RECENT British policy in relation to the Northern Ireland peace process has been difficult for Irish people to appreciate. Making every allowance for John Major's problems with his backbenchers, and perhaps also with some members of his Cabinet, as well as for his potential dependence on unionist support in the Commons, the introduction of, and subsequent persistence with, the Washington 3 precondition made no sense to anyone in Ireland.
In the first place, this precondition has never been logically sustainable in its own right the amount of reassurance that could be provided by merely starting the decommissioning process in advance of all party talks was always inherently negligible.
And the idea that, however irrational such a precondition might be, it was needed to satisfy political unionism was also untenable as soon as David Trimble was elected leader of the Ulster Unionist party, he showed how little interest he had in Washington 3 by proposing as an alternative to it an election to a convention. Whoever Washington 3 was designed to please, it wasn't the unionists.
The simple fact seems to be that Washington 3 was a clumsy and ill judged attempt to buy off potential opposition within the British political system to all party negotiations taking place in advance of a complete decommissioning of arms by the IRA.
The Mitchell Commission provided an escape hatch for the British government from the hole it had thus dug for itself. But the trouble with escape hatches is that an exit through them can be rather undignified unless one can distract people's attention at the moment of escape.
And that is what John Major seems to have been attempting to do last Wednesday. His decision to present the unionist proposal for an election to a convention as an alternative precondition for all party talks, as distinct from merely putting it forward as a possible additional element in the peace process, was clearly tactical designed to facilitate acceptance by backbenchers of the inevitable climb down on the decommissioning precondition.
This course involved a rejection implicit and unavowed but no less patent for all that of the Mitchell report's recommendation that all party talks should be initiated on the simple basis of explicit acceptance by all parties of the report's six principles. And because the initiation at this stage of an electoral process would involve months of delay, it is incompatible with the agreed end of February target for all party talks.
British persistence with this new stance represents the introduction of a new precondition. This fact is not altered by the formality of the British acceptance of the Mitchell requirement that an elected body would need to be "broadly acceptable".
The Mitchell Commission viewed a broadly acceptable elected body "with an appropriate mandate, and within a three strand structure" as a possible additional way of "contributing to confidence". But the British approach effectively represents an ultimatum to the effect that unless such an elected body is accepted, they will insist on the Washington 3 precondition the impracticability of which is described by the commission as "the reality with which all concerned must deal".
Whatever attempts may be made by the British government to fudge this issue, the above is the factual situation created by John Major's ill judged "escape hatch" strategy.
The extraordinary excuse given by Sir Patrick Mayhew for the adoption by the British government of this tactic is that "I happen to know that unionists will not be there on the terms that have been put for ward by Mitchell". But up to the time he made this statement in the House on Thursday, no such rejection of the Mitchell Commission's recommendation had come from the Ulster Unionist Party.
HOW can one appropriately describe the action of the British government in choosing to hide behind and give their support to an unavowed unionist rejection of Mitchell, and thus to connive at rather than to do all in their power to remove such a blockage to progress towards a settlement of the Northern Ireland problem? Possibly the least description would be in the kind of terms the British would be quite uninhibited about using were an Irish government to have rejected the Mitchell report on the grounds that its six principles were too much to ask Sinn Fein to swallow
The fact that on top of all this the British prime minister apparently failed to honour a commitment that the Northern Ireland Secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, would telephone the Taoiseach to go through Mr Major's proposed speech with him and instead did Mr Bruton the discourtesy of furnishing the text a mere 30 minutes beforehand, is simply on a par with the rest of the way the British government has handled this whole affair.
It is now for the Irish Government to respond to this situation vigorously but calmly, firmly rejecting the introduction of a fresh precondition at this stage and making it clear that only the reformulation of the British position on an elected body can relieve that government of the responsibility for rejecting the Mitchell recommendations with all that this might imply for the Anglo American relationship.
At the same time, on the issue of the possible utility of an elected body as an additional means of "contributing to confidence" to use the words of the Mitchell commission the Government should firmly shift the onus of proof in this matter to the British government. Instead of the Irish side having to justify opposition to a proposal which has been presented as virtuously democratic, it is now the British government that must be required to address the many objections and concerns raised by this proposal.
In addition to the obvious objection to the introduction of such a further precondition to the initiation of all party talks, there are a number of specific difficulties about the employment of an elected convention as a vehicle for all party talks.
A genuine danger, however and one that clearly worries both the Government and the Northern nationalist parties is that this unionist inspired project could lead to an internalisation of the tripartite peace process, bringing it within a Northern Ireland context, and thus distancing the Government from what has hitherto been envisaged as a joint Anglo Irish oversight of the tripartite talks. It should, however, be possible with goodwill to guard definitively against this danger, and those responsible for this proposal would find it difficult to resist the introduction, even should they wish to, of effective safeguards against such a danger.
More difficult to deal with is the objection that a negotiation partly carried on within an elected body would be liable to prove confrontational and correspondingly fruitless. And, even if the elected members were had be required to do no more than select equal numbered delegations to undertake the negotiations, the possibility that any agreement would have to be referred back to such a convention rather than to or perhaps as a preliminary to a popular referendum could make it much more difficult for the actual negotiators to reach agreement. Again, the existence of a large body of elected representatives especially from the larger parties who could not be involved in the actual negotiations would be a potentially disruptive factor.
MOREOVER, there is the further potential undesirability of leaving the choice of negotiators especially for the smaller parties to the inherently uncertain process of a popular election. Such an election seems, indeed, unlikely to produce any representatives of the two small parties which reflect the concerns of the loyalist paramilitaries and while such an outcome might please the two major unionist parties, it would have a potentially negative effect on the negotiating process which this election is intended to facilitate.
It should be clear from the nature and scale of these difficulties that, even aside from the delay issue, the reaction of the Government and the Northern nationalist parties to this unionist proposal, now backed by the British government, is not captious or disruptive but reflects a legitimate concern about genuine and serious problems.