In recent years, historians have been able to pull up a chair at various negotiation tables used during the peace process, courtesy of the State papers released on both the British and Irish sides. Access to such papers has allowed us to observe the various players and their strategies as they inched the process towards the signing of the Belfast Agreement in April 1998.
Martin Mansergh, who died last week, features prominently in these records. It was challenging work; Graham Spencer, an academic specialising in political violence and conflict resolution, has written of the degree to which “the creativity, imagination, application needed to end conflict ... hinges on the unexpected, the spontaneous, the peripheral and the psychological”. It was often a trudge, involving public servants who saw themselves as having a patriotic duty to end violence, but who were also serving their political masters and hemmed in by many factors outside their control.
Mansergh, unlike most diplomats he was working with, became an employee of Fianna Fáil. An Oxford history graduate, he moved from the Department of Foreign Affairs to work as special adviser on Northern Ireland to three Fianna Fáil taoisigh: Charles Haughey, Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern. He also became a Fianna Fáil politician himself, serving as a senator and TD for South Tipperary.
In an interview with Graham Spencer about his initially highly confidential talks with Sinn Féin in the late 1980s, he recalled that “I was given the instruction just to listen but I’m afraid I did a great deal more than that”. That was typical of Mansergh; he always had more to add than the official brief entailed. If he was asked to review a book, he would, instead of just assessing its content, “prefer to respond to the stimulus provided by the author”. That response would take him in all sorts of directions, historians generally not being in the business of giving succinct answers.
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Mansergh’s view of history was deeply coloured by the work of his father Nicholas, an expert in Anglo-Irish history, who wore various hats during his career, including as an expert in Irish affairs for the British ministry for information and later as a Cambridge professor. Significantly, Nicholas had been guided in his postgraduate research at Oxford by WGS Adams, who had advised the British prime minister David Lloyd George on Irish matters. In that sense, the involvement of Martin in the peace process of the 1980s and 1990s provided a satisfying arc, given that what was agreed in 1998 was partly about trying to use political means to undo the straitjacket that had resulted in the tightening of enmities from 1920-23 when Lloyd George was prime minister.
Nicholas published a revised version of one of his renowned works, The Irish Question 1840-1921, in 1975, at the height of the Troubles, and saw no reason to separate past and present, hoping his book would prove “fruitful” to “an assessment of the nature of the Irish question and to an understanding of the difficulties of resolving it peacefully”.
Martin invoked history in his talks with republicans, encouraging the idea of a nationalist consensus akin to that of the New Departure of 1879, when the leaders of the Irish land reform movement, constitutional nationalists and Fenians came together to engage the various shades of nationalist opinion in the agrarian struggle. He insisted that an updated nationalist consensus could only happen if violence ended, but he also dismissed the idea that Britain was “neutral” on the future of Northern Ireland (“I never bought that argument”). While the Downing Street Declaration of 1993 that he worked on averred that the British government had no “selfish strategic or economic” interest in Northern Ireland, the word “political” was not included in that sentence.
Mansergh never hid his admiration for FF and was delighted to serve as a senator and TD for the party. He had a blind loyalty to Charles Haughey and exaggerated his greatness, editing and providing a fawning introduction to the collected speeches of Haughey in 1986 (many of which Mansergh wrote), The Spirit of the Nation. The book ran to more than 1,200 pages.
He was also disturbed by the reaction to the downfall of Bertie Ahern and, again, rooted his assessments in a fair assertion about the long view of history: “Since the time of Parnell, we have been extraordinarily hard on our fallen leaders ... We do not have to condone or play down the serious faults or flaws discovered either in our governors or our governance ... we do not have to reject in totality individual persons and all their achievements, because of their shortcomings”.
Many of their achievements were made possible by the work of the discreet mandarins, working painstakingly through various drafts and managing fraught encounters. Mansergh, with his sense of history, was one of the most significant of them.
