AT THEIR first Downing Street meeting the then British prime minister Tony Blair asked Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams if he could tell his people "there was no possibility of a united Ireland".
At its conclusion Mr Blair told key aides "he was pleased that Adams seemed to accept he would have to live with something less than a united Ireland" as the outcome of the Northern Ireland peace process.
In his new book on the process, Great Hatred, Little Room, former Downing Street chief of staff Jonathan Powell thus confirms Mr Blair's essentially pro-union position from the outset of the negotiations leading to the Belfast Agreement.
While still leader of the opposition at Westminster Mr Blair had abandoned Labour's traditional policy of Irish unity through consent. Over time he then moved from a position of apparent neutrality on the constitutional issue to one of effective support for maintaining the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland based on the "consent" principle subsequently enshrined in the accord reached on Good Friday, 1998.
When they met in the cabinet room on December 11th, 1997, Mr Adams said "he was grateful to Tony for taking the risk of holding the meeting and asked if the Labour Party policy of unity by consent had disappeared altogether. What was the government's strategic view?"
According to Mr Powell's account, which began its serialisation in yesterday's Guardian: "Tony said he would not be a persuader for a united Ireland but he did want to create a situation in Northern Ireland that was fair."
This is consistent with Mr Blair's decision on becoming prime minister in 1997 that his first major trip out of London should be to Belfast, where he memorably suggested that no one in his audience was likely to see a united Ireland in their lifetime.
In a determined bid to win unionist confidence ahead of the second IRA ceasefire and Sinn Féin's speedy admission to the talks process, Mr Blair went on to say: "Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, alongside England, Scotland and Wales. The union binds the four parts of the United Kingdom together. I believe in the United Kingdom. I value the union."
At their Downing Street meeting Mr Blair asked if the Sinn Féin president could return and tell his people there was no possibility of a united Ireland.
According to the Powell diaries, Mr Adams replied that "the question was rather how he could bring his people along. He had to show them there was an alternative way forward."
Mr Adams and Martin McGuinness also raised two issues that would dog and influence the 10 years of negotiations that would finally see the Rev Ian Paisley's DUP agree to share power with Sinn Féin following the 2006 St Andrews Agreement. "McGuinness said the strength of the 'securocrats' in the British system worked against the peace process," wrote Powell. "The prime minister had to change it."
At the end of their meeting Mr Adams - who struck Powell as "intelligent, subtle and impressive" - moved around the table to where other members of his delegation couldn't hear him and raised the issue of the feared "split" in republican ranks.
According to Mr Powell, Mr Adams "said to Tony that he could of course split the movement any time we wanted him to, but that his aim was to carry them all along, and that he was at them persuading them every day".
Mr Powell confirms that "this time" the British found themselves in the same position as the republican leadership: "We did not want to have to make peace lots of times with republican splinter groups. We wanted to do it once. And so, uniquely, the British government had an interest in a united republican movement as well, rather than trying to pursue a policy of divide and rule as it had in the past."
The former No 10 chief of staff acknowledges they of course knew that "some of the people we were talking to as Sinn Féin leaders were also leaders of the IRA". However, Mr Powell says "it wasn't as simple as that", that there "wasn't a complete overlap" and that this "duality" prompted Mr Blair on a number of occasions "to offer to meet the high command of the IRA to try to reason with them himself".
Authoritative sources made light of the Guardian report, based on an interview with Mr Powell, that this could have seen Blair "take the unprecedented step of holding secret masked meetings with the IRA leadership". However, Mr Blair was apparently entirely serious in suggesting that he seek to resolve difficulties by talking directly to the IRA.
Mr Powell records that leading republican Brian Keenan, who at one stage represented "the single biggest threat to the British state", was "instrumental in bringing the IRA round to the political strategy" and was also the man who eventually achieved the decommissioning of IRA weapons.