It is fitting that the North-South Ministerial Council reconvened in Dublin Castle last Friday for its first full meeting since November 2016.
Of all the institutions of the Belfast Agreement, the council most closely reflects John Hume’s vision. Stormont is the least relevant in this respect, despite its prominence in how the peace process is judged.
Hume’s relationship with devolution is widely misunderstood. He entered politics in the 1960s with the intention of building a nationalist parliamentary opposition, reforming Stormont from the inside along Westminster lines – something unionists today would welcome unreservedly.
Hume's initial proposal for governance was for a six-person committee of three elected members plus one appointee each from London, Dublin and Washington
When that failed – for which unionism bears overwhelming responsibility – Hume never again entertained the idea of an internal Northern Ireland settlement.
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At his insistence, the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, which created the first powersharing executive, included a Council of Ireland, comprising ministers from North and South.
When Sunningdale failed, Hume gave up on Stormont altogether. He boycotted a phased reintroduction of devolution in the 1980s, causing the experiment to be abandoned.
In its place, Hume almost single-handedly drove the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, whose sole institution was a regular conference of British and Irish ministers.
The first talks of the peace process began soon afterwards.
Hume’s initial proposal for Northern Ireland’s governance was for a six-person committee of three elected members plus one appointee each from London, Dublin and Washington. However bizarre this sounds, it was a rational synthesis of Hume’s view of the North as a British and Irish problem, unfit to be left to its own devices.
The Belfast Agreement split this into three supposedly equal strands. Its main institutions are Stormont, inheritor to the Sunningdale executive; the North-South Ministerial Council, inheritor to the Council of Ireland; and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, legal successor to the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
While Hume could be called the father of the latter two institutions, the conference was meant to fade away as Stormont acquired more powers.
The North-South Ministerial Council, by contrast, was meant to grow. It was tasked with agreeing six areas of co-operation at the outset, creating all-Ireland implementation bodies, then moving on to agree and implement more, without limit.
This was to be complemented by a joint forum of the Oireachtas and the Northern Assembly, as was Sunningdale's Council of Ireland, forming in effect a consultative all-Ireland parliament.
Template
Many unionists imagined the North-South Ministerial Council was designed to lay a template for Irish unification. Many nationalists hoped the same. To calm unionist nerves, extra and somewhat eccentric institutions were added to the east-west strand: a British-Irish parliamentary body and the British-Irish Council.
It is extraordinary to recall how fraught the debate over this became, given how arcane it seems today.
Unionists have lost their fear of North-South co-operation, albeit largely through cynicism, reopening prospects for its momentum
Unionist reaction to Sunningdale and the Anglo-Irish Agreement produced two epic spells of disorder, with Dublin’s involvement the objection on both occasions.
Preventing this happening again was a major factor in peace process negotiations.
Unionists continued criticising the North-South implementation bodies for several years after the Belfast Agreement, with the DUP portraying them as profligate and unaccountable. But outrage could not be sustained.
As all attention gravitated towards Stormont, unionists discovered they could sideline North-South co-operation by simply giving it the minimum attention their duties required. Nationalists failed to find a countervailing strategy.
Two decades on, there are still only six implementation bodies, all humdrum little bureaucracies such as Waterways Ireland and the Food Safety Promotion Board. The joint parliamentary forum was never developed.
David Trimble, Hume's fellow Nobel laureate, liked to say "fine words butter no parsnips".
The same could be said of last Friday’s meeting of the council.
Discussion of a high-speed rail line between Belfast, Dublin and Cork made headlines. This idea has been kicked around for decades, inviting comparisons with Boris Johnson’s bridge to Scotland. Apart from that, proceedings were worthy and dull. However, the North-South strand is not doomed to be eternally threadbare.
The council is a genuinely useful vehicle to handle all-Ireland issues as they arise. Brexit, Covid-19 and Border region city deals were serious new items on Friday’s agenda.
Unionists have lost their fear of North-South co-operation, albeit largely through cynicism, reopening prospects for its momentum. They have also welcomed the Irish Government’s “shared island” policy, whose programme is a neat fit for the council’s structures.
Changing party fortunes since the Belfast Agreement have forced the evolution of Stormont. The council shows traces of the same. For the DUP, it promises a cross-Border bulwark against Sinn Féin. For the SDLP, now in an alliance with Fianna Fáil, it in theory puts the party at both ends of the table. This is a change from Hume's firm positioning of the SDLP as the Northern partner of any Irish government.
The danger of Stormont for nationalists is that it becomes the natural focus of all Northern Ireland politics, to the extent of creating an internal settlement.
If a fraction of the care put into maintaining devolution was shown to the North-South Ministerial Council, it still has the potential John Hume imagined.