The former head of the Northern Ireland civil service, Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, told the Merriman Summer School yesterday that he believed the Anglo-Irish Agreement embodied a fatal flaw.
"It entrenched the Irish Government in perpetuity as the special guarantor and protector of the nationalist minority in Northern Ireland. In doing so, it seemed to me to fly in the face of principled Wolfe Tone nationalism, which would have accepted no distinction between Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter. Such provisions simply reinforce the fears of a pan-nationalist coalition."
Sir Kenneth, who was head of the North's civil service from 1984 to 1991, was a key civil servant in Northern Ireland over an extended period, dating from his days as a private secretary to the prime minister, Capt Terence O'Neill.
He said he commended the Downing Street Declaration "for its honesty and forthrightness on issues of principle, particularly about status and the possibility of future change. I would wish to see the pith and substance of these understandings fully reflected and respected both in British and Irish constitutional and statute law.
"But I am uneasy about the Framework Document, which has to me an unhealthy flavour of potential imposition."
One day, he said - and he had read a piece recently by Dr Garret FitzGerald which argued that such a day was far from imminent - a poll might reveal a majority in the North in favour of Irish unity. "What real intellectual preparation has been made for that - possibly remote - contingency? Is it supposed that the preoccupations of the distinctive Northern Unionist-Protestant community would just fade away? Is it imagined that the arrangements for the governance of a pretty homogenous state would be apt for a new heterogeneous one?
"When we talk of `parity of esteem', what does it mean both in the present and potential future context? What assured share and place would this new community have in a future hypothetical Ireland? " Sir Kenneth asked.
He said there was a great deal in the recent record of the Republic which was a wholly legitimate cause for pride. There had never been such a world-wide interest in, and approval of, Irish culture in the widest sense. Citizens of the State, such as Mary Robinson and Peter Sutherland, had won admiration on the wider world stage - and the earlier profligacy in economic management had been re placed by policies which had led to the State becoming one of the "tiger economies" of the EU.
However, the development of policy towards the North had in many respects been deeply flawed, and as a consequence, unproductive or even counter-productive.
"When an area and a community have long been embodied in another state to which they do not want to belong, it is perhaps inevitable that the first thrust of independence is to emphasise and encourage distinctiveness. The trouble here in Ireland was a schizophrenia of aspiration. The founding fathers of this State wished to see it free, independent and united - that is to say including within its embrace all the people living on the island of Ireland.
"The new State demonstrated and asserted its new independence by policies and gestures of what I might call `non-Britishness', a state not easily distinguished from `anti-Britishness'. But if you accept that it was a sense of `Britishness' which, in part at least, characterised the `separated brethren' of the North, then it was rather as if one cried - `Come over and join us on the other side', while at the same time hacking down all the existing bridges."
He added that in the earliest years of the independent Irish State, efforts to establish and underpin its distinctiveness were inevitable. But the consequence was that the Southern jurisdiction came to be seen as more and more foreign by visitors from the North.
"If what is sought is really an `agreed Ireland', an Ireland for Irishmen to be agreed by Irishmen, can it be right to appear ready from time to time to deal with the purported colonial power over the heads of one's alleged fellow-citizens?"