Neither Sinn Féin nor the SDLP accurately represented the views of ordinary Northern nationalists in the mid-1990s, Taoiseach John Bruton believed.
Equally, the Fine Gael leader, who became Taoiseach in 1994 after the government of Fianna Fáil’s Albert Reynolds collapsed, had concerns about the views of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
In his private memos to his closest advisers, it is clear that Bruton regarded the Department of Foreign Affairs as being on the same page as Sinn Féin and the SDLP.
However, Bruton believed that the unionists’ demands for IRA decommissioning were not going to go away and that they had to be satisfied.
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The unionists, he wrote, were “definite” that the 1993 Downing Street Declaration’s pledges for “a permanent end to the use of, and support for paramilitary violence” had to be honoured.
Bruton’s surprise election as Taoiseach in December 1994 caused concern within the Sinn Féin leadership, since he was not regarded as sympathetic to their cause.
However, the Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams, said in private before meeting the new Taoiseach that he “was personally confident the peace process would continue”.
Two months later Adams was less confident, complaining that the IRA ceasefire had been sold to doubtful republicans by “three pieces of the jigsaw”.
These were support from Irish America, the relationship between Sinn Féin and the SDLP leader, John Hume, and the commitment of the Fianna Fáil/Labour government that had been in power until 1994.
Now the government had changed, support from Irish America had not lived up to his expectations, and Hume was the only remaining “piece of the jigsaw”.
Hume, too, was worried, telling Foreign Affairs that the British were using IRA decommissioning to separate Bruton from others on the Irish side, and that it “would be disastrous if we allowed this to happen”.
Mitchel McLaughlin of Sinn Féin agreed, expressing concern that “the Government at high political level may not fully appreciate the need to keep the nationalist strategy going”. He was clearly talking about Bruton.
However, Bruton had his own concerns about Hume, suggesting to his officials in September 1995 that “we need to clarify John Hume’s personal position on the peace process”.
He wanted to find out if Hume supported Sinn Féin’s position that there would be no decommissioning of IRA arms until the talks were over and an agreement was reached. If he didn’t, would he support a call from the Irish Government for some decommissioning during the talks as a gesture of good faith? “As John Hume will be seen by many as the expert on the peace process, his interpretation and answers on these points should be known to us at the earliest possible stage. We should not be travelling blind.”
He also had his doubts about the united Ireland ambitions of both Sinn Féin and the SDLP, or at least the creation of North-South institutions that would lead in that direction.
Was that really what Northern nationalists wanted? he asked. “Do their demands focus on sovereignty issues (as in their parties’ official policy) or on ‘respect’ and ‘dignity’ issues (as I suspect is the case)? In the absence of a clear understanding of irreducible Northern nationalist demands, there is a danger that the Irish Government will be drawn into writing a blank cheque in the talks ... Given that they want the talks to start within two months, there is some urgency in finding out what they really want.”
Qualitative research into nationalist opinion in the North, to be paid for by Fine Gael, was needed, he believed. Essentially, he wanted to find out the bottom line of Sinn Féin and SDLP supporters: “Would they settle for a package involving powersharing, a reformed RUC, greater symbolic and cultural recognition of the nationalist community, and some modest North-South co-operation?”
The research does not seem to have been carried out.