When civil servants in the Anglo-Irish division of the Department of Foreign Affairs were preparing taoiseach Bertie Ahern for a meeting with British prime minister Tony Blair in early April 1998, they drafted notes suggesting unionists would be foolish not to recognise what was theirs to gain as peace negotiations in Belfast headed towards a conclusion. There was, they insisted, a “huge historical prize” on offer with the acceptance by “nationalist Ireland, north and south” of the legitimacy of Northern Ireland’s place within the UK: “if nationalists were gaining a united Ireland we would give David Trimble a blank sheet on which to write his requirements”. But in return for what unionists were getting, “the status quo with a few ‘add ons’ will not work ... unionist cannot be allowed to blow this prize, as they have done so often in history. We are putting our changes, our commitments in concrete. They must do so too...we can’t have concrete on one side and sand on the other.”
If there was broad acceptance of the validity of the unionist position, and the Republic was prepared to jettison its territorial claim to Northern Ireland, unionists had to show they were serious about “sharing” Northern Ireland and a broader commitment to conflict resolution and North-South co-operation. A week later the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was pushed over the line to much acclaim.
A friend of the chairman of the negotiations, George Mitchell, later recalled how Mitchell had trained himself “not to luxuriate in drama”. This was quite a feat in a process drowning in it, but more than 25 years on audiences at the Gate Theatre have been doing precisely that, luxuriating in Owen McCafferty’s play Agreement, a Lyric Theatre, Belfast, production, about those fraught, high-octane negotiations. Few would have predicted that a play based on that dialogue would strike a chord, but it is brilliant and moving, driven by an extraordinary cast who capture the freneticism and what was at stake.
In a recent piece in the Dublin Review of Books, archivist Catríona Crowe points out that “whereas a lot of literary, dramatic and cinematic attention has traditionally been paid to the violence and horror...less has been paid to the talking part – what happens when antagonists put down their guns and have to engage in the hard work, compromise and communication required for genuine negotiation of what may look like intractable differences...We need to adjust our audience lenses and wise up to the drama of discussion and administration.”
At the outset of the play Mitchell describes trying to juggle knives and balloons, but it was others in Castle Buildings in Stormont who had to do most to try to blunt the knives. The maleness of it all is striking. McCafferty’s play features six men, and just one woman, Mo Mowlam, played by Andrea Irvine, whom Crowe describes as “funny, irreverent, seriously ill, caring for them all like a weary mother hen”. Mowlam at the outset comments sardonically on the desire for “man to man” dialogue, a reminder not just of the ego of the preening Blair but a culture that witnessed Peter Robinson of the DUP during that era declare “women should leave politics and leadership alone”. But Mowlam was there, sharp and incisive, unlike Robinson and his colleagues, who subsequently benefited hugely from what was achieved.
In one of McCafferty’s earlier plays, Quietly (2012), one character asserts “there’s more to the truth than facts”. In Agreement McCafferty sticks with that belief, by lightly fictionalising; as he put it, he was not interested in “a verbatim play...it was easier for me to approach it if I thought about the notion of agreement in general. How does agreement work? How does any sort of conflict resolution work?”
But the play’s content is broadly accurate as can be seen from the way exchanges mirror the actual archival documents. Ahern asks Blair “What are you giving up?...We’re talking about changing my country’s Constitution – moving from a historic claim to a future aspiration ... what I’m doing isn’t nothing – I am willing to do it – but Trimble must be told there is no triumphalism or grandstanding about this – and you need to tell him he is here to negotiate”. Trimble, meanwhile, had to wrestle with conscience, the unionist inheritance, fear of change and fellow unionists warning him of treachery and betrayal.
This play is not about neat resolutions; the 1998 deal was also about institutionalising the binary of Green and Orange in a way inimical to the concept of a “shared society”, but as Enda Longley has pointed out, “most of us believe that contradiction is better than violence”. It is a message that seems more relevant and urgent than ever given the current scale of international terror and denigration of democracy.