Jonathan Powell's insightful book on the peace process falls short on the early years, writes Garret FitzGerald.
JONATHAN POWELL'S book, Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace In Northern Ireland, provides an exhaustive account of the prolonged negotiation of the peace settlement in Northern Ireland which led to the establishment last May of a powersharing government there.
Powell was exceptionally well-equipped for the difficult role of intermediary between his prime minister and the Northern Ireland political parties, most notably Sinn Féin/IRA and the DUP. And no one else could have written this comprehensive and remarkably honest account - not even Tony Blair himself.
The patience of Blair and Powell with their principal interlocutors, Sinn Féin and the DUP, was Job-like. We have been extraordinarily lucky in having had at this crucial stage in our history a British prime minister with no hang-ups about Ireland, a willingness to devote so much time to the issue, and a long unbroken period in that office.
Inevitably the weakest part of Powell's book is the chapter in which he attempts to summarise all that had gone before for his only previous involvement with the North had been a very limited one - as a diplomat in Washington during John Major's premiership. On the whole, his account of what happened up to 1997 is factually accurate; but, inevitably his understanding of the significance of some of the events during the three decades that preceded his entry to the scene is incomplete.
First of all, I would quarrel with the picture he gives of the events of the early 1980s, leading up to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. What Powell fails to grasp is that the 1985 agreement was primarily designed by us to swing Northern nationalist opinion back to the SDLP and away from Sinn Féin - towards which it had been drifting since the 1981 hunger strike, with a view to persuading IRA/Sinn Féin that its Armalite/ballot box strategy had failed, and that it should therefore abandon violence.
Later, in 1994, Adams admitted he had come around to this view in 1986, just after the agreement. And some years ago, in a lecture in UCD, Mitchell McLaughlin confirmed the profound impact the agreement had made on the Sinn Féin leadership.
Because he does not seem to understand this, Powell goes on to say that "the agreement led to years of political sterility" - whereas in fact it contributed to the switch in Sinn Féin policy that led to the peace process.
However, the issue on which I most strongly disagree with Powell is his belief that "it is always right to talk to your enemy, however badly they are behaving . . . You can't refuse to talk to them without pre-conditions".
But Powell's experience is limited to the period after it had become clear that the IRA was already seeking to initiate a peace process. And once the leaders of that terrorist organisation had indicated they were prepared to consider throwing in the towel, both governments were right to become involved in discussions with them. It would, indeed, have been grossly irresponsible for them not to have done so.
But that begs the question about contacts with terrorists during the earlier period while they were engaged in their brutal campaign. Over a period of more than 20 years it was the consistent view of successive Irish governments that such contacts could only buoy the terrorists' hopes that, if they kept on murdering enough people, they would finally be rewarded with a "cave-in" by the governments.
That is why throughout the 1970s and 1980s Irish governments consistently avoided any contact, direct or indirect, with the IRA - and also refused them the oxygen of TV publicity, which was their most sought-after short-term objective.
The problem for Irish governments was that they could not trust British politicians on this issue. In 1971 Irish constitutional politicians had suffered the humiliation of a visit by the British opposition leader, Harold Wilson, with the object of talking secretly behind our backs with the IRA, whose objective was the overthrow of our democratic state in favour of a socialist dictatorship.
Because Wilson was likely to become once again Britain's prime minister, the Lynch government - and I have to say, the opposition also - failed to challenge this treacherous act. Had we had the courage to denounce Wilson publicly at that time, Willie Whitelaw in the succeeding Tory government might have hesitated about inviting the IRA leadership to a London meeting a year later.
Those two British meetings with Sinn Féin/IRA, and others that followed in 1974/5 and 1980/81, encouraged the IRA to believe that some British government would eventually give them what they wanted: a withdrawal from the North enabling them to destabilise both parts of Ireland.
In government in 1974-5 we suspected that Wilson was contemplating withdrawal. We now know this to have been the case - until in November 1975 Wilson was finally blocked by Jim Callaghan, together with Denis Healy and Merlyn Rees.
However, after the last ham-handed British approach to the IRA in July 1981 - during the second hunger strike - an approach that unhappily sabotaged a Catholic Church move to end it - such British contacts with the IRA ceased for a decade. Perhaps because of this, but also because of Sinn Féin's loss of votes to the SDLP in the aftermath of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, the IRA finally turned away from violence and towards politics.
The controversial conclusion that Powell reaches about contacts with terrorists has even led him to suggest that a "back channel" should now be opened to al-Qaeda! From the narrow base of an experience confined to the final decade of the Northern Ireland crisis, Powell draws what is to my mind a very dubious conclusion indeed.