Blair legacy: Northern Ireland: Praise for the British prime minister's ' engagement' with the peace process is close to a historic understatement, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
When he entered Downing Street on May 2nd, 1997, Tony Blair would not have believed the extent to which two conflicts - one modern, one ancient - would shape his premiership and inform his legacy. Nor that it would be a deal struck with an octogenarian Ian Paisley that would enable the prime minister to set seemingly stable peace in Northern Ireland against the violent uncertainty to which he would have to leave Iraq.
It might not have been quite what the author of a famous e-mail had in mind when he advised on Blair's farewell tour, urging him to depart the stage while leaving the crowds cheering for more. Cheering crowds would have been too much to expect in Belfast, where the antagonisms and scars of conflict still run deep.
Some, indeed, had watched in disbelief as their tribal chieftains inched toward accommodation, convinced, hoping, praying . . . that their leaders might still be engaged in an ever more elaborate version of the "blame game".
Yet it was a truly remarkable moment at Stormont on Tuesday when Mr Blair, accompanied by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, watched Dr Paisley and Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness assume office as joint First and Deputy First Ministers in Northern Ireland's new powersharing Executive. And it would be one for Blair to savour in the post-Downing Street years.
Even before he arrived in office, of course, there were those who would have argued that prime minister Blair could hardly have failed in Northern Ireland. No one could have known then that Blair would surpass all three of Margaret Thatcher's parliamentary majorities.
However, the certain expectation before the 1997 election was that the first Labour prime minister in 18 years would have a comfort zone sufficient to liberate him from the constraints that a disappearing Commons majority were deemed to have imposed on John Major's response to the evolving "Irish peace process".
Mo Mowlam, who would become his first secretary of state for Northern Ireland, had maintained Irish faith through the Major years, assuring Dublin the incumbent prime minister was ready to engage and would respond to a second IRA ceasefire by bringing Sinn Féin speedily into negotiations.
And engagement was almost all that was asked for at that point, or so some imagined. For hadn't nationalist and republican Ireland already done most of the heavy lifting?
Tributes were paid at Stormont on Tuesday to many of the extraordinary cast of characters who had built on a series of initiatives along the path to peace that could be traced back to the late Charles Haughey. Some were there to share in the congratulation, like John Hume, who had set out the essential architecture of a political settlement in an interview in The Irish Times as far back as January 1990.
Former taoiseach Albert Reynolds was rightly invited to share in the historic moment, although it seems the British had not thought to invite Mr Major, with whom Reynolds negotiated the Joint Framework Documents in 1995. Nor, despite the new mood of generosity, were there places on the official guest list for the original first and deputy first ministers David Trimble and Séamus Mallon.
It was these two who negotiated the final, crucial breakthroughs that spelt delivery of the Belfast Agreement on the morning of Good Friday, April 10th, 1998. Yet nine years would elapse before it would be possible to re-establish the devolved institutions with confidence that, this time, they would endure.
The intervening period was characterised by a start-stop approach to devolution, a crisis within unionism fuelled by the unresolved issue of IRA weapons decommissioning, attended by ceasefire breaches including notorious murders, alleged republican spy rings and the then biggest bank robbery in British history . . . and endless negotiations which at times threatened to debase the language of peace and process altogether.
To reflect on that time between the Belfast Agreement and the DUP-Sinn Féin pact emerging from the St Andrews negotiations is to realise that praise for Tony Blair's "engagement" with the process - which itself would never fail for want of "spin" - is something close to an historic understatement.
Bertie Ahern recognised this on Tuesday. Speaking with real emotion, the Taoiseach said the people of Ireland knew that this opportunity to make Northern Ireland now "a place of peace and promise" would not have happened without Tony Blair.
It is questionable, actually, whether it would have happened without Taoiseach Ahern. It was he, remember, who forged the unprecedented working relationship between a Fianna Fáil-led government and Trimble's Ulster Unionists that eventually led to the withdrawal of the Republic's constitutional claim to the territory of Northern Ireland. Without that we would never have seen the Belfast Agreement, still less Dr Paisley's recent celebrated trip to Dublin promising a new era of North-South relations.
That said, there would never have been the necessary "engagement" with unionism at all had not Blair first abandoned his own party's traditional commitment to Irish unification with consent; disappointed republicans and others who hoped that in office he would act as "a persuader" for unity; and assured unionists that he "valued" the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
When he offered that assurance on his first visit to Belfast in May 1997, some doubtless hoped this was "New Labour" artifice designed to entice unionists into talks. At the point of his departure, however, it may be said that - in strict constitutional terms at least - Blair has delivered unionism the best deal on offer from any British prime minister in more than 40 years.
As the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s, Harold Wilson was contemplating a 15-year plan for Irish unity. Edward Heath's government abolished the Stormont parliament and declared it had no interest in impeding the realisation of Irish unity. The most "unionist" of them all, meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher, excluded unionism from the processes leading to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.
It is, of course, a very different union today. However, it is firmly rooted in the non-negotiable principle of consent, and the Taoiseach is foremost in declaring that the constitutional issue is now settled. Arguably this evolution of British policy would have occurred anyway in response to the end of the IRA's long war.
But the fact is that it happened on Tony Blair's watch. So while Mr Ahern sings Mr Blair's praise, Dr Paisley - like Mr Trimble - should feel no embarrassment about joining in the chorus.