The Good Friday Agreement of 10th April 1998 was an important turning point in the modern history of Ireland. It announced the introduction of devolved government to Northern Ireland on what it called a ‘stable and inclusive basis’ and created human rights and equality commissions. It agreed to the early release of terrorist prisoners. It demanded the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons. It promised reforms of the criminal justice system and the police. The government of the Republic of Ireland was brought into the process through a formal ‘ministerial conference’ in which it would meet regularly and formally with members of the Northern Ireland administration.
The Agreement was ratified by two referendums – one in the North, in which 71 per cent of the people agreed to it, the other in the South when more than 94 per cent agreed. There was one further significant terrorist incident. A group calling itself the ‘Real IRA’ set off a bomb in Omagh in August 1998, killing twenty-nine people. Failure to agree on the process for decommissioning weapons delayed final agreement even further, but in May 2007, following local elections, the Northern Ireland Assembly resumed its administration of the province on a power-sharing basis.
‘The Troubles’, as they are called, began in the late 1960s when the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland began to protest against what they believed to be discrimination by the Protestant majority. Their grievances developed into violent civil unrest. The Catholic cause was supported by the Provisional Irish Republican Army, ‘the Provos’, whose members saw themselves as the direct descendants of those who had first fought on the streets of Dublin in 1916. The Protestants had their own militia, the Ulster Volunteer Force, which took its name, although not its organisation, from the group formed to defend the Union in 1912. In Ireland, north and south, history is only just below the surface. Perhaps as Ulster’s old enemies, now partners in peace, set about building the future they will sometimes care to look back to Gladstone, the Grand Old Man of Victorian politics who wanted, but failed, to pacify Ireland. Perhaps they will sigh ‘If only’. Perhaps they will ask ‘What if?’
Britain Signs the Treaty of Rome
In 1973 Britain joined the European Economic Community by signing the Treaty of Rome. It agreed to relinquish certain aspects of its national sovereignty in return for the benefits of cooperation with other European powers.
In 1910 a newspaper headline caught the eye of the comic poet, Harry Graham. ‘The Kaiser,’ it said, ‘spoke at length with the Baron de Haulleville, Director of the Congo Museum, in French, German, and English.’ Graham decided to celebrate this multi-lingual occasion as follows:
Guten morgen, mon ami,
Heute ist es schones Wetter!
Charmé de vous voir ici!
Never saw you looking better!
Another verse reads:
Und die Kinder, how are they?
Ont-ils eu la rougeole [measles] lately?
Sind sie avec vous today?
J’aimerais les treffen greatly.
This piece of fun, written nearly a hundred years ago, can still raise a smile today. In fact it feels quite modern. It displays a certain relevance to the integrated European world in which we live – a continent without borders, sharing for the most part a common currency, which has turned its back on the conflicts of the past to sink its hopes in a united vision of prosperity and peace.
The European Union of today was created out of the ashes of war.
Harry Graham’s poem was written before the First World War devastated the hopes of Britain and its Empire, before the long depressions of the inter-war years and the fight to the death against Nazi Germany. It is no wonder that after nearly forty years of conflict and decline the tottering nations of Europe decided to grasp each other for support and to build something between them that might prevent the outbreak of war again. The European Union of today was created out of the ashes of war, and the greatest of the wartime leaders, Winston Churchill, was one of its first proponents. Speaking in Zurich in 1946 he said: ‘We must build a kind of United States of Europe.’ Quoting William Gladstone in his famous defence of Home Rule for Ireland he called for what the nineteenth-century Prime Minister had called ‘the blessed act of oblivion’ and added: ‘We must all turn our backs on the horrors of the past and we must look to the future.’ Most importantly, and presciently, he said there ‘must be a partnership between France and Germany’. He thought this was more important than Britain’s involvement and ended his speech with this: ‘If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join a union we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.’ In the event this is what happened. The European state which was not willing or able turned out to be Britain.
In May 1950 the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, announced that the French and German governments were going to create a common ‘High Authority’ to regulate and control the production of coal and steel within the two countries. Other countries in Europe would be invited to participate in the plan which would ‘make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’. The British government was given only a few hours’ notice of Schuman’s announcement, and its reaction was one of dismay. The nation still felt itself to be a world power. It was not like the other countries of Europe. It did not need to be pushed or chivvied into schemes it had not helped to invent. Furthermore it had just completed the nationalisation of its coal industry and was not inclined to unpick this to please some new, European dream.
In fact Schuman and the planning brains behind the Franco-German idea, Jean Monnet, were prepared to let Britain join their partnership even though its coal industry was nationalised, but the British government under the re-elected Labour leader, Clement Attlee, declined. The country had a strong trading relationship with the Commonwealth and a political alliance with America – although America was very much in favour of seeing Britain absorbed into the European alliance. In 1952 the Treaty of Paris created the European Coal and Steel Community, made up of France, West Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Five years later, in 1957, the Treaty of Rome took it one stage further and established the European Economic Community. Britain could only watch these developments from the sidelines. It had decided to stay out, following the approach laid down by Winston Churchill who, although he had eloquently defended the idea of European integration in 1947, told his cabinet four years later: ‘We help, we dedicate, we play a part, but we are not merged and do not forfeit our insular or Commonwealth character.’
By the 1960s the realities of international commerce were beginning to filter into the minds of British politicians. In 1960 Britain joined an organisation called the European Free Trade Area, or EFTA, whose other members were Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal. This was simply a trading association without the same political apparatus of the European Community. A year later, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, told the House of Commons that Britain was tendering a formal application to join the Common Market on condition that its obligations to the Commonwealth could be met. He was, he said, ‘not confident, but hopeful’ of success. Neither confidence nor hope would prove enough. The French President, Charles de Gaulle, sceptical of Britain’s commitment to the European idea, exercised his veto on two occasions, in 1963 and 1967, to prevent it from joining.