Coined at the Anglo-Irish summit in December 1980, the phrase "totality of relationships in these islands" is at last beginning to signify a political reality. As the parties at Castle Buildings enter substantial negotiations their precise task is to determine the political institutions which will govern those relationships well into the 21st century.
Initially, the phrase suggested no more than areas in which co-operation might be mutually beneficial. However, it soon embraced fundamental aspects of Anglo-Irish relationships, especially those of a political and constitutional kind affecting the North of Ireland. For nationalist Ireland, the New Ireland Forum led the way in redefining the basis to these relationships.
The forum did so by marking the formal end to an exclusively territorial perspective on the partition of Ireland. Henceforward, partition was to be regarded primarily as the product of dismembered relationships in Ireland and not simply the result of British self-interest. While the forum parties stressed that Irish unity would continue to be the objective of the nationalist tradition, the endorsement of unionists was recognised as a necessary factor in healing relationships.
The aim now is a constitutional and political settlement embracing both parts of Ireland and giving due recognition to unionist and nationalist rights and aspirations. Underpinning such a settlement would be a satisfactory accommodation of relationships between both communities in the North of Ireland.
By reinforcing co-operation at government level the Anglo-Irish Agreement was an essential step towards attaining such a settlement. It stated the need for the Irish and British governments to commit themselves to recognising, reconciling and acknowledging "the rights of the two major traditions that exist in Ireland, represented, on the one hand, by those who wish for no change in the present status of the North of Ireland and, on the other hand, by those who aspire to a sovereign united Ireland achieved by peaceful means and through agreement". The latter represents the SDLP's perspective.
Of these three commitments, reconciling both set of rights posed the greatest challenge. Recognising and acknowledging two sets of rights as legitimate does not automatically reconcile them, at least not in the political and constitutional sense.
Recognition and acknowledgment can be afforded in a variety of ways, none of which might directly impinge on the major problem of how to reconcile two mutually exclusive aspirations, one of which is also reality, i.e. the unionist aspiration to maintain the North of Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. The Anglo-Irish Agreement addressed this in Article 1, by affirming the principle of consent as the only basis for change in the status of the North of Ireland and by recognising both the North's present status alongside the potential for it to become part of a united Ireland.
While the agreement did not explicitly use the language of self-determination, it did so implicitly and in a manner which required the British government to acknowledge for the first time in an international agreement the legitimacy of the aspiration for a united Ireland. Indeed, while the concept of self-determination was being implicitly accepted, its application was being defined in terms more suited to the Irish context and so, could more accurately be described as "co-determination".
Irish unity was now deemed to require assent from the communities in the North as well as assent from the people in the South, a position never before so formally endorsed by both governments.
In their 1993 Joint Declaration the then Taoiseach and British Prime Minister repeated their commitments. Significantly they also went beyond the actual terms of the agreement by endorsing the need for an all-Ireland framework to a solution by pledging themselves "to foster agreement and reconciliation, leading to a new political framework founded on consent and encompassing arrangements within the North of Ireland, for the whole of these islands and between these islands".
This common pledge was followed by a commitment on the part of the British Prime Minister, first, "to uphold the democratic wish of the greater number of people in the North of Ireland on the issue of whether they prefer to support the Union or a sovereign united Ireland . . . [but also] to work together with the Irish Government to achieve such an agreement, which will embrace the totality of relationships. The role of the British government will be to encourage, facilitate and enable the achievement of such agreement. They accept that such an agreement may, as of right, take the form of a united Ireland achieved by peaceful means.
Placed alongside the statement, in the same paragraph, that the British government has "no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland", it is difficult to interpret this commitment other then as the door being clearly opened to a united Ireland. The invitation to go through that door was left to those convinced that it is in the best interests of all of our people to do so.
Meantime, the British committed themselves to encouraging, facilitating and enabling agreement between the people of Ireland and if, in seeking agreement, the Irish people decide to unite, it is clear from the declaration that this wish will be accepted.
For its part, the Irish Government reiterated its acceptance, in the Anglo-Irish Agreement, of the principle of consent to constitutional change by stating that "it would be wrong to impose a united Ireland, in the absence of freely given consent of a majority of the people of the North of Ireland . . . [and] . . . that the democratic right of self determination by the people of Ireland as a whole must be achieved and exercised with and subject to the agreement and consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland".
These commitments and the principles upon which they are based remain central to the negotiations upon which we are now embarking. The reassurances that they provide to all sides should remove any fear of imposed settlements while at the same time laying the basis for a new and more positive political expression of "the totality of relationships" embracing the people of Ireland and Britain.
