to forestall any effort to reassess the US relationship with Ireland. But that coalition was about to be challenged by a concerted movement of influential figures in the US Senate and the House of Representatives.
Ted Kennedy, like Tip O’Neill, had imbibed Irish nationalism from an early age, through his maternal grandfather, John ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, who had been Mayor of Boston. This included walks through Irish parts of the city where the NINA (No Irish Need Apply) culture that had prevailed excluded the Irish from circles of power in both politics and commerce. The core lesson Honey Fitz imparted to JFK when he ran for election was: ‘He said: “The only thing you have to know about foreign policy is that Trieste belongs to Italy, and all of Ireland will be united and free”, and with those two things, you could get elected in Boston.’8 While that simplistic view may have worked for the ethnic politics of Boston, and indeed coloured Kennedy’s earliest pronouncements on Ireland, Hume disabused him of the validity of such simple views when applied to the contemporary Irish reality.
Yet even before Hume fully embarked on his partnership with US politicians, the establishment of a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland in 1973 had emerged from talks between the Irish and British governments at the Prime Ministerial level (Liam Cosgrave on the Irish side and Ted Heath on the British side). Hume, who had long identified power-sharing as a key element to solving the problem of Northern Ireland’s divided people, immediately and wholly committed himself to the power-sharing arrangement contained in the Executive agreed at the Sunningdale Conference, in Berkshire, England.
The Sunningdale Agreement
In the preliminary talks leading to the Sunningdale Agreement in December 1973, it was clear that any discussion on a settlement in Northern Ireland would involve a recognition in London and Dublin that the conflict could not be defined solely within the Northern Irish State; rather, the Irish and British governments would have a considerable role to play in the creation of any new structure for Northern Ireland. That was an analysis that Unionists largely rejected. Similarly, the Hume/SDLP concept of a ‘New Ireland’ which provided for territorial unity by consent was assailed by the Unionist population on the grounds that a New Ireland was a Trojan Horse for a United Ireland by stealth. ‘Dublin is just a Sunningdale away’ ran a contemporary Unionist slogan. Undeniably, however, the Irish dimension to the Northern Irish crisis needed to be recognised: the Irish and British governments were expected in any authentic reassessment of the Northern Irish State to construct institutions that would reflect all of the strands of Northern Irish political identity.
At Sunningdale, the Irish delegation insisted that everything be recorded in writing. There were six meeting rooms at Sunningdale to accommodate the talks, though in practice a great deal of the negotiations actually took place in the corridors. The British representative was James Allen, who reported directly to the British government, and he was assisted by Philip Woodfield, Deputy Head of the Northern Ireland Office. Their counterparts from Dublin were Declan Costello and Garret FitzGerald, both of whom were immersed in the details. William Whitelaw, Secretary for State for Northern Ireland, put his political career at risk to guarantee Sunningdale’s success and at key moments in the negotiations he would speak at length with John Hume and the SDLP in camera to ensure their views were accommodated. Eventually, on 9 December 1973, a deal was agreed which provided for a power-sharing Executive in Belfast and a North–South Council of Ireland, in the form of a Consultative Assembly made up of thirty members from the Northern Ireland Assembly and thirty members from Dáil Éireann.
The Guarantee
A recurring bugbear for Hume and other Constitutional Nationalists was London’s guarantee to Unionists that no constitutional change would ever occur without their consent. That guarantee had the appearance of properly taking account of Unionists’ constitutional rights. However, in doing so it took absolutely no account of Nationalists’ legislative rights. Hume even made the blunt argument that such an unspoken guarantee to Unionists had been the cornerstone of the intransigent one-party government that ran Northern Ireland for sixty years and was the root cause of the Troubles.9 The fact that Britain had given a legislative guarantee of no constitutional change to Unionists strengthened their hand immensely. In negotiations, not just about constitutional change, but on any agenda for reform, it served Unionists to simply retreat to their constitutional guarantee position, which tended to be enough to foil any initiative for change. Therefore Hume and others railed against it and attempted to rethink and reconfigure the political landscape outside it, based on the fact that Northern Ireland was an artificial jurisdiction from its foundation and that the consent of all its people was never sought. For as long as the guarantee obtained in Northern Ireland existed, democracy could only exist in a vitiated form.
Sunningdale was a fundamental break with London’s position that no new political structures were required to achieve stability for Northern Ireland. Today the agreement reads as both a reasonable and a prescient document. For example, both the Irish and British governments accept (in paragraph five) that there could be no change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland without the consent of a majority. This was an unprecedented recognition for the Irish government. At the same time, the British prime minister signed up to a clause providing that ‘if in the future the majority of the people of Northern Ireland should indicate a wish to become part of a united Ireland, the British Government would support that wish’; and (in paragraph thirteen) that it ‘was broadly accepted that the two parts of Ireland are to a considerable extent inter-dependent in the whole field of law and order’.10
In 1973, the slightest hint of a United Ireland in the future and the acknowledgement of an existing symbiotic relationship between Ireland North and South seemed to enrage Unionism. The structure of the Council of Ireland, designed to reflect the interdependence of the two states in Ireland, became a source of contempt for hardline Unionism. Conor Cruise O’Brien, then Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, argued that the Council of Ireland was asking Unionism to concede too much, while Republicans recoiled from the Council of Ireland because they saw it as an implicitly partitionist institution.
Besides the philosophical misgivings of both the nationalist right-wing and the Unionist right-wing, the practical task of sustaining Sunningdale’s institutions represented an enormous undertaking. Dermot Nally, a senior official of the Irish government, estimated at the time that sustaining the Council of Ireland alone would require 2,000 civil servants to maximise its functions. Sunningdale required for its success a huge degree of good will and determined commitment.
Sunningdale
The civil rights protests had been a necessary step, but only a first step, toward recasting politics in Northern Ireland. Hume’s attempts to awaken the conscience of Stormont were met by an almost preternatural unwillingness. With the signing of the Sunningdale Agreement, however, Hume realised that Northern Ireland now had a reasonable framework within which the diverse facets of Northern identity could be recognised. The Sunningdale Executive contained within it the strands – centrist Nationalist and Unionist parties in the North, along with Southern Irish and British participation – that together would form the basis for a workable political process in Northern Ireland provided that Britain and Ireland would stand by the newly minted Executive.
However, it was going to take enormous political will to prop up the Sunningdale arrangements and within weeks of the signing of the Agreement signs of serious tension were already evident. In a December 1973 report to the Department of Foreign Affairs Headquarters, Seán Donlon, then head of Northern Irish policy for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, expressed doubt that Sunningdale could last because Faulkner had lost too much Unionist support. Getting on the ground and exercising ‘shoe-leather diplomacy’, Donlon had spoken to people who held the keys of Orange Halls in Newry, Dungannon and Omagh and the isolation of the Executive was becoming clear to him.
The murder by the Provisional IRA of Thomas Niedermayer, general manager in Northern Ireland of the German company, Grundig, and honorary consul for West Germany, was devastating. Niedermayer was murdered on 27 December 1973 (subsequently his wife and both his daughters committed suicide), and his abduction and murder happened against the backdrop of Hume, as Minister for Commerce in the Sunningdale Executive, attempting to promote Northern Ireland as a location for foreign investment by multinationals. In a broader context, it also occurred