The Belfast Agreement appeared impossible in the early 1990s, when political stagnation was the order of the day and it seemed the Troubles would never end, recalls GERRY MORIARTY, Northern Editor.
VERY EARLY in January 1991, I joined The Irish Timesfrom the Irish Pressin Dublin to work in Belfast. The assignment was mainly to cover the conflict. There wasn't any sense whatsoever of what would be possible on Good Friday seven years later.
Back then news editors had suspicions about the sanity and sincerity of anybody actually wanting to work in Northern Ireland. I remained in Dublin for three months so that I could be acclimatised to the ways of The Irish Times. Editors then had a thing about reporters from the South "going native" when they travelled the 100 miles up the road to Belfast.
But in the late 1970s and early 1980s I had worked in Donegal, where the Northern story often encroached. In the Irish Press in the 1980s I was regularly dispatched North from Dublin to help report the big stories: Enniskillen, Loughgall, the response to the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
The worst week was 20 years ago, when three IRA members were killed by the SAS in Gibraltar. That same week when they were being buried, Michael Stone started hurling grenades and shooting at us in Milltown Cemetery, killing three more people. That week too, two corporals were killed in west Belfast during one of the funerals for those killed by Stone.
I would be filing stories from early morning to very late at night, to the different editions of the Evening Pressand Irish Press, and the Sunday Press. Driving to my hotel late at night, I had to avoid the rioters and car hijackers, and manoeuvre past the burning cars and buses. Come Sunday of that week I was a beaten docket. I had to ring Ian Paisley for a line on some angle or other. This place is buggered, I told him, very sure of my analysis. It was a week of horror upon horror, culminating with the poor off-duty corporals lying dead and almost naked, spread out like the crucified Christ, Fr Alec Reid saying a prayer over them. No hope there, I said to Paisley.
Paisley generally doesn't talk to reporters on Sundays, but, wearing his religious hat, he gave me a "pull yourself together" lecture over the phone, concluding with the final line, "There is always hope". And curiously there was. That same year Gerry Adams and John Hume were talking to each other, not very productively, but it was the genesis of the Hume-Adams project five years later. Charlie Haughey was taking an interest too, but in a deniable sort of way.
All that was still secret when I finally made it to the Belfast office of The Irish Timeson April 1st, 1991.
Back then, Belfast was drab, dull and dangerous. There were only a few decent restaurants in the place, pubs tended to be Orange or Green, and on Sundays the city closed down. It was a grey city.
My daughter Naoise heard her first bomb when she was just a few months old. She was sleeping beside me in our house in the Holylands in south Belfast one morning when there was yet another attack on the Europa, famously dubbed "the most bombed hotel in Europe" - the thud and aftershock of the explosion startling her awake.
Another time I was walking her in her buggy when three rockets exploded in the car park of St Brigid's Church in south Belfast. The IRA was aiming for the nearby British army base but missed and instead almost wiped out a wedding party.
When you walked down Great Victoria Street in Belfast in those years it seemed that every window of the Europa Hotel was boarded up. Heavily armed and armoured British soldiers and RUC officers patrolled the streets. When the shops shut, the centre of Belfast became a ghost town. There appeared little or no hope of anything better, so people just got on with their lives. As an old joke goes, "Grave news: the Hundred Years War has just started." That was how the Troubles seemed back then, a conflict that would grind on relentlessly, interminably.
EVEN AFTER THEfirst IRA ceasefire in 1994 there was no diminution in the sectarian tension. There were times during Drumcree, particularly the early years, beginning in 1995, when Northern Ireland seemed on the brink of civil war. There were occasions then when we had to stay overnight in the Royal Victoria Hospital on the Falls Road.
Outside you could hear the rioting, shooting and petrol bombing that were triggered by the annual stand-offs in Drumcree. In the environment of a hospital, where people were striving to preserve life, it all seemed so futile and absurd.
Every marching season was accompanied by community anxiety. When the massive, intimidating bonfires were lit on the Eleventh Night in July, sensible people, if they could afford it, cleared out of Northern Ireland. You worried for children being brought up in such a place.
That was Northern Ireland, a world removed from its neighbouring state. My colleague Dominic Cunningham, who worked in Belfast for the Irish Independentall through the Troubles, particularly brought this home to me. He was enjoying some R&R in a hotel in Sligo. He was sitting at the bar having a drink when an elderly man came alongside and ordered a pint. As he waited for it to settle the two fell into convivial conversation about the weather, the Down and Sligo GAA teams, tourism, and the fine view of Knocknarea Mountain, where Queen Maeve is allegedly buried.
"Our conversation couldn't have been more pleasant," Cunningham recalled. "But then, as he turned away with his pint, his mood darkened. He said to me, 'You are all the same up there, and we want f*** all to do with you'." Cunningham, while astonished, understood why the South would turn away.
Paisley often spoke about never forsaking the blue skies of Ulster for the grey skies of the Republic. But he had it the wrong way around. There was always a palpable lifting of tension when we went on holidays or broke South for a weekend to Dublin, Offaly, Donegal or Cork.
Yet, back in the early 1990s, work was simple: it was 80 per cent covering violence, 15 per cent covering what passed for politics, and 5 per cent covering what passed for normal life. Killings were happening at a rate of one, two or three a week - which, in some official eyes, passed for an acceptable level of violence compared with the 1970s.
When someone was murdered you went to the scene, found out as much information as you could and filed your report. You covered the funerals and wrote, to the best of your ability, with humanity, feeling and respect about the victim or victims, to reflect the terrible loss and suffering.
Between starting with The Irish Times and the signing of the Belfast Agreement, 399 people died as a result of the Troubles. I covered very many of those tragedies. As a reporter, one minute you'd be exulting in front of the TV as Ray Houghton scored against Italy in the 1994 World Cup. Three quarters of an hour later, you'd be standing at a cordon in Loughinisland in Co Down, contemplating how to find words to report the slaughter of six civilians by the UVF at the Heights Bar.
Gradually though, political work took up more time. There were the talks in 1991 and 1992 organised by Peter Brooke and Patrick Mayhew.
Then came word of the Hume-Adams dialogue.
Later in 1993, Albert Reynolds and John Major came through with the Downing Street Declaration. That led to the IRA ceasefire in August 1994, followed by the loyalist cessations in October that year. That IRA ceasefire broke down for a variety of reasons in February 1996, but resumed in July the following year under the influence of the new "hand of history" leaders on the block, Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair. This all led to Sinn Féin joining the other main parties, apart from the DUP, for talks at Castle Buildings, Stormont.
THAT HAD USreporters standing out in the car park where we would remain for many months to come. It was a slow, stop-start, tedious business. To pass the time when action was particularly sluggish, we'd play soccer in the car park. One day, RTÉ's Charlie Bird joined in the game: very competitive is Charlie. Still, his presence reinforced our growing conviction that something might happen here.
Holy Thursday was set as a deadline and the closer we got to it the bigger the press pack grew. We'd taunt the Northern Ireland Office to lay on some reasonable facilities, a few sandwiches perhaps, but the NIO preferred the journalists to work in Spartan conditions. "The Department of Foreign Affairs always look after us when the story is in Dublin," British reporters complained to the officials, but the NIO wouldn't budge, at least not until the final weeks of the negotiations, when there were so many of us that they were embarrassed into providing some additional amenities.
Holy Week 1998 was unforgettable. One minute a deal was on, the next it was close to collapse. On one of those occasions I asked Steven King, a Trimble adviser, "Any white smoke, Steven?" "It's not the sort of metaphor we unionists like to use, Gerry." Also that week, someone, probably from one of the peace groups that were swelling the numbers outside Castle Buildings, released a white dove of peace in the car park. But there was also a genuine local kestrel which had made its home in the woods nearby. Hawks and doves - these talks could still go either way, and it would take more than corny symbolic gestures to carry the day. Oh, we could be cynical.
Another evening it was close to deadline and we were desultorily interviewing members of the Women's Coalition in the car park. They did good work, but at that stage weren't central to the story, and what we wanted to hear was what the main parties were thinking and doing. Behind the line of Coalition members, we could see the SDLP talks team emerging from Castle Buildings. We almost trampled Monica McWilliams and her colleagues underfoot as we made a beeline for Hume, Seamus Mallon and Bríd Rodgers. "How dare you; you have no manners," thundered Bronagh Hinds of the Coalition, attempting to put us in our place.
Holy Thursday night merged into Good Friday morning. Lots of symbolism here, for sure. The snow fell lightly on the car park. We waited and watched in the cold, as night turned to morning. Truly, great risk-taking decisions were taken inside Castle Buildings that night and that day that would transform life for everyone in Northern Ireland.
Finally, at teatime on Good Friday, the deal was done. There was much more work ahead, of course, many more hurdles to be surmounted, but what happened inside that building set the scene for Paisley and Adams cementing an even better deal in May last year. Hume and Trimble earned their Nobel Peace Prize. Belfast began to lighten up and brighten up.
Six days later my second son was born, within "the octave of the Good Friday Agreement", as my aunt Nuala liked to say. We couldn't think of a name that had a relevance to the peace process until a friend, Frank Galligan, suggested Garbhan. It's from the Irish, meaning rough, but the root of the name, "garbh", also means peace after struggle, his book of Irish names assured us. We settled on Garbhan. I don't think he's ever heard a live bomb or bullet.