, Maeve, and two of their three children, Aoife and Ronan, are here tonight, as are Ronan’s wife Antonia, Dermot’s brother Brian, and Maeve’s sisters Loretto and Katie. His eldest daughter, Fiona, would also be here were she not currently in the US.

I was first contacted about this lecture by Julitta Clancy of the Meath Peace Group, whom I first met in the 1990s at the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation. Julitta and her colleagues have been tireless campaigners for peace and reconciliation for thirty years. Julitta is also the indexer of the magnificent Royal Irish Academy series of Documents in Irish Foreign Policy. Volume 13, which takes the story up to 1969, was recently published. Dermot joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1970, so his name should start appearing in Julitta’s indexes very soon. The Meath Archaeological and Historical Society has been involved in arranging the lecture, and Julitta’s predecessor as President, Frank Cogan of Oldcastle, is also a former Ambassador, with whom Dermot and indeed I worked closely at various stages of his most distinguished career.

I’d also like to say a word about a Meath man, the former Taoiseach John Bruton. He played a crucial role in getting the Northern Ireland talks up and running in 1996. In his retirement he continues to be a very active and incisive commentator on Northern Ireland and international affairs, whose voice is all the more important in that he is always prepared to question the conventional wisdom.

Dermot Gallagher was born in Carrick-on-Shannon in 1945 -something he’d never let you forget – and he and died just short of his seventy-second birthday in January 2017. His devotion to his native county was unswerving. He was immersed in its lore and legend, a keen observer of its politics, a constant reader of the Leitrim Observer – the Liar, as he used to call it – wherever he was in the world, and a lover of the work of John McGahern, with whom he was personally friendly. Perhaps above all he was an indefatigably loyal supporter of the Leitrim football team. At least by his own account he was a handy under-age footballer. To put it mildly, following Leitrim has always involved more disappointments than triumphs, but Dermot was always undaunted. After each defeat, no matter how heavy, he would say it was all part of a fifty-year plan. And if Leitrim beat London or New York (something not to be taken for granted, as we saw at the weekend) he would marvel at how it could overcome great world cities hundreds of times larger. He was around for Leitrim’s Connacht Championship win of 1994 – a dream come true, the memory of which made it easier to bear the ensuing famine, which continues to this day.

Leitrim, like the rest of Ireland, was in the economic doldrums in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Dermot often spoke about how few of his classmates in the Presentation College went on to do the Leaving Certificate, let alone go to college, and how most emigrated to Britain. He recalled being brought in about 1955 to see the first house to be built in Carrick since the War. One of Dermot’s proudest achievements during his career was securing substantial funding from the International Fund for Ireland to restore the Ballinamore to Ballyconnell canal, the Shannon-Erne waterway, which has had a transformative effect on the tourist economy along its route

Dermot’s horizons were much wider, however. He had an outstanding academic career as an undergraduate student of History and Irish at UCD, moving on to an MA in History. His lifelong passion for history was a valuable asset in his diplomatic career. Not long afterwards, in 1970, he joined the Department of Foreign Affairs as a Third Secretary. However, an even more important and lasting legacy of his time in UCD was meeting Maeve, who became his wife. Maeve and her family, the Farrells, are deeply rooted in County Meath, between Ratoath and Ashbourne. The beautiful house Dermot and she built at Harlockstown was to be the still centre of their turning world, for Dermot a refuge and a place of renewal and, above all, the setting for a truly happy family life.

We have heard of tiger mothers, but Dermot was a tiger father: devoted to and ambitious for his children, and determined to do everything he could to help them in their lives and careers. In this as in everything else he was successful.

Dermot developed a great connection with Meath, getting to know its personalities, its sportsmen, its pubs – the Snail Box was a favourite stopover on our way down from Belfast - and becoming a stalwart of Curragha Tennis Club. It never supplanted Leitrim in his heart, but it occupied a proud second place.

Dermot’s career in Foreign Affairs was dominated by his work on Anglo-Irish and US-Irish issues, but he made a serious impact in other areas too: as one of the founders of Ireland’s official aid programme in the 1970s, as deputy chef de cabinet to Michael O’Kennedy when he was Ireland’s European Commissioner, as a key figure in Ireland’s EEC Presidency of 1984, and as Ambassador to Nigeria from 1985 to 1987. In his eight years as Secretary General of the Department, from 2001 to 2009, Northern Ireland remained a constant focus, and I’ll be talking about that in a few minutes. But he also led the Department into and through a challenging period on the UN Security Council from 2001 to 2002, which saw 9/11 and the mounting pressure for war on Iraq. In 2004 we had a highly successful EU Presidency. And he effectively managed a period of rapid modernisation and expansion.

In his very active retirement, he was Chairman of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission, Chairman of the Governing Body of UCD, and, what I think he enjoyed most, a member of the Coiste Bainistí of the GAA.

But the main thread running through his career was the North. As a new Third Secretary in 1970, when on duty one weekend he had to calm an angry group of Northern nationalists who had come south looking for politicians to give them arms. He served in San Francisco at a time when the Irish Government was working hard to dissuade Irish-America from supporting violence. And, as press officer in the Embassy in London for five years, he developed a network of British media and political contacts, learned how to manage the symbiotic relationship between journalists and officials, and was present at the Sunningdale talks in 1973 – the only person on either government team who went on to be in Castle Buildings in 1998.

Dermot’s first period as head of the Anglo-Irish Division was between 1987 and 1991. It was a very difficult time, with some notorious and bloody episodes. The relationship between Charles Haughey and Margaret Thatcher was tense. And things were not easy for the Department. Haughey had opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, for largely opportunistic reasons. Some in Fianna Fáil saw Foreign Affairs as a nest of Fine Gael or Labour-leaning vipers. Dermot played a leading role in persuading Haughey to use the machinery of the Anglo-Irish Agreement instead of denouncing it, and to maintain a correct relationship with the British Government. In so doing he, with Secretary Noel Dorr and others, demonstrated that the Department was professional, non-partisan, and trustworthy. Dermot was also tasked with putting out feelers to unionism, using Archbishop Robin Eames as a channel to the UUP leader James Molyneaux. At the same time Martin Mansergh and Dermot Ahern were engaging in initial contacts with republicans. So in a sense this very traumatic time also saw the sowing of the seeds which grew into the peace process.

From 1991 to 1997 Dermot spent six very happy and successful years as Ambassador in Washington. He built links with the Clinton Administration and cultivated other leading Democrats, such as Senators Edward Kennedy and George Mitchell. His most visible achievement was to help persuade President Clinton to grant a visa to Gerry Adams in 1994, before the IRA ceasefire – a risky manoeuvre which was strongly opposed by the British Government and the State Department. But Dermot and his team outwitted the British Embassy and delivered. This public demonstration of the path which could open up if there were an end to violence helped Adams to sell the subsequent ceasefire to the republican movement.

Dermot’s other great focus in Washington was the Ireland-US economic relationship. He cultivated leading Irish-American business figures, such as Don Keough of Coca-Cola and Dan Tully of Merrill Lynch. He could operate at the highest corporate levels and was able to persuade chairmen and CEOs to consider investing in Ireland – which paid off hugely when Merrill Lynch opened in Dublin, one of the very first major US banks to do so.

In the summer of 1997 Dermot returned to the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Anglo-Irish Division, this time as Second Secretary General. He swapped places with Seán Ó hUiginn, another outstanding diplomat whose abilities complemented Dermot’s. Seán was the great intellectual conceptualiser of the peace process: it was up to Dermot, with his negotiating skills, to help turn promise into reality. The restoration of the IRA ceasefire in August 1997 led to Sinn Féin’s return to talks in September, and the start of the helter-skelter six months which eventually concluded, against the odds, with the Good Friday Agreement. Dermot was an inspiring leader of the Foreign Affairs team through that period; worked seamlessly with Paddy Teahon of the Taoiseach’s Department and Tim Dalton of Justice; advised the Taoiseach and his ministers; and negotiated with the British Government and the Northern parties.

I am not going to repeat the oft-told tale of how the Agreement was achieved. I am instead going to discuss those of its aspects which remained incomplete in April 1998. Like many others, including the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach, Dermot spent much more time on the implementation of the Agreement than on its negotiation.

But before I do so, I wanted to pick out the particular strengths which underlay Dermot’s hugely successful career. What made him so special? And what does that say about the civil service at its best?

He was a man of high intellect– his depth of knowledge and the quickness with which he assimilated new information were striking.

He had an unrivalled ability to boil things down to their essentials. He was the best editor of a text I ever worked with.

His was not just an abstract intelligence, but also an emotional one. He understood what motivated people, why they acted as they did, and how they might be induced to change. A senior lawyer who advised him as chairman of the Governing Body of UCD, once said to me that Dermot was the shrewdest man he had ever met.

In negotiations he could understand where the other side were coming from, and what they needed to reach a deal. He was far-sighted in cutting through his own side’s rhetoric and homing in on what was achievable.

Dermot was also a ferociously hard worker all through his career. Right up to the end of his term as Secretary General he travelled in from Meath to Iveagh House at 7 am and left again at 7 pm at the earliest. He knew all that was going on and was a master of detail. In negotiations he insisted that we had to be absolutely in command of the substance, and that this required meticulous preparation. He set up a drafting team in autumn 1997 to work on possible texts of all possible elements of an agreement, and in consequence we were quicker off the mark than the British when we started exchanging drafts in mid-March 1998. For him, putting the first document on the table was crucial.

I am not exactly a neutral observer, but he was eager to assign those he saw as the best and brightest in the Department to key roles. There were those he liked and supported, whose careers he encouraged, and with whom there were unbreakable bonds of mutual loyalty. I was proud to become one of them. However, merit was the overriding criterion, and even if he didn’t have a close personal relationship with someone, he would promote them to a top position as the best man or woman for the job.

He was an exacting boss, it’s true, expecting others to match his unsurpassable standards. Those who didn’t win his confidence were placed to one side. Some were scared of him – often because they didn’t know when he was joking and when he was serious. Even in very stressful situations, his often mischievous humour helped keep up our morale. He was keen on running gags, on nicknames, on historical arcana, on seanfhocail and obscure French phrases – often followed by “as the old people used to say”. He adored gossip, in part because of his interest in human nature and his desire to know everything. But jokes were set aside at times of personal difficulty such as I once experienced, when he was extraordinarily kind.

He and I barely knew each other when he called me into his team in 1997 but we became close colleagues very quickly, and then true friends until the end of his life.

Once you were on team Gallagher, you were on it for ever. In his GAA role, he became a sort of diplomatic adviser to successive Presidents and Directors General. From time to time, he would ask me to cast an eye over a draft speech or statement. The topics ranged from the sublime – the visits to Croke Park of Queen Elizabeth and then Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping - to the ridiculous. Sitting in my fine Ambassadorial office in Paris in 2014 I received a call from Dermot: would I help with the GAA’s response to the cancellation of Garth Brooks’s Croke Park concerts? Dermot Gallagher had friends in all sorts of places, high and low.

Dermot was a remarkable networker, for whom professional relationships sometimes turned into personal friendships. He made firm and enduring connections with very senior people in US politics. Closer to home, as Secretary General he had excellent links with the heads of other Departments, not least Finance, which ensured that Foreign Affairs was seen as a key part of the machinery of government, and not as an elitist outpost.

One of his strongest bonds was with Harold McCusker, the Ulster Unionist MP. Harold McCusker died all too young in 1990 at the age of 50. I was moved, twenty-seven years later, by the presence of his widow and son at Dermot’s funeral, and then at his Month’s Mind in the Snailbox. Dermot was entirely open and non-sectarian, and, though he was rooted in traditional Irish culture, had a broad and expansive sense of Irishness. He was a prime mover in promoting the development of the Battle of the Boyne site close to here as a way of reaching out to the unionist tradition.

Dermot was loyal to all his political bosses. Some he particularly liked and admired - he had a very particular bond with Brian Cowen, I always felt. He knew the weaknesses of others. But I never once heard him speak disrespectfully about them. Though I might make a personal guess about his political leanings, he never expressed a party preference. He placed a great emphasis on protecting Ministers, frankly advising them against ill-judged words or actions, but also carrying out their decisions with determination – though some in the Department felt he could have been more dilatory in implementing Charlie McCreevy’s decentralisation of Irish Aid to Limerick.

He won the admiration and confidence of generations of politicians from different parties. Albert Reynolds once said to a colleague of mine that Dermot was the finest civil servant he ever worked with.

Above all, Dermot was a patriot who loved Ireland deeply and wanted to serve it to the best of his ability.

As I said earlier, I thought that in talking about the Good Friday Agreement I would focus on how it was implemented in the months and years after April 1998. This was a highly challenging process and, as we know, one which is still continuing twenty-five years later. This is in no way unusual. Almost no treaty or international agreement is definitive: their interpretation, their operation and their reform are always up for debate. But important aspects of the Good Friday Agreement were controversial from the start, and it was opposed by a significant minority of the people of Northern Ireland.

A really important aspect of the deal was the commitment to endorse it through simultaneous referendums North and South. From our point of view, while this involved preparing and enacting legislation at great speed to meet the set date of 22 May, it was more an administrative and legal than a political challenge. There was never any doubt that the people of the Republic would vote in favour by an overwhelming majority. And so it proved, with 94% supporting change to our Constitution. At the same time, and while the result was a foregone conclusion, I personally was disappointed that turnout on something so epoch-making was only 56%.

There was little we could do to influence the outcome in the North – that was down to the British Government, the political parties, and, of course, Bono. It was wonderful that 71% of voters, on a much higher turnout than in the South, supported the Agreement. But the campaign, and the result, revealed fault lines which remain to this day. So far could as be estimated, probably only a narrow majority of unionists voted yes.

Next came elections to the new Assembly in June 1998. On the nationalist side, the SDLP not just came well ahead of Sinn Féin but was the largest party overall in terms of vote share. The UUP outpolled the DUP, as it always had, but that disguised the fact that some of its MLAs, most notably Jeffrey Donaldson, did not support the Agreement, essentially because of prisoner release and because it had not delivered immediate decommissioning. The Assembly elected a First Minister and Deputy First Minister designate, David Trimble and Séamus Mallon.

The next stage was to flesh out the bones of the new North South institutions. In the final days of the negotiations, Bertie Ahern made decisive and essential concessions to David Trimble, which made clear beyond all doubt that these institutions could only function on the basis of consensus both between North and South and within the Northern Ireland Executive. We also scaled back our ambitions regarding their scope and substance and agreed that the detail was for later negotiation. The safeguard was that all of the institutions in each of the three strands had to go live together – so if there were foot-dragging on North/South there would be no Executive.

There were three months of tough negotiation between the Irish Government (working with the SDLP) and the UUP to specify the areas for co-operation, both through six new implementation bodies and in the North/South Ministerial Council. This finished just before Christmas 1998. Irish civil servants, of whom I was one, and their Northern Ireland counterparts then worked flat out until early March to agree on the detail of how the new arrangements would work. We then had to translate this into international law and domestic legislation. This was hugely demanding from a technical viewpoint, but what I remember in particular was the great sense of camaraderie which developed between us. I made one friendship with a Northern official which continues to this day.

Overall, however, it has to be said that the North/South implementation bodies have had a relatively modest, though useful, impact. Most successful has been the all-island approach to international tourism promotion. The North/South Ministerial Council has provided a space in which Ministers can get to know one another and agree on practical co-operation in some areas. Unfortunately, it goes into the freezer when the Assembly and Executive are suspended. The institutions’ remit was circumscribed from the start, and unionists have shown no interest in developing it as we had hoped. They were of particular value in the eyes of the SDLP, and its decline has really damaged the level of political commitment to them.

In 1999, though, so far, so good. But then the really hard part started. The question of what would happen to the IRA’s weapons had been a complicating factor from the moment the ceasefires started. There was a general agreement between the governments and between all of the mainstream parties that the weapons would have to go at some stage. But there was no agreement on when that could or should begin.

The British Government argued that there should be at least a start to decommissioning – a technical term which somehow was twisted into a pejorative one - before negotiations began, as a demonstration of good faith and to prove the permanence of the ceasefire. It probably said so prematurely. And unionists had no option but to follow its lead.

The Irish Government argued that that it would be unachievable in the near future and that to insist on it right away would undermine the Sinn Féin leadership in its efforts to bring its followers with it. The focus should be on sustaining the fragile peace now in place. The key thing was not the possession of weapons, but their non-use.

The decommissioning argument raged for a decade: from 1995 to 1997.

Bit by bit, including through the 1996 recommendations of an international advisory group led by George Mitchell, the British made a series of concessions which the unionists grudgingly accepted. First that decommissioning should take place at the start of negotiations; then that it should be addressed during negotiations; and then that it should happen at the end of the negotiations.

In the Agreement itself, all participants reaffirmed their commitment to the total disarmament of all paramilitary organisations, and to “continue to work constructively and in good faith…and to use any influence they may have, to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years….in the context of the implementation of the overall settlement.”

This was indeed a classic piece of constructive ambiguity. The IRA itself, not being a participant, had made no commitment: and Sinn Féin consistently maintained a clear distinction between itself and the IRA. It could be talked to, but not instructed.

The Agreement itself made no direct connection between participation in the institutions and decommissioning. And it required a cross-community vote to remove a Minister from the Executive if he broke his pledge of office. David Trimble’s critics within the UUP saw this as a key weakness. At the very last gasp, he obtained a side letter from Tony Blair to the effect that he expected decommissioning to begin right away and would be prepared to introduce new legislation to exclude recalcitrant parties from the Executive. Neither promise was achievable or sincere, in my view, but on Good Friday the letter was essential in getting Trimble to agree at the last gasp.

The interplay between guns and government dominated the first years of the Agreement. Once the arrangements for the Strand Two and Strand Three institutions were in place in March 1999 it was now time for the Executive to be established too. However, Trimble, his party, and the unionist community as a whole demanded concrete action by the IRA. For several months ingenious attempts by the two Governments to come up with forms of words which might work for both Sinn Féin and Trimble were unavailing. It was at this time that Dermot began his many secret trips up to Belfast to meet Adams and McGuinness with his Secretary General colleagues.

Eventually, in October we had to turn back to Senator Mitchell, who with an admirable sense of duty reluctantly agreed to come back to Castle Buildings. He spoke directly to the political parties for weeks – with teams from the two Governments, in our case Dermot, our great colleague Tim O’Connor, and me, waiting in the wings to offer advice.

In mid-November Mitchell stated his expectation, based on his discussions, that decommissioning would begin at the same time as devolution. In private, based on what he was hearing – and this was a hugely experienced politician - he was genuinely confident. David Trimble took the decision to rely on Mitchell’s assessment and proposed to his party that, as he put it, they “jump first”. He won one of a number of wafer-thin majorities in the Ulster Unionist Council – that Saturday afternoon Dermot, Tim and I waited nervously in Iveagh House to hear the result, and then toasted it with champagne or diet coke according to taste.

The institutions did go live in early December and began to get down to work. But Trimble had had to promise his party that he would resign if decommissioning didn’t begin. It didn’t. One of the Sinn Féin justifications was that the new six-week deadline was unilateral and destructive of confidence. And it repeated that it had of course only been able to offer its best guess as to what could happen.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, the new Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Peter Mandelson, felt he had no option but to suspend the institutions in February1999. Some of my colleagues – not Dermot in particular – felt, angrily, that Mandelson had been too hasty. Personally, I thought he had no option but to act as he did. When he made his entry to the Executive, Trimble had been assured of the support of both Governments. And in any event the Executive and Assembly would simply not have functioned without the UUP.

I won’t go into the complicated story of how the institutions were put back together later in 2000, and of the tortuous path to another suspension in 2002 which lasted for five years – or into how, bit by bit, the IRA came around to its announcement in July 2005 of full disarmament.

But, with hindsight, the near two-year delay in establishing the institutions, and then the failure to cut the Gordian knot of decommissioning immediately after they had been, damaged the Agreement from the start. The Executive and Assembly, and the North/South Ministerial Council, had no quick wins. The failure to achieve decommissioning made a majority in the unionist community – many already lukewarm about the Agreement – see Trimble and the UUP as ineffectual and weak. This led to their being overtaken by the DUP as early as 2003. But the SDLP also suffered greatly. It was prevented from working the institutions of which it was the intellectual architect. The focus on decommissioning placed the spotlight firmly on Sinn Féin, leaving the SDLP in the shadows, and what were seen by many nationalists as unionist excuses for not respecting Sinn Féin’s mandate increased its support to the point where it, like the DUP, became the main actor in its own community.

Other factors played a part too, such as Sinn Féin’s much greater organisation and energy, but the transformation of nationalist politics might well not have been as dramatic and speedy as it turned out.

Séamus Mallon in particular felt bitter in later years about what he saw as the failure of the two Governments to stand up against Sinn Féin, and their willingness to cut the SDLP adrift. He blamed not only politicians, but also officials, including Dermot. I can well understand why he felt that way. What happened to the SDLP was, in moral terms, very unjust. It was deeply galling for it to find itself confined to the part of the Prodigal Son’s older brother.

It is fair to say that Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell had no particular affinity with or feel for the SDLP. The SDLP was not a problem to be solved, like the UUP or Sinn Féin. By the time they got to know John Hume he was no longer the towering figure he had been. And maybe, as Blair reportedly said, “you guys have no guns.” So if they were collateral damage, too bad.

But it would not be fair to say the same about the Irish Government. For decades, politicians and officials, none more than Dermot, had worked closely with huge numbers of people in the SDLP, talking over many cups of tea, pints and whiskeys, helping them in many ways, learning from, championing, and developing their insights. I am certain that nobody in our system wanted the SDLP to be supplanted by Sinn Féin.

Could anything have been done? To legislate to remove Sinn Féin from the Executive would have been to change the Agreement radically and would have had catastrophic effects. The reality is that the Agreement already allowed Ministers to be removed from office on the basis of cross-community consensus, which could have been achieved had the SDLP been prepared to vote with the UUP: but for good reasons.

I don’t know if Sinn Féin deliberately sought to undermine David Trimble. My instinct is, not at first at any rate. Their priority was maintaining the maximum unity within republicanism. This meant moving with extreme caution on decommissioning, despite the enormous concession on prisoner release. It may be that they could have moved more decisively. But as outsiders we just don’t know. And after some time they saw which way things were moving within unionism. Protecting David Trimble from Ian Paisley was not their job.

It has only been quite recently, after his death last year, that many nationalists have come to recognise fully the courage Trimble showed as leader. Rather incredibly, in Tuesday’s Irish Times Gerry Adams is reported as saying that only through recent television coverage has he realised the “challenge he was involved with”. Some of my colleagues used to argue that Trimble did not do enough to sell the Agreement. In fact he did emphasise the constitutional and institutional wins for unionism – and the fact that republicans had failed completely to achieve their main objectives. But these arguments did not make as much impact in his community as the emotive ones about guns, prisoners, policing, and the IRA’s lack of remorse.

Many other aspects of the Agreement needed to be implemented, in such fields as human rights, language policy, criminal justice reform. Prisoner release, though really controversial, went forward relatively smoothly, as did the gradual removal of British army installations.

But the most important other issue was policing reform. This was “highly emotive”, as the Agreement recognised. Unionists saw the RUC as their force, made up of brave men and women, the great majority Protestant, who had suffered greatly as the front line of defence against violent attempts to overthrow their state. But even moderate nationalists generally saw the RUC as biased and aggressive.

The Agreement set out the objective of “a new beginning to policing in Northern Ireland with a police service capable of attracting and sustaining support from the community as a whole...a police service representative of the make-up of the community as a whole and which, in a peaceful environment, should be routinely unarmed.” Wide-ranging principles and ambitious objectives were set: but how to give them effect was left up to an international Commission chaired by Chris Patten. It reported in September 1999. Patten rightly said that its 175 recommendations were in line with what it had been asked to do and were based on extensive consultation and research. However, their cumulative magnitude came as a great shock to unionists. What would in any case have been a very difficult exercise in organisational transformation – requiring massive changes to structures, governance, recruitment, training, policing culture and so forth – was made still harder by the emotions involved. Unionists saw the replacement of the Royal Ulster Constabulary by a new Policing Service of Northern Ireland as tantamount to a repudiation of its sacrifice. Symbolic changes, including to badges and memorials, were especially hard to take.

The British Secretary of State, Peter Mandelson, in taking forward the detailed legislation and implementation plan required to bring the new Service into being, made a number of important changes which nationalists and the Irish Government – and Patten himself – saw as watering down and weakening the proposals. A sustained political and diplomatic battle bega raged for over a year. In this, Brian Cowen as Minister and Dermot Gallagher as the key official led the Irish side. This took place alongside the parallel arguments about devolution and decommissioning, not to mention parades, another very difficult issue, if outside the scope of the Agreement. On the nationalist side, this was the SDLP’s cause – there was at this stage no chance that Sinn Féin would support policing arrangements - and whatever Séamus Mallon may have thought about our approach to the other issues, he had no reason to criticise our commitment on this. Agreement was reached at Weston Park in July 2001. The importance of this cannot be overstated. With hindsight, the creation of the PSNI has been the single most unambiguously successful aspect of the entire Agreement. It has been truly transformative. Sinn Féin came round to supporting it a few years later. In a dark way, the universal execration of the would-be killers of DCI Caldwell at Omagh shows how far we have come.

Is the Agreement perfect? By no means. Did it purport to resolve the constitutional question for all time? No – it only sought to set out the bedrock of principle on which it could be addressed. Were there things it didn’t deal with adequately or at all, such as reconciliation, anti-sectarianism, and the rights of victims? Yes. Have its institutions delivered better government while promoting working together? Only intermittently and incompletely. Ought it be reformed? In principle, very probably: in practice, it’s hard to see how that could be achieved.

Critically, it has suffered immensely from the pressure of Brexit, which has been a wrecking ball in so many ways. Responsibility lies overwhelmingly with those who promoted Brexit without recognising its implications for Northern Ireland, and then with Boris Johnson and his acolytes. I myself wonder if the EU and the Irish Government may initially have been too dogmatic on the Protocol: but they were dealing with a negotiating partner which was first weak and divided, and then cynical and opportunistic. The Protocol has its problematic aspects but it is an inevitable result of Brexit as it was implemented. In any event, with the Windsor Framework the EU has moved a long way to address unionist concerns, both practical and political, and I just hope that Jeffrey Donaldson eventually has the skill and the good sense to find a way to claim victory and move back into the institutions.

Twenty-five years on, however, the Agreement has cemented peace in Northern Ireland and has transformed the everyday lives of people there. I am also certain that an end to violence on the island was a crucial factor in the transformation we have seen in the Republic and did wonders for our international reputation.

There is much to do to exploit its full potential and to build a secure and prosperous future of opportunity for the young, as emphasised by President Biden in Belfast on Tuesday. But Dermot Gallagher and his generation of leaders made an extraordinary contribution to the well-being of Ireland, which we rightly celebrate today. It is now up to following generations to finish the job they started.

Buvinda House, Navan, Thursday 13th April 2023