THE old ultimatum strategy seems to have worked in the North - on at least one occasion anyway. Harri Holkeri, one of George Mitch- ell's two deputies at the peace talks, says that at one stage the negotiations got so boring that the three wise men wrote a letter to the participants saying "since this is impossible, we are now leaving and will come back when you have something to say". The letter, which was Mitchell's idea, was never sent, but word got around that it had been drafted and the politicians pleaded "don't leave us, please". "You are our only hope," said people in the street.
The co-chairmen had two kinds of contributions to the make to the talks, Holkeri said - "neutrality, even a childish neutrality" which meant looking at the colours of his tie each day to ensure it didn't give a wrong signal and "extreme patience".
Holkeri, a former Finnish PM, told a dinner in Washington last week that after reading thousands of pages of Irish history to try to understand what pushes people to use violence against each other in a democratic society, he finds the terrorist mind unpredictable. He believes there won't be a return to paramilitary violence, and that the decommissioning of illegal weapons may turn out to be easier than the decommissioning of mindsets.
Now chairman of the Helsinki Telephone Co-operative, Holkeri said that when first asked to serve with Mitchell and Gen John de Chastelain to solve the decommissioning problem he was not sure what it meant. Dictionaries referred to ships and nuclear power stations. His colleagues had a problem too and asked him what it meant; Holkeri replied: "Gentlemen, this is your native tongue."