Second paragraph of third chapter (about Ian Paisley):
At the same time, Paisley was aggressive, mean, a bully, and gratuitously insulting. He made up mocking names for his opponents, like Donald Trump much later. For example, in one of the early issues of the organs of the DUP, the Protestant Telegraph, April 21, 1972, Paisley went on about “Hill-Billy” Whitelaw (for Viscount William Whitelaw, the first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland after Direct Rule was imposed in 1972), and “Liar Lynch” (for Jack Lynch, the Taoiseach of Ireland).⁴ He “generated fear” in everyone around him, as Eamon Mallie and David McKittrick put it in their BBC TV series on the Troubles.⁵ The journalist Eamonn Holmes has said recently that, “I defy anyone to say that lan Paisley in his prime was not scary.” ⁶
⁴ The Protestant Telegraph, April 21, 1972. DS.
⁵ Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick, Endgame in Ireland (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001), 275ff.
⁶ Eamonn Holmes, “Clinton’s Men Tried to Arrest Me Under the Christmas Lights,” Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, eds., Reporting the Troubles: Journalists Tell Their Stories of the Northern Ireland Conflict (Newtownards, Northern Ireland: 2018), 158.
This is a sympathetic book by an outsider. Stormier is both a retired professor of history and a qualified psychoanalyst, and his previous books include two studies of Abraham Lincoln, two books on Christian fundamentalism, and an analysis of the psychological reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Here he gives us a historical account, with nuances rooted in psychology, of the personalities behind the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the process that led to it.
My own first thought on reading the book is that asking why the Good Friday Agreement talks succeeded is a very good question. Many, perhaps most, negotiations around deep-rooted conflicts fail. Look at Cyprus; look at the Israel/Palestine situation; look indeed at the current dynamic between the USA and Iran (I am writing this in mid-August but I think it will be the same when this appears in early September). Even South Africa, held up so often as a paragon of how to do it, had a collapse of the process in mid-1992 with awful violence resulting.
There were several junctures where the Northern Ireland process could have gone in a different and less successful direction, and it’s worth remembering that the timescale was quite short – it was only a decade since the Anglo-Irish Agreement, only twenty-five years since Sunningdale; these were closer to 1998 than 1998 is to us now.
Crozier’s main source for his book is John Alderdice, who was the leader of the cross-community Alliance Party from 1987 to 1998. Crozier interviewed Alderdice expensively and has also had a very good browse through his records. I myself worked very closely with Alderdice from 1993 to 1996, and we have stayed in touch since I left Northern Ireland in early 1997, so even where he is not explicitly quoted I recognized some of his thoughts and analysis coming through.
This is not a bad thing at all – if you have one excellent source to hand, you may as well use it, provided (as in this case) that it is tempered with other sources, in particular the first-hand published accounts of a number of the leading players, notably George Mitchell, and key biographical notes, notably Dean Godson’s on David Trimble (in which I believe I get a credit myself). There is still the occasional slip, and I think the book would have benefited from a final read-through by someone familiar enough with Northern Ireland to catch the occasional point of detail that has gone astray (eg Dolours Price becomes “Jean Dolours”).
The book starts with a 50-page profile of John Alderdice including an introduction to the Northern Ireland situation for beginners. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, who became a psychiatrist, married to a pathologist, but also committed to politics. I had not realized that his family and the Paisleys were near neighbors when he grew up in Ballymena, though there is a big generational difference between them (Ian Paisley was 19 years older).
We then get twenty-page pen portraits of the other leading political figures: Paisley, Adams, Hume and Trimble. Paisley’s participation in the Good Friday Agreement itself was marginal, but it cannot be denied that he is the most dominant Unionist figure, possibly the most dominant figure of any variety, during the Troubles and that Northern Ireland’s troubled psyche ran in tracks that he laid down. There is no mystery about Paisley. Adams is more enigmatic.
After a note about the role of women in the peace process, Crozier then looks at the sequence on the American side that brought Washington into the room, and at the confluence of events in 1994-1995 that led to the ceasefires. This was the period when I myself was most closely involved, and there are a couple of incidents where, while I wasn’t in the room where it happened, I heard about it shortly afterwards from one or more of the protagonists.
I sat on the back benches for the first six months of the 1996-98 talks chaired by George Mitchell. It was a morale-sapping experience, though I did have one good moment when John Alderdice presented a paper on decommissioning of arms that Stephen Farry and I had written, and received compliments from several of the other talks participants. (I think we later published it, but cannot remember where).
My most vivid memory is Jeffrey Donaldson vigorously defending the rights of Orangemen to march through Drumcree – this was 1996, the year that the march was first blocked and then forced through by the police). Nobody enjoyed that phase of the talks, with the DUP and Robert McCartney inside and Sinn Fein outside. McCartney in particular was a complete waste of space, droning on about the purity of his cause so monotonously that even his supposed DUP allies looked bored to death. I left in December, never to return.
However, the point made by Crozier (and not only by him) is that the psychological effect of having party leaders sitting and listening quietly (if not necessarily respectfully) to each other meant that everyone’s point of view received exposure, and it also established the place of action as that depressing room in Castle Buildings (where the ground floor was labelled ‘3’, and the talks took place two stories up on floor 5; we never discovered what lay beneath, but it was rumoured to be the government’s nuclear bunker). That in itself reinforced the credibility of the process, and made Paisley and McCartney look irrelevant once they left.
Post-1998 developments are handled rather quickly in Crozier’s book, which is a shame – the dynamics of the St Andrew’s Agreement of 2007 which brought the DUP into government directly with Sinn Féin, Ian Paisley sharing the top spot with Martin McGuinness, are an important part of the later story.
By then, John Alderdice had moved on to other roles (though he retained an important post as a monitor of paramilitary activity including decommissioning, the subject that Stephen and I had written for him about ten years before); and because Crozier’s main source is off the scene he doesn’t go much beyond the headlines. But this is a book about the Good Friday Agreement, not about Northern Ireland in the last forty years, so I accept it for what it is.
I think even people with little knowledge of Northern Ireland would find this interesting and enlightening, subject to the above caveats. You can get Making Peace in Northern Ireland here.
