Last July, the British and Irish governments drafted a new international treaty to suspend the institutions established under the Good Friday agreement if IRA decommissioning did not occur. The draft treaty was outlined in a letter from the then Northern Secretary, Mo Mowlam, to David Andrews, then Minister for Foreign Affairs.
The Department of Foreign Affairs refused to disclose the contents of the draft treaty. However, under pressure in the Commons from Robert McCartney, the British government deposited a copy of what it termed "Failsafe Proposal: Draft International Agreement" in the libraries of the Commons and the House of Lords. Through the good offices of Mr McCartney, I was forwarded a copy.
The draft agreement is contained in an annex to the accompanying letter. It provides for the suspension of the institutions if commitments then being entered into on decommissioning were not met. It will be remembered that this was the time when Tony Blair detected a "seismic shift" on decommissioning - it turned out not to be a shift at all.
Several issues arise from this draft agreement.
The first is that the very existence of such a draft agreement was an acknowledgement by the British government that the suspension of the institutions established under the Good Friday agreement would require an amendment to the existing treaty, which arose out of that agreement. How then could the British government, in the absence of an amending treaty, suspend institutions established under the agreement?
The next issue is that if the Irish Government was prepared to enter into a new treaty in July which would have provided for the suspension of the institutions in the event of a failure by the IRA to decommission, why is it not agreeable to that now?
There is the further point that, quite obviously, no commitments were entered into by anybody about IRA decommissioning in July and because of this neither the new draft treaty nor the establishment then of the institutions come into effect.
Is it likely that during the Mitchell review in November commitments were then made on decommissioning which were not forthcoming four months previously? And if the answer to this is yes, perhaps we should be told what those commitments were and who made them?
The decommissioning issue has been bedevilled by disingenuousness, primarily by Mr Blair, but also by others, including David Trimble and now, since November, by Sinn Fein. Within minutes of the signing of the Good Friday agreement on April 10th, 1998, Mr Blair wrote a letter to Mr Trimble which has been at the heart of the impasse since then.
The letter read in part: "This letter is to let you know that if, during the course of the first six months of the shadow Assembly or the Assembly itself, these provisions [on decommissioning] have been shown to be ineffective, we will support changes to those provisions to enable them to be made properly effective.
"Furthermore, I confirm that in our view the effect of the decommissioning section of the agreement, with decommissioning schemes coming into effect in June [1998], is that the process of decommissioning should begin straight away."
The letter managed to give the Ulster Unionist Party the impression that the agreement just signed required a start to decommissioning before Sinn Fein could be part of the new power-sharing executive without actually saying that.
Mr Blair made matters worse in a speech at Balmoral just before the referendum on the agreement when he said that decommissioning was integral to the agreement in a way that clearly it was not.
Bertie Ahern added to the confusion and the two leaders almost scuttled the entire process at Hillsborough last April. While acknowledging that decommissioning was not a precondition of Sinn Fein's participation in an executive, they went on to seek to make it one.
Mr Trimble has also behaved disingenuously on decommissioning. He knew the Good Friday agreement did not include a precondition on decommissioning as he had tried again and again during the negotiations to have it included in the agreement.
Throughout all the shenanigans on decommissioning, Gerry Adams and his Sinn Fein colleagues behaved correctly, until November, that is. We do not know what they said in private to George Mitchell, or what they said in private to Mr Trimble, but we do know one thing for certain: Mr Adams joined in the establishment of the executive and of the other institutions knowing that at least one of the other parties joining in the establishment of those institutions was doing so in the expectation that there would be a start to IRA decommissioning by the end of last month.
Mr Adams and his colleagues may not have said anything definite to encourage such an expectation, but as sure as hell they did nothing to dampen such expectation. If they knew, as they must have done, that it was highly unlikely there would be a start to IRA decommissioning before the end of January, did they not owe it to their prospective partners in the executive to be frank about that?
I spoke recently to a prominent member of Sinn Fein who had a part in the negotiations and who is also likely to know about the IRA's attitude to decommissioning. He said there was no prospect, and there had been no prospect, of IRA decommissioning in the foreseeable future.
He said there would have to be an IRA convention to sanction decommissioning and that such a sanction would require a two-thirds majority. Decommissioning would not get the support of 5 per cent at an IRA convention, let alone 66 per cent.
Is it likely that he withheld this information from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, and Pat Doherty and Gerry Kelly, or that these people did not know the IRA's attitude?
However fastidious Mr Adams and his colleagues have been in sticking to the agreement since it was concluded in April 1998, they acted in bad faith in allowing Mr Trimble to join the executive in December in the expectation that something would happen which they knew would not happen or at least was very unlikely to happen.
vbrowne@irish-times.ie