This Day in Irish History (Downing Street Declaration Offers ‘Framework’ for Ulster Peace Process)

Dec. 15, 1993—The leaders of Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland advanced the fraught peace process in Northern Ireland by signing the Downing Street Declaration, a joint statement of intentions that capped a year when a change in policy on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to dissolve decades of mistrust and violence in the troubled province.

In this “charter for peace and reconciliation," the UK government forswore any "selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland."

At the same time, Ireland agreed that any settlement needed to "respect the democratic dignity and the civil rights and religious liberties of both communities"—not just Catholics who had been pressing for issues like justice, economic gains, and better housing since “The Troubles” broke out in 1969, but also Protestants who feared any agreement that would leave them at a disadvantage.

Above all, both governments pledged to abide by the wish of the majority in any future agreement.

At the time, that was regarded as a concession to the Protestants who had held sway in the province since the 1920s, when a commission to determine the boundary between Ulster and the more republican-dominated region to the south dissolved. Their unsettled work resulted in a de facto gerrymandered Northern Ireland that favored Unionists.

At the time of this partition, Protestants had enjoyed a nearly 2-1 advantage in population over Catholics, based on the 1911 census, and they had retained that edge for decades. But by 1992, higher birth rates for Catholics had left them not far behind Protestants: 42.8 percent versus 38.4 percent.

Now, according to the 2021 census, there are more Catholics than Protestants living in Northern Ireland: 42.3 percent versus 30.5 percent. (A growing 8.2 percent identify as non-Christian religious.) This was a boon welcomed by advocates of Ulster’s unification with Ireland—and a nightmare scenario for those preferring continued association with the United Kingdom.

Although these demographic trends were gathering steam in the 1990s, leaders in Britain, Ireland—and now, the United States—were primarily concerned in the Downing Street negotiations with ending nearly a quarter century of violence between the nationalist Irish Republican Army (IRA) and loyalist paramilitaries that was increasingly exhausting all sides.

On the surface, little seemed to be happening to end the stalemate. But much was happening outside public view, starting with the development of a friendly dialogue over the prior two years between British Prime Minister John Major (left in the photo) and Ireland’s Taoiseach (“Chief” or “Leader”), Albert Reynolds (right).

Neither leader possessed an especially strong hold over either their party or the wider electorate. But both believed, as Major told the House of Commons in his Dec.15 address announcing the agreement, that “we had to make it a personal priority both to seek a permanent end to violence and to establish the basis for a comprehensive and lasting political settlement.”

What they produced was “a framework for peace,” a carefully chosen phrase meant to convey mutual understanding—and a set of principles to guide future diplomacy.

All the same, getting the two governments to agree even on this much would have been well-nigh impossible for the prior 25 years. Even events in the last year before the agreement could have upended everything:

*Whatever warm feelings existing between Major and Reynolds were not replicated between the British leader and Bill Clinton. The Prime Minister had been deeply embarrassed when news leaked in the 1992 campaign that the Home Office had investigated whether as an Oxford student, Clinton had applied for UK citizenship as a means of avoiding military service during the Vietnam War.

*Major could barely command a majority in the House of Commons—and it could all come apart if Ulster’s Unionist MPs thought he was making too many concessions to the nationalists.

*Despite continued denials that it would not deal with the IRA unless it gave up its campaign to drive the British out of Ulster, Major’s government had been forced to admit, in late November 1993, that it had been maintaining back-channel talks with the organization for many years.

*October 1993 was marked by the largest loss of life (27 dead) in Northern Ireland in a single month since 1976, including, most notoriously, nine civilians, all Protestant, and one IRA bomber killed in a bombing on Shankill Road, aimed on faulty intelligence at the leadership of the loyalist paramilitary force, the Ulster Defence Association.

Other factors contributed to the Good Friday Agreement concluded in 1998, including talks between Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, and John Hume, the leader of the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party; Irish-American politicians and lawyers who pushed for justice and peace in Ulster; and more active American facilitation of talks among the parties through President Clinton.

But the Downing Street Declaration created an avenue for paramilitary forces to participate in the political process, and momentum for the IRA to declare its first ceasefire nine months later.

(In light of one massive change in the UK in the last decade, I urge you to read Darren Litter's March 2021 blog post on the role of the European Council in paving the way for the Downing Street Declaration. Given the UK and Irish governments' "sensitivity to leaks and failure to reconcile positions," he argues, two summits held by the council in the fall of 1993 enabled Major and Reynolds to discuss obstacles to compromise "away from the lights" of media gathered in Belfast.)

This Day in Theater History (Friel’s Bloody Sunday Play Sparks Critical Donnybrook)

February 23, 1974—The Freedom of the City only lasted nine performances on Broadway before closing at the Alvin Theatre, but not before setting off hackles over how accurately Brian Friel (pictured) had depicted British control of his native Ulster. Reaction to the play where it had been presented previously, in Dublin and Chicago, had already been polarized.

But the Broadway production turned out to be a virtual Rorschach test. The most prominent New York theater critic of the time complained that the playwright had examined the treatment of civil-rights activists to the disadvantage of British authorities, while Friel’s supporters observed that the play itself was being criticized unfairly by people who brought their own naivete and even prejudice into the theater.

The play premiered still relatively early in the Ulster "Troubles," the period from 1969 to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, when 3,000 lives were lost in the six disputed provinces under British control. The passage of four decades confirms that Friel was not only not a simplistic propagandist, but also that British security forces’ responsibility for human-rights violations had been as rigorously whitewashed as he had shown.

Friel’s chief antagonist in the New York critical establishment was Clive Barnes, then at the peak of his power as theater and dance critic at The New York Times. In the last decades of the 20^th century, shows without a star or “brand-name” composer depended for its run on the imprimatur of the Newspaper of Record. Friel’s play, like many others in Barnes’ time at the paper, did not win the critic’s approbation.

But there was excellent reason to question how much Barnes’ negative opinion really derived from aesthetic reasons, for the review of the London-born critic reeked of disbelief that that Her Majesty’s forces could have reacted with anything other than restraint in a region that had been a tinderbox over the last half-dozen years.

Barnes might have, with justice, pointed out that much of any tension in the play was gone from the moment the curtain rose to reveal the corpses of two young men and a middle-aged woman in Guildhall at Derry, the city in which Friel was born.

But Barnes moved in a different direction, claiming that the events subsequently depicted—the British authorities’ ludicrous misreading of the three Catholic victims as terrorists (not as they were-- civil-rights marchers who, under the pressure of tear gas, tumbled by mistake into the mayor’s office) and the subsequent judicial whitewashing—were “luridly fictionalized,” “far-fetched” and “impossible.” In particular, he asked: “Can we really be expected to believe that the British Army would mobilize against these three people 22 tanks, two dozen armored cars, four water cannon and a ‘modicum of air cover’?”

New York City Council President Paul O’Dwyer, born in the Republic of Ireland and by this time a fierce opponent of British policy in Ulster, wrote a letter to the Times saying Barnes defended “The Empire” more than he had reviewed the play. But there was an even more cogent point to make: that Barnes was oblivious to the situation on the ground that Friel, a direct witness in the civil-rights marches, knew firsthand.

Actually, what the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland had already lived through was far from “impossible.” The play is set in 1970, perhaps as acknowledging when Friel first took up the pen to examine the dynamics of a region that, even as a child raised Catholic, had left him in fear for his life. But he worked on the play even more fervently after “Bloody Sunday” in January 1972, when British paratroopers, thwarting a civil-rights march intended for Guildhall Square, opened fire, killing 13 and wounding 13 others.

If Barnes felt that a British inquiry could never be guilty of whitewashing security abuses, he evidently did not pay much attention to the report by Lord John Widgery, which not only claimed the soldiers were justified in firing but also threw suspicion on the deceased (“there is a strong suspicion that some others had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon and that yet others had been closely supporting them”). The “paraffin test,” used in the play to cast aspersions on the deceased, also figured crucially in the report.

It was not until 1999 before British Prime Minister Tony Blair reopened the inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Bloody Sunday, and yet another decade would pass before this latter investigation, this time by Lord Saville, absolved the victims of responsibility for their own deaths and new Prime Minister David Cameron apologized for the affair as “unjustified and unjustifiable."

After encouraging reviews of the play in Chicago, the producers of the drama had decided to make the move to Broadway, despite Friel’s misgivings. The reaction of Barnes, and the show’s quick closing, proved that he had a better sense of events than they did. (It should be said that Barnes’ opinion, though decisive, was hardly unanimous about the drama’s merits. Richard Watts of the New York Post called it “a genuine masterpiece.” That, of course, was before Rupert Murdoch moved the tabloid from its tamely liberal stance to its current conservative tone, including aggressive cheerleading of the official government line in the U.K. concerning Ulster.)

Though the play might be faulted, to some extent, on dramatic grounds, it was not really the nationalist agitprop of the imagination of Barnes and his ilk. Other parties in the drama—not just the British judge tasked with determining the truth of the case, but also a Catholic priest and an American academic spouting “culture of poverty” theories—reduce the three victims to their own preconceived notions. But Friel gives each of the victims a habitation, a name, and idiosyncrasies that render them fully human.

In the 1990s, New York’s estimable Irish Repertory Theatre approached Friel about mounting the play at its Off-Broadway venue. At that point, the playwright was reluctant to grant approval, as he did not want anything to interfere with the delicate negotiations toward resolving the Troubles. In 2012, however, with the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement and more than a decade of progress toward justice and peace in Northern Ireland, the company put on its production with Friel’s permission.

By this time, with plays such as Dancing at Lughnasa to his credit, Friel could be seen as he desired: a playwright with far more than political concerns on his mind. Those with open minds, on both sides of the Atlantic, could also see—not only because of the new findings on Bloody Sunday, but also because of the Guildford Four and John Stalker inquiries—that the rights of civilians had been frequently violated by the military and law enforcement in Ulster. This production ended up being well received critically. (See, for instance, this piece in the Huffington Post by Wilborn Hampton.)

Quote of the Day (Larry Kirwan, on the late Irish Public Intellectual Conor Cruise O’Brien)

“He was a scholar, diplomat, educator, politician, author, memoirist and general agent of change. He may also have been just slightly off his rocker.”—“Black 47” frontman Larry Kirwan, “Cruiser Sank More Than Spoken Words,” The Irish Echo, January 14, 2009

Conor Cruise O’Brien—inevitably nicknamed “The Cruiser”—enjoyed a long and varied career before his death last month at the age of 91. The comment by historian Paul Johnson regarding O’Brien’s biography of Edmund Burke--"a book by the greatest living Irishman on the greatest Irishman who ever lived"—is the kind of blurb that authors would kill for. Unfortunately, the first part of the quote is, I’m sorry to say, not only exaggerated but foolish.

Somewhere along the way, O’Brien segued from an admirable historians’ tendency to look past patriotic myth about Ireland’s revolutionary origins to something closer to revisionism for its own sake. By the end of his career, he had not only become a Unionist Party member but had denounced the Good Friday agreement, the pact that enabled Ulster, at long last, to move out of the shadow of the gunman.

None of us can be right all the time. Particularly when it comes to Northern Ireland, quite a few bright people were wrong over the years. But at least some early critics of Bill Clinton’s decision to advance the peace process there by admitting Gerry Adams later owned up to their mistake, notably the late columnist Michael Kelly, one of the President’s fiercest critics.

What made O’Brien unique was not just that he was wrong nor even that he was consistently wrong, but that he was loudly, unrepentantly wrong.

O’Brien was concerned about the minority rights of Ulster Protestants in a united Ireland—an irony, given that that same group trampled on the rights of Catholics in the province for a half century after the Anglo-Irish Treaty that brought into being the Irish Free State as well as the fateful partition between North and south.

O’Brien himself infringed on the rights of citizens in the Irish Republic when he became Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, pushing to curtail open debate on Irish history and the fate of the North by more aggressively applying the ban on IRA appearances on the airwaves called for in Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act.

Kirwan’s column from the current issue of The Irish Echo rightly takes The Cruiser to task for this enforcement, which not only affected what citizens of the republic could see or hear from the Nationalist side in The Troubles but also limited exposure even to old folk songs that were heavily oriented for the republican cause and against British rule early in Ireland’s history.

Once he got a whiff of the urge to censor, O’Brien even thought of extending it outside the realm of the airwaves to print. The minister told a journalist friend of Irish Press editor Tim Pat Coogan that he was contemplating prosecuting the editor for printing pro-Nationalist letters in his paper.

It should also be mentioned that in 1994, O’Brien called for “more stringent security measures” for dealing with the rebels—ignoring a quarter-century of past experience in which that very approach had been tried by the British government, only to produce excesses that led to more sympathy for the IRA than might have existed otherwise.

A sympathetic obit of O’Brien in the British newspaper The Telegraph refers to the “many ways” in which he remained “profoundly Irish,” including “sometimes excessive conviviality.” Sounds like a euphemism for overindulgence in alcohol, does it not?

Well, if you ask me, O’Brien did far more damage to intellectual debate and the Irish constitution when he was sober than when he was under the influence.