With time running out for Mr Blair, the scene was set for a final attempt at resolution with one more round of negotiations at a venue away from the pressures and distractions of Belfast. In October 2006 the parties and British and Irish leaders convened at St Andrews. Even the choice of a Scottish location played to Mr Paisley’s Ulster-Scots roots. The DUP leader was said to be more enthusiastic than some of his party officers on signing a new international treaty between two sovereign governments that Mr Paisley would argue was an improvement on the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
The St Andrews Agreement contained more inducements for Mr Paisley than it did for Mr Adams and Sinn Féin, but the republicans also knew that they had fewer cards to play. Just as with Mr Blair, Sinn Féin’s investment in years of developing a political strategy to achieve Irish unity without resort to violence now depended on the man who had made a career out of wrecking every attempt to reach an accommodation with nationalism. Sinn Féin agreed not only to recognise but to support the forces of law and order in the guise of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, a reformed Royal Ulster Constabulary shorn of its name and emblems, in return for the DUP’s agreement to share power at Stormont. This was the moment when the sacred cow of the legitimacy of the Provisional IRA, a construct of the Irish liberation movement dating back to 1919, was finally dispatched. The following summer the Provos would quietly announce that they had formally ended their campaign to force Britain out of Ireland.
Symbolically this was a significant victory for Mr Paisley and the DUP, but it was still proving to be a hard sell to his grassroots, for so long weaned on the rhetoric of smashing Sinn Féin and republicanism. Mr Paisley demanded and got another Northern Ireland Assembly election, the tenth time that Northern Ireland had been called to the polls since 1998, to test his mandate for going into government with his former sworn enemies.
The March 2007 election rewarded the DUP with 36 seats in the 108-seat Assembly, reinforcing its primacy. The UUP managed only half that number and Sinn Féin also pulled away from the SDLP, taking 28 seats. On May 8, Mr Paisley was formally sworn in as First Minister. “If anyone had told me that I would be standing here today to take this office, I would have been totally unbelieving,” he said. Mr Blair and the Provisional IRA’s ruling Army Council, separated by just a few seats, watched from the Stormont gallery. Mr McGuinness took the oath as Deputy First Minister. Mr Blair left office with his peace project prize.
The “Chuckle Brothers” era was golden but brief, a honeymoon period in which the two former enemies laughed in public at one another’s jokes even though Mr Paisley still refused to shake Mr McGuinness’s hand. The former’s fortunes soon waned. Having been schmoozed by the Establishment he had for so long spurned, even his wife Eileen was now a member of the House of Lords, he was rejected by the very Church he founded. Free Presbyterian elders forced him to stand down as Moderator over his decision to share power with “unreformed terrorists”.
It was the tangled allegations of financial impropriety against his son Ian Jr that provided the excuse to get rid of him (the Stormont Ombudsman later cleared him). Mr Paisley tersely announced that he was retiring, to be replaced as DUP leader and First Minister by Peter Robinson. Mr McGuinness learnt of it from the radio news.
Mr Robinson promised a new era of “business-like” dealings with Sinn Féin: code for less grinning, which was going down badly with the grassroots. The DUP’s foot-dragging over the transfer of policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont began to unnerve Sinn Féin, which withdrew its cooperation, effectively rendering the power-sharing Executive mute for many months. In local parlance, the Chuckle Brothers had become the Brothers Grim.
Northern Ireland slid in slow motion towards a new crisis. Sinn Féin privately briefed that its patience was not eternal and that if policing and justice were not devolved by Christmas 2009 they would bring down the institutions whose construction had taken so long to complete.
Then came the most unpredictable of crises for Northern Ireland’s leaders. Gerry Adams was accused of covering up for decades the alleged sexual abuse by his brother Liam of Liam’s daughter. Mr Robinson was revealed as a cuckold, his wife, Iris, MP for Strangford, having had an affair with a teenager. There was more. Iris had raised £50,000 from property developer friends to set her young lover up in business, pocketing a “commission” herself from the cash. Mr Robinson was accused in a BBC investigative documentary of having breached his office’s code of conduct by not having made the authorities aware, a charge that he strongly denied.
The personal and political crises intertwined as Sinn Féin increased the pressure. Gordon Brown, whose interest in Northern Ireland had been minimal until now, was forced to fly with Brian Cowen, his Irish counterpart, to Belfast to hold emergency proximity talks. These failed and after three days the Prime Minister abandoned Hillsborough Castle, leaving Shaun Woodward, his Northern Ireland Secretary, to oversee two weeks of marathon negotiations, during which Mr Robinson temporarily stood down as First Minister.
Eventually the deal was done and sealed by the British and Irish leaders, who returned to unveil a firm date for the transfer of policing and justice powers, a hugely symbolic act for Sinn Fein since it could henceforth argue that the English were no longer running the show.
The extraordinary survival of Mr Robinson and Mr Adams as leaders of their respective parties was much commented upon, with most agreeing that neither could or would have remained in any other part of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. Yet there was one surprise in the general election of 2010. Mr Robinson’s party saw off the challenge from a revived Ulster Unionist Party, now in alliance with the Conservatives, but also the Traditional Unionist Voice power-sharing rejectionists.
Establishing themselves beyond question as the voice of Unionism, talk began once more about a united Unionist party to challenge Sinn Fein’s onward march towards becoming Northern Ireland’s largest party. But Mr Robinson lost his East Belfast seat, which he had held for 31 years, to Naomi Long of the cross-community Alliance party, which designates itself neither Unionist nor nationalist. Across the city in West Belfast Mr Adams increased his share of the vote to 71 per cent.
As the parliamentary term drew to a close it seemed as if the self-denial about the threat of a fresh cycle of terrorism from a new generation of Irish Republican extremists was finally over. The Real IRA, a splinter of the Provisionals, bombed the Army’s Palace Barracks outside Belfast where MI5 has its headquarters.
One phase of the Troubles had drawn to a close, but another was threatening to commence.
Greg Hurst
Editor of the Guide
Britain’s first postwar coalition government involving the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats came within a whisker of being forged in Wales, three years before that agreed in Westminster. The two parties struck a deal to become junior partners in a coalition led by Plaid Cymru after the elections to the Welsh Assembly in 2007, only to see it unravel at the eleventh hour.
The collapse of Cardiff’s “rainbow” coalition propelled Plaid into the arms of Labour, the dominant party of Wales, which remained in office to lead a red-green Government that was anathema to many supporters of both.
The biggest beneficiary was Rhodri Morgan, returning as First Minister to secure his place as the man who, more than anyone else, shaped the direction and tone of Welsh devolution. Donnish, quirky, consensual in approach but statist by instinct, Mr Morgan’s achievement was to reach out well beyond Labour’s strongholds in industrial South Wales to foster a sense of national purpose, often while his party did not. To do so, he had to lead, cajole and endure a Welsh Labour Party whose tribal instincts were directly contrary to the principles of pluralism on