Former Finnish prime minister Harri Holkeri, who co-chaired multiparty talks in Belfast in advance of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, quickly spotted how differently unionists and nationalists used the English language in the Stormont talks.
“Because English wasn’t his first language”, Holkeri was sensitive to the differences, said former SDLP leader Mark Durkan.
“Different parties talked nearly in different idioms. Some of the words were the same but the meaning and the intention was different.”
In a new book, The SDLP, Politics and Peace – the fruits of a series of detailed interviews with Durkan by University of Portsmouth academic Prof Graham Spencer , the former Northern Ireland deputy first minister delves deeply into the history of efforts to bring an end to the Troubles.
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Too often people were not understood correctly, he said. “There were people I didn’t read right. Like most people, I couldn’t read [Ulster Unionist Party leader David] Trimble. Was he interested? What’s he going to do? When is he going to walk? Is he really in this for the long haul?”
The one person who did read Trimble “reasonably well” was the SDLP leader at the time of the talks, John Hume.
“He took a glass-half-full approach,” Durkan said of Hume at the Dublin launch of the book, which has been described by former Clinton White House official Nancy Soderberg as “a groundbreaking must-read”.
Often the issue came down to the way in which people viewed life and the way they communicated accordingly, he said, contrasting the more literal approach of unionists with the more conceptual stand taken often by nationalist politicians.
Today, words matters again. Asked about the debate surrounding a united Ireland, Durkan said “there is a Hume-sized hole in the conversation” surrounding the options for constitutional change that should or could be explored.
Past examples such as the New Ireland Forum, the Forum on Europe or the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation should be examined now to create a vehicle for thinking across the spectrum, rather than letting extreme views from any side take hold.
[ Mark Durkan: Propagating John Hume’s ethics and methodsOpens in new window ]
This could help to ensure that “thinking becomes less partisan, because it is shared, where it is informed and stimulated by other parties’ opinions, by expert opinion,” said Durkan, who led the SDLP for nearly a decade until 2010.
However, he said such a body should not have “New Ireland” anywhere in its title because “that is now just seen as a euphemism for a united Ireland”.
“Even when John Hume talked about a new Ireland or an agreed Ireland, it had a different, looser meaning back then,” said Durkan, who pointed to the care taken about the wording of changes to Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution.
I think it’s probably not unusual that catalysts for change can also be casualties of that change. We definitely know the difference between vindication and reward
— Mark Durkan
“I cannot say I was in the room for all of it, but I have some sense of the work that was done by [then taoiseach] Bertie Ahern, by the attorney general [David Byrne], by so many officials at that time, just to get that wording right,” he said.
“Because there’s an unstated differentiation between the nation and the State, there’s the firm will of the nation in terms of securing the unity of the people of Ireland, but it then also goes on to say that a united Ireland can only be by consent.”
Voices “on the other side” must be heard, he said, pointing to the Belfast Agreement negotiations that were “a long, slow murmuration that at times looked chaotic and disconnected, with different elements that looked like they were completely detached, or on a collision course”.
Often, there were people who “weren’t willing to agree or discuss things who then ended up coming back to the table and were willing to agree and discuss things in a different way, and maybe challenging you in another way”.
However, the gulf in the way in which people communicate is not just between nationalists and unionists, it extends, too, to Irish and British politicians officials, said Spencer, who has interviewed scores of both over decades.
“Even now, unionists I’ve interviewed will say, ‘We don’t use the word reconciliation, because that’s a republican word. We tend not to use equality, because that’s a republican word,‘” he told the launch.
Following the Hillsborough Agreement in 2010, which cleared the way for the devolution of policing powers to Stormont, Spencer remembers watching the British prime minister Gordon Brown and taoiseach Brian Cowen emerging after the deal was struck.
“Brown, the Scottish Presbyterian, said, ‘We’ve got the detail of the agreement right.' And Cowen said, ‘We’ve got the spirit of the agreement right.' That probably sums up two very different psychologies, between the literal and the metaphorical.”
For the Irish side, “informality is a big, big part of their working ways”, said Spencer, while their British counterparts would often tend to be more reticent, “more driven by paper”.
The lesson to be drawn for the future is that everyone “shouldn’t spend our time trying to deny or define anybody else’s identity, (but) to find a way of being able to confidently express our own, and I hope that will be respected,” said Durkan.
But that discussion must be founded on an understanding that there are people on the island who can see themselves “as Irish and not at all British”, while others believe they are “totally British and not a shred Irish”.
Looking back, Durkan wonders about the might-have-beens. In June 1998, the SDLP won 22 per cent of the vote in the election for the 108 members of the first Northern Ireland Assembly established after the agreement.
[ John Hume: His life and timesOpens in new window ]
Today, the SDLP holds eight of the 90 seats in the Assembly, while its numbers in Westminster have fallen from four in 1997 to just two now, in Derry and South Belfast. Ever loyal to the party, Durkan acknowledged the SDLP’s fall in support.
“I think it’s probably not unusual that catalysts for change can also be casualties of that change. We definitely know the difference between vindication and reward,” but Hume’s vision – focusing on reform and reconciliation – has “been vindicated”, he insisted.
“But have we been rewarded for it? No.
“If we’ve made mistakes – and they had been mistakes of generosity, that ended up with lost seats and lost votes – I much prefer to live with those mistakes than mistakes of others that led to lost years, lost opportunities and lost lives”.
