The Lessons of Northern Ireland for Contemporary Counterterrorism and Conflict Resolution Policy

Summary

Podcast Summary:

The Lessons of Northern Ireland for Contemporary Counterterrorism and Conflict Resolution Policy

Podcast: LSE: Public lectures and events
Date: May 23, 2011
Host: Professor Michael Cox and LSE Film and Audio Team
Panel: Lord David Trimble, Martin Mansergh, Jonathan Powell, Professor Richard English

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Overview

This wide-ranging roundtable explores what—if anything—the peace process in Northern Ireland can teach contemporary policymakers wrestling with terrorism, intractable conflict, and peacebuilding around the world. Drawing on personal experiences and deep academic expertise, the panel interrogates if lessons can be extracted from Northern Ireland’s history; discusses structural, political, and psychological elements that enabled compromise; and parallels and limitations in applying these insights to peace efforts elsewhere.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. Are There "Lessons" from Northern Ireland?

• Lord David Trimble (04:50):
  Challenges the very concept of simple "lessons," warning against assuming what worked in Northern Ireland can be exported wholesale. Context and careful attention to local detail are crucial.
  • Quote: “Each situation has to be looked at in its own merits. And to approach the situation through the prism of some other case is to result in not giving the situation you’re looking at the attention it deserves...” (06:40)

2. Structure, Preconditions, and the Consent Principle

• The Northern Ireland process had a carefully designed structure, shaped by reflection on past failures.
• Consent Principle: No solution imposed; it must be accepted by the people of Northern Ireland.
• Preconditions: Entry into negotiations required a real cessation of violence and a commitment to exclusively peaceful, democratic means.
• The implementation phase took years, with setbacks and key struggles remaining after the Good Friday Agreement.

3. Talking to Terrorists—When and How?

• Nuanced discussion differentiates between intelligence-gathering, engagement, and formal negotiations.
• The panel agrees that while direct negotiation with violent groups is delicate and must be highly conditioned, some form of engagement is typically necessary.
• The IRA were not included in talks until they met strict criteria, unlike the failed Whitelaw-IRA attempt in 1972.

4. Compromise vs. Victory: Preconditions for Peace

• Trimble (16:00):
  • Quote: “When we got to Sunningdale Agreement, the problem … was … a significant number … still thought in terms of a victory over the other. They weren’t thinking in terms of a compromise. When we got to 1998, most people were prepared to accept a compromise and even the IRA accepted the compromise.”
• Peace only possible once sides abandon dreams of total victory and accept coexistence.

5. Counterterrorism and Conflict Resolution: Not the Same

• Martin Mansergh (17:31):
  • Warns that overzealous security responses can inflame conflict ("Bloody Sunday," hunger strikes, etc.).
  • Argues for a balanced mix: “Democratic conflict resolution, underpinned by a firm but not excessive security policy, is by far the most effective way of dealing with ... a terrorist problem.” (29:07)
  • Emphasizes dialogue’s risks and the need for strategic timing to prevent granting groups premature legitimacy.

6. "Ten Lessons" from Northern Ireland (Jonathan Powell, 30:03)

Powell offers a rapid-fire list of potential "lessons":

1. Security Pressure is Vital: But must be combined with addressing grievances and offering a political way out.
2. Eventually, You Talk to Terrorists: Historical pattern across conflicts.
3. Channel vs. Negotiation: Secret channels for communication are distinct from open negotiation.
4. Shared Realization of Military Stalemate: Only when both sides believe they cannot win militarily do negotiations bear fruit.
5. No Sanctuaries: Success hinged on cross-border security cooperation.
6. Political Leadership Needed: Across all sides, to take risks and expend capital for peace.
7. Process Matters: A functioning process maintains hope and direction—without it, violence fills the vacuum.
   • Quote from Shimon Peres: “The good news is there’s light at the end of the tunnel. The bad news is there’s no tunnel.” (36:08)
8. Negotiating with Unified Actors: Better to make peace once, not multiple times with splintered groups (e.g., Fatah and Hamas analogy).
9. Breakthrough Is Not the End: Implementation is often longer and harder.
10. No Intractable Conflicts: Patience and leadership can break seemingly hopeless deadlocks.

7. Hard Realities: No Reconciliation, and the Myth of Terrorism's "Success"

• Richard English (42:43):
  • Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided, sectarian society; violence ended due to political calculation, not genuine reconciliation.
  • Myths challenged:
    • Most citizens never supported violence—even at its political peak.
    • Terrorism rarely achieves maximalist goals (citing statistics from Audrey Cronin).
• Quote: “None of the terrorist organizations in the Northern Ireland conflict ended ... on the basis of having got what they were killing people for.” (48:39)

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• Trimble: “Without a clear structure and … clear objectives … then, you know ... But the other thing … Oh, there is perhaps one lesson ... You’re only going to get somewhere [in negotiations] where people are prepared to accept the existence of the other and to embrace … compromise.” (16:00)
• Mansergh: “…For about 20 years, the model was try and bring together into the center the constitutional more moderate parties, reach an agreement and then ... justify extremely tough security measures to deal with anyone who still carries on violence ... that model did not produce results.” (22:45)
• Powell: “There is no example in the world of a terrorist conflict being policed out ... if there is in the end a political issue, you’ll have to find a political solution to it.” (30:26)
• English: “No one comes out of the Northern Ireland conflict looking good. No one. Okay. It’s an ugly, ugly specimen. That’s an important point to remember when we look at these conflicts.” (48:39)

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Audience Q&A Highlights

Voter Apathy and Political Change (52:39)

• High abstention rates seen as both a sign of disillusionment and of politics finally becoming "boring"—a marked improvement from violent times.

Was All Violence Equally Wrong? (53:09)

• Panel affirms need for neutral language: condemning all communities’ violence equally.
• Trimble: “Sinn Fein … only started to get serious votes when it distanced itself from violence. Violence didn’t get them into the Assembly. Votes did.” (58:52)
• English: “Political murder is political murder and should be condemned … I would not want to single out one side.” (56:53)

Did Terrorism “Work”? (54:23)

• Panel makes clear: While former militants now hold power, their maximalist goals were not achieved—moderation and compromise won out.

The Role of Third Parties and Mediators (60:25)

• Mixed views on mediators. George Mitchell was credited for fairness and skill; the Clinton and Bush administrations had different styles—Clinton persuasive, Bush willing to pressure.
• Three types described:
  1. Weak facilitator (Mitchell’s role),
  2. Strong facilitator (governments able to affect events),
  3. Guarantor (e.g., monitoring commissions).

Lessons for Other Conflicts—Middle East, Sri Lanka, ETA/Basque (71:01, 72:01)

• Process should avoid preconditions that make dialogue impossible.
• Direct analogies with ETA/Basque and Middle East crises are limited. Implementation and endgame hurdles differ, but engagement with all factions and parties is key.

Economics and Extremism (83:42)

• Economic deprivation may play a role in sustaining support for violence in Northern Ireland—a link less clear-cut internationally.
• “Your average terrorist internationally is not from the worst off sections ... [but] there was a stronger connection in Northern Ireland.” (85:15)

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Tone and Reflections

• Sober, frank, and sometimes wry. The panel’s tone alternates between the practical (what worked, what failed) and the philosophical (complexities of violence, morality, legitimacy).
• Emphasizes humility (“no ready formulas”), the need for patience, genuine dialogue, and allowing for local particularity.

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Timestamps of Major Segments

• 00:00–04:36: Introduction and overview by Michael Cox.
• 04:50–17:15: Lord David Trimble—Cautions on exporting lessons; structure of peace process; importance of compromise; retrospective analysis.
• 17:31–30:00: Martin Mansergh—Security vs. political strategy; the risk and power of dialogue and inclusion; need for balanced counterterrorism; three phases of the process.
• 30:03–42:34: Jonathan Powell—Ten lessons distilled; historical antecedents; leadership; implementation challenges; impact of unified negotiating partners.
• 42:43–52:13: Professor Richard English—Challenges myths; the limits of reconciliation; terrorism’s limited efficacy; moral complexities.
• 52:13–88:05: Audience Q&A—Voter engagement, legitimacy, mediators, global parallels, current threats, economic roots.

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Conclusion

The panel broadly agrees that while Northern Ireland’s experience cannot be mapped directly onto other contemporary conflicts, it offers key insights: successful peace depends on structure, willingness to abandon maximalist narratives, bold political leadership, and the often unglamorous, protracted grind of implementation. Terrorism rarely "works" in achieving original aims, and democratic compromise backed by robust—but not excessive—security is seen as the hardest, but surest path forward.

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For Further Reading:

• Powell, J. Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland
• English, R. Armed Struggle; Irish Freedom; Terrorism: How to Respond
• Cronin, A.K. How Terrorism Ends

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[Note: Advertisements, introductions, and closing remarks have been omitted. Timestamps refer to the audio offset provided in the transcript.]

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to this round table organized by LSE Ideas here at the London School of Economics, supported by the Air Innue Trust Fund and the LSE Annual Fund, for which we give very great thanks. The topic tonight, as you can see, is the lessons of Northern Ireland for contemporary counterterrorism policy. I'd also add to that conflict resolution, peace building. It's a subject of much interest, though sometimes the broader lessons of what happened in Northern Ireland and is still happening in Northern Ireland often seem to be unique sui generis. And one of the things we're going to try and tease out tonight is whether or not there are lessons from Northern Ireland, whether or not there are consequences of Northern Ireland which have broader lessons for conflicts and troubles in other parts of the world. Maybe ask the question. Is there just one Irish question? Or maybe several? Is it just only about Ireland? That's the broad theme of tonight's roundtable. Let me first introduce myself. My name is Professor Michael Cox. My interest in Northern Ireland is both personal and intellectual and professional in it's personal because I got married there. It's personal because all my four children were born there. And it's professional because I taught at Queen's University Belfast between 1972 and 1994 before moving on to Wales, before moving here. So this is not just for me an academic issue. It's something very personal and something which I've been involved with many others, of course, over my life. Let me introduce the more important people for tonight, the speakers. The first speaker will be Lord David Trimble, a key player in the Northern Ireland peace process. An academic lawyer at Queen's University Belfast. We coincided. And later leader of the Unionist Party. On 1st of July 1998, he was elected First Minister of Northern Ireland in the new Northern Ireland assembly. And in October 1998, in recognition for the work he had done with others, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. That's with John Hume. For their efforts combined to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland. The Nobel Institute noted at the time, words worth remembering that as the leader of one of the traditional parties in Northern Ireland, David Trimble showed great political courage when at a critical stage of the process he advocated solutions which led finally to. To the Belfast Good Friday peace Agreement. Martin Manzer on the far left there, Dublin and later Oxford. Educated, an historian, son of an historian, as I'm sure he's often reminded Nicholas Manza. And a policymaker as well, with long policy interest in Northern Ireland and another key player in making the peace process possible. And Martin has Written on this, the legacy of history for making peace in Ireland. He'll be our second speaker. The third speaker here, if you could wave, is Jonathan Powell, Foreign Office, but then went on to become Chief of staff to Tony Blair after Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997 and re engaged in the Northern Ireland peace process. And Jonathan in that role played a key part again, one of the other key players which led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, on which he has written, of course, great hatred, Little Room, Making Peace in Northern Ireland, his role in part in that peace process. And last but by no means least, my old friend, not too old, as you may notice here, Professor Richard English. We were good colleagues and friends at Queen's in the Department of Politics in the old days. Richard remained there until, I think this year, beginning of last year. He's now at St. Andrews, foremost historian of Ireland. There's two great books, Armed Struggle, which I think is now regarded clearly as one of the definitive. It is the definitive history in the IRA and a wonderful book on Irish nationalism called Irish Freedom. I'm sure you'll appreciate agree with me. We've got a great panel tonight. I wonder if we can give them a nice warm welcome and.

[B]

Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed.

[A]

And David, I think we'll begin with you if you want to come up here and then we'll move on. Thanks very much, David.

[B]

Thank you. I want to actually start by challenging the concept of lessons. The title of this is Lessons of Northern Ireland. And I think one of the key points which I would urge on anyone who's looking at the situation in Northern Ireland is not to go there looking for simple lessons, not look for something. They did that there, so that worked. So we'll do this here. I think that's not the way to approach the situation. Now. I'm not dissuading people from studying the situation in Northern Ireland or indeed situations elsewhere. Indeed, I think the more of these situations people study, the better. In the run up to the negotiations beginning, the serious negotiations beginning in Northern Ireland, a number of us were invited out by the South Africans who gave us a detailed exposition of their experience. I found it fascinating. I went there actually hoping to get some guidance as to how we might conduct negotiations in the event. We just borrowed one thing from the South Africans. It was the concept of sufficient consensus, although we defined it differently to the way they had defined it. All the other bits of detail they told us about their negotiating process, very interesting, but turned out not to be relevant for our experience. But nonetheless, I find the example of being there and talking to people involved in their process, you know, very interesting. Maybe giving one some insights into how things might move, but recognizing it was a different situation to ours. Similarly, someone coming, dealing with another situation elsewhere might very well look at ours, might very well get some insights. But each situation has to be looked at in its own merits. And to approach the situation through the prism of some other case is to result in not giving the situation you're looking at the attention it deserves and not treating its own circumstances with the weight that it deserves, that the particular circumstances of the situation you're looking at must be your starting point at all times. So Northern Ireland, one of the things we did, as everybody famously knows, we ended up talking to terrorists and indeed ended up including former terrorists in the administration. So that's one of the things, obviously, one has to look at here. The term talk is used too loosely. There are various forms of communication. Any government will have to dealing with a terrorist problem will want to know what motivates the terrorists and what the terrorists are thinking and doing. You can't get that information without there being some communication somewhere along the line. But that's a very different thing from a government itself engaging with persons involved in violence. And it's a very different thing from engaging with persons involved in violence to then negotiating with them. And that, I think, is something a government should do very, very cautiously. We had in 1972, shortly after direct rule was imposed, William Whitelaw was the first Secretary of State. He responded too positively to a suggestion that he should talk to the ira and did actually reach out to the IRA and persuaded them to have a ceasefire, which after a few days, an IRA delegation was flown over here to London and they ended up down in Cheyne Walk for talks, which in the end got nowhere. The IRA merely arrived to state its demands, basically to give the British government an ultimatum, expecting the British government to respond to it, and walked out saying, oh, that it was clear that the British government didn't. Were not ready for negotiations. And so they went back to intensify the violence. Those that form of engagement was clearly a mistake. You might note with interest that the IRA delegation in 1972 that was flown over included one Martin McGinnis and one Jerry Adams. But that's just a small detail, by the way. So that form of interaction with terrorist was a mistake. The interaction we had with them was one that was highly conditioned, highly conditioned as to the circumstances in which there would be the interaction and highly conditioned into when they would be allowed into talks, and indeed, highly conditioned as to the outcome of the talks. And those conditions were first laid down clearly in what's called the Downing street declaration of December 1993. And although a lot of the language of the Downing Street Declaration was one designed to make nationalists feel comfortable reading it, when you got down into it and looked at what was there, you saw that clearly enshrined within that was what we call the consent principle, that, in other words, no solution is going to be imposed on Northern Ireland. It's a matter for the people of Northern Ireland to decide. There was also clear requirements in that for a commitment to exclusively peaceful and democratic means. In other words, there had to be a secession of violence, not temporary one, but a permanent ending of violence and a commitment to the democratic process and a willingness to accept the outcome of a negotiation. That's all there in the Downing Street Declaration. And there's quite a bit when you think about that requirement to be committed to exclusively democratic means, and also the acceptance that at the end of the day, it's for the people of Northern Ireland to decide for them what they want in that situation. The structure of the talks, which had been laid down before the Downing Street Declaration in an earlier series of talks, also to some extent preconditioned the outcome of it. At the end of the day, most people who went into those talks had a fairly good idea what were the parameters of the outcome. Now, the details are hugely significant, very much. And most of the problems in terms of getting a successful outcome of the talks did hinge on points of detail, not the general basic thrust of what I've mentioned here so far. Although do please bear in mind that when we reach the outcome of those talks on the afternoon of Good Friday in 1998, people keep talking about signing up to the agreement. Nobody actually signed up to the agreement because our process involved a vote. And there was a vote cast in the chamber, and there were rules as to determining whether there was sufficient consensus or the voting was significant. And all the parties, bar one, voted in favor of the agreement. The party that didn't vote for the agreement was Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein abstained. And most of the problems we had post the agreement in terms of implementation were actually a struggle to get Sinn Fein to accept the agreement and to accept the obligations resting on it and on the Republican movement in the agreement. Now, I don't intend to track through all the detail of that. We have told. I was only had 20 minutes, and that's scarcely enough to even scratch the surface on that subject. But we had considerable difficulties post agreement in getting the Republicans to actually accept the requirement of being committed to exclusively peaceful and democratic means, which involved also getting rid of all the criminality that was associated with the Republican movement. And it wasn't really until around about 2005, 2007 that the Republican movement actually got to the point that was, in a sense, set out in the agreement of 1998. Now, if you want to study, look for some lessons from Northern Ireland or some guidance from Northern Ireland. Going through the detail of that is actually useful. You learn more from failures than you do from successes. And there was an element of failure in terms of the handling of the process from 1999, 2000 through to 0607. Looking at why the process ran into difficulties and why it took a slightly different course is where I think a lot of useful guidance can begin. Now, I'm not going to summarize what I think went wrong on that occasion because that's going to get A too detailed and B, might tend to fracture slightly the very good relationship that currently exists amongst the Federalists. And so I don't want to get too much into that. But the result of the day, when we got to 0708, the Republicans had finally committed themselves to a purely peaceful path. They got rid of their weapons, insofar as one can tell, they got rid of their weapons and they were moving decisively towards accepting the legal system and the police, which they have done. And we now have a situation where we've got local institutions in operation in Northern Ireland and they're. Well, I was going to say that they're working successfully. I think. Drop out the last word. They are working not terribly successfully, not terribly efficiently, but that's an awful lot better than what went before. And most people look forward to the future Northern Ireland with confidence. There are still what they call dissident Republicans. There's still wrinkles in the situation. There will be for some time. The Republican ideology, which most of the mainstream Republicans have now ditched, is still believed in by the handful of people who are referred to as dissident Republicans and who say to Adams and McGuinness, well, we're only doing what you did 20, 30 years ago. And the fact that Adams and McGinnis can't turn around to, or won't turn around to them say, yes, but we now realize that what we did was wrong is perhaps a limiting factor on that. But nobody thinks that the process is going to be undermined as a result of it. Now what the lessons are from what I've said, I don't know because I don't feel one should be drawing lessons in that crude sense. Whether there's been any enlightenment in terms of what I've said, I'm not sure either. But I do emphasize, and I want just to conclude on this, as I said earlier, the process we were in was not just a free for all. It was not just a matter of anybody doing what they wanted at the time. There was a structure and the structure was crucial to the outcome. And that structure didn't come from nowhere. It came, I think, from governments reflecting on the mistakes that were made earlier and consequently laying down a clearer structure and what the appropriate structure would be for other talks. Processes are something you have to consider in the light of the circumstances there. But I think that without a clear structure and without clear objectives being spelled out in a way that. And defensible objectives, the right to it in a sense that the right objectives been clearly set out for people, then, you know. But the other thing. Oh, there is perhaps one lesson and it is this actually, again, it's reflecting on the failure of the earlier attempts in the Sunningdale Agreement and the Anglo Irish Agreement and all the rest were compared to success later. And bear in mind that 25 years spans the gap between the first Sunningdale agreement and the Belfast Agreement. When you got to Sunningdale Agreement, the problem with it was, I won't go into. There's problems about the detail of that, but leaving that to one side, the underlying problem was in 1973, probably most, a very significant number of those involved on the national side and certainly a significant those involved on the Unionist side still thought in terms of a victory over the other. They weren't thinking in terms of a compromise. When we got to 1998, most people were prepared to accept a compromise and even the IRA accepted the compromise. That's the one point I would underline. If you have a situation where people are still trying to achieve outright victory, and if the person seeking outright victory have the capacity then or sufficient a number to derail the process, then you're not going to get anywhere. You're only going to get somewhere where people are prepared to accept the existence of the other and to embrace, no matter how reluctantly the idea of compromise.

[A]

We will of course move into questions and answers and David will pick up some of those points as well, some of yours. Martin. Martin Manza. Martin, please.

[C]

Thank you. Great pleasure to be in the LSE for the first time and indeed just to Sample your local bookshop briefly. But during the conference period, I agree with what David has to say about lessons between one situation and the other. But a successful peace process is a good example and an inspiration to other attempts to resolve conflicts in their own way in other parts of the world and certainly, for example, the Basque country. Parties in the Basque country were inspired by the North Northern Ireland peace process. And I suppose there hasn't been a lot of good news coming out of Ireland for the last couple of years, but the completion of a full assembly term, elections which look as if they will lead to another full assembly term, and the first visit last week in a hundred years to what is now the Republic by a British monarch. They do represent a consolidation of what has been achieved by the peace process. And a lot of people expressed relief that we had the economists off the airwaves and the historians. The historians came back at least and we had unremitting, apart from unfortunately the death of Garrett Fitzgerald, unremitting good news last week as opposed to bad ones. I'm delighted to share this platform both with David Trimble and Jonathan Powell. I think David Trimble displayed tremendous courage, as did John Hume, but in making the agreement possible. And I would like to say that with the benefit of hindsight, in other words, where we are today. He did deserve his share in the Nobel Peace Prize. And I'm equally delighted to share a platform with Jonathan Powell who was absolutely critical. He went to all sorts of places that his predecessors wouldn't have gone and he did an awful lot of the spade work for Tony Blair and he's written a book about it. I would make the point that counterterrorism and conflict are a resolution, while clearly related, are not the same thing. Terrorism was a word used sparingly, if at all, by many Irish governments over the quarter of a century of conflict. Not because it implied a strong rejection of the IRA that was their but it could have signaled a narrow view of the solutions. More anti terrorism laws, security force personnel, more ruthless tactics up to and beyond the rule of law. Why? Clearly security measures and a viable security policy is necessary to prevent the spread of conflict. It can also help prolong it by creating new landmark causes such as Bloody Sunday, the hunger strikes, shoot to kill collusion. The legacy of all of which has been difficult to clear up even today. And I mean in fairness, I haven't seen the news today about the Rosemary Nelson inquiry outcome. But the Bloody Sunday inquiry at vast cost and over many years did finally achieve its objective to the satisfaction of most Reasonable people. And I suppose one of the problems in Northern Ireland, and it is a problem, for example in the Middle east as well, is, is how do you check a revolutionary minority inside an ethno religious group without alienating the moderate majority within that group and without creating public sympathy for extremists. And that's a quotation from History island about the Fenian invasion of Canada in the 1860s, but it applies today. And I suppose the whole purpose of the peace process was to shift from trying to inflict defeat on a section of the population to be isolated, to trying to find a new and fair far reaching accommodation for the many legitimate interests. For a long time, for about 20 years, the model was try and bring together into the center the constitutional more moderate parties, reach an agreement and then use that agreement to justify extremely tough security measures to deal with anyone who still carries on violence after that. Now, that model did not produce results. And in the late 80s we started to explore going about it the other way, which was to try and create an inclusive process by reaching out first of all by very tentative discussions to see was there a way that one could build political ideological bridges which would enable them to embrace a purely political core as opposed to a combined political and paramilitary one. And the Anglo Irish Agreement was, if you like, the last of the ones that was excluding out excluded Unionists, but it also excluded Sinn Fein. But the fear, real fear of Dr. Fitzgerald, who died yesterday and who was one of our great political figures, was that it was important at all costs to prevent Sinn Fein winning nationalist electoral majority, electoral support that might enable it to legitimate arms struggle. And I suppose that would be the justification for the hurt that went against his instincts that was inflicted on the unionist community. Now, I wouldn't certainly take. This is a matter that's been much debated over the past few years whether it's always good to talk and always good talk. I think there are some dangers. For a long time it was authorized orthodoxy in Ireland that you shouldn't do this. It was a stronger orthodoxy actually than it was in Britain. And certainly if you're not careful about the timing, you will give people the impression that they're winning and that this will in fact redouble your problems. So the problem is to identify when such dialogue might genuinely be the start of a search for a way out and for a credible political alternative. And I suppose there were kind of three strands to dialogue. There was an IRA British government dialogue that wasn't known about until late 93. There was also efforts over the 2030 years, sort of mediators, disinterested parties. You have that in many conflicts. But what was also important was dialogue with the other elements of the much wider nationalist community, north and south. One of the advantages in the Northern Ireland situation, which is lacking in say, the Basque conflict, Sri Lanka and indeed Palestine, is that the British government was always willing from the 1920s to accept the legitimacy of a united Ireland if brought about by agreement and consent, not imposed against the will of a unionist majority. Whereas I think in some of those other situations the constitutional aim is impossible. And creative use was made of the concept of self determination, which obviously in a long partition country has to be exercised concurrently. I don't really have time to go into some of the problems and difficulties, but basically there are three stages of the process. The first stage was to try and bring violence to an end, which would then enable negotiation to take place. And the second phase, if you like, was the negotiation of an agreement. And the third phase, which took at least 10 or 11 years, was actually implementing the agreement. Now, very often, if you look at peace processes in other parts of the world, you've difficulty getting violence stopped. If you get violence stopped, no negotiation takes place, so then it's apt to resume. Or alternatively, you stop the violence, you have the agreement negotiated, but it proves impossible to implement the agreement. There was nothing inevitable about any of this, but we did manage, with some considerable setbacks along the way, we did manage to negotiate all those three hurdles. There is of course, a problem of dissidents. The question is, do small groups of dissidents, do they merit the same type of treatment as you do to what one might call a more mainstream paramilitary organization? I'm not certain, frankly, that there is a lot of point in talking about that. To conclude, democratic conflict resolution, underpinned by a firm but not excessive security policy, is by far the most effective way of dealing with, with a terrorist problem. And if you can mobilize the community, I mean, for example, when you had very recently the shooting dead of Constable Ronan Kerr, the entire community, including some very strong nationalist organizations, made clear their disgust with this. And that has also proved very effective in, in the Basque country, where hopefully terrorism there is coming to an end. Thank you.

[A]

Thanks very much, Martin. And now we move on to Jonathan Powell.

[D]

Jonathan, thank you. O2 will be extremely brief. Let me start by saying what we all agree, which is that Northern Ireland is sui generous. The conflict was sui generis, the solution was sui generis. There is no Northern Ireland model to be exported anywhere else. However, it does seem to me that there is something to be learned from the successes and failures we had in Northern Ireland. And it is worth people involved in conflicts elsewhere looking at Northern Ireland to see what they can learn from those successes and those failures. If nothing else, it enables them to make their own mistakes as opposed to repeating ours. I'm going to just rattle through 10 very quickly, 10 lessons that I think Northern Ireland, you can draw from Northern Ireland, which may or may not apply to some other conflicts. And I will be specific about which conflicts I think they might apply to. Starting with counterinsurgency. The American military have just re done their handbook on counterinsurgency. They've adapted it from a straight military approach to a wider approach. I personally think it actually needs to go wider even than it does. Hugh Orwood, who was the Chief Constable in Northern Ireland and was participating with us today, said about three or four years ago that there is no example in the world of a terrorist conflict being policed out. That if there is in the end a political issue, you'll have to find a political solution to it. And I think that does really should people who are drawing up counterinsurgency strategies need to dwell on that. There seem to me to be three elements that we had in Northern Ireland and three elements that would work elsewhere. The first is clearly the security pressure down. You need to have security pressure down. If not the insurgents you're dealing with will not give up. They will not go away unless their life is uncomfortable. They will carry on until they can win. But equally, unless you address what Mao called the water they swim in, the grievances that they have that make up their cause. In the case of Northern Ireland, it was housing equality in housing, equality in employment, and so on. Unless you address those causes, you won't find a way of removing the support from the community for that insurgent group. And lastly, and most importantly, you need to offer a political way out. In other words, if you simply apply pressure, you will simply consolidate the group you're trying to fight. You won't actually end that group unless you think you can kill each and every member of it if you just give it a political way out. They won't take that political way out because they're perfectly comfortable doing what they're doing. So you have to have the pressure down and a political way out. That's certainly what we had in Northern Ireland in the end. And I think, for example, in Afghanistan, if you think about it, that's likely to be the only way out. In Afghanistan, you have to maintain security pressure you have to address the water they swim in by dealing with the grievances. But you also need to offer a political way out, and that means talking to the Taliban, at least in my view. The second lesson I would try and draw is that we have always in the past said that we will never talk with terrorists. We've always said that we would not negotiate with evil, in the words of President George W. Bush, that we would defeat it. And yet, if you look at our history, we said that about Menachem Begin and Irgun in Israel, Palestine as it was then. We said the same about Kenyasha and the MAU MAU, and we said the same about Archbishop Macarius. And yet in all three cases, not only do we deal with them, we treated them as statesmen later on. More recently, we've done the same with the PLO and the ira. So I think there's no reason to assume that we won't be doing exactly the same with Hamas, with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Because we see them as terrorists now does not mean to say we will not necessarily be talking to them or dealing with them at a later date. My third lesson is that, as David says, it's absolutely right to distinguish between establishing a channel and negotiating. The British government had a secret channel to the IRA from 1973 right through to 1993. It was only occasionally used, but it was there and open and usable when they wanted to, for example, in the hunger strike in 1980 or in the ceasefire in 1974. That is different from actually negotiating. And it seems to me that what Northern Ireland suggests to me, as there are some conditions that need to be there, some necessary conditions if you're going to be successful at negotiating. Perhaps the most important of those is that both sides accept that they can't win militarily. In the case of Northern Ireland, in About early to mid-1980s, the British army realized that while they could contain the IRA indefinitely, they could keep security at an acceptable level indefinitely. They were not going to be able to wipe it out, to make it go away altogether by military means. The IRA came to a conclusion somewhat later. I'm not clear exactly when we were discussing that today, late 80s, very early 90s, it was a generational change, in part. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who joined the movement quite young, were sort of 30s, 40s by then. They could see their young people, their cousins, nephews, nieces, so on, being arrested, getting shot. And the question arises, do they think they could win militarily? Could they drive the Brits out militarily. They realized they couldn't do that. They would never be defeated, they'd never be wiped out by the British, but they weren't going to win militarily. And they started reaching out, looking for a political solution. So it seems to me that is a precondition for successful negotiations when it doesn't happen. As in, for example, Sri Lanka, where after the ceasefire, both sides thought they could win militarily. The Tamil Tigers and the Underprabrakhan and the Sri Lankan government. Both sides went back to war because they thought they could win. It wasn't sufficient consensus to actually get a proper negotiation going. A further condition, it seems to me, is the need to have no sanctuary, to have no place that the terrorists can easily flee to. In Northern Ireland, one of the conditions of success was security cooperation with the government of the Republic of Ireland, being able to ensure the IRA could not just cross the border and come back again and fight. But you see exactly the same thing. For example, in Spain, the Spanish government and the security forces had their success with ETA when they could no longer flee the border to France with impunity. When the French police started cooperating really properly, which has really been since President Sarkozy came into office, that's when they've had their biggest military success. The same is true with the FARC in Colombia. It's when Venezuela cooperates and they don't have safe sanctuary, you can make progress. I gave them further than that. Of course, in the case of Northern Ireland, it's because we were able to work so closely with the Irish government. And it did really enter a new plane after 1997 with Bertie O'Hearn and Tony Blair. There'd been cooperation before, but really strong cooperation for the 10 years they were both in government thereafter made a huge difference. I think there's a need for political leadership as a sufficient consensus if you're going to make progress in these sort of negotiations. And we were actually blessed in Northern Ireland with remarkable political leadership. I think David Trimble not only deserved his Nobel Peace Prize, he deserves something more. If there was a sort of extra star on top of it for actually putting at risk his political party and his own political career to get to peace. I think it was a remarkable thing to do. I think Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness deserve credit for leading their movement somewhere. It never had any intention of going in a crab like way over a long period of time. It was real political leadership of a remarkable kind that put their lives at risk as well as Everything else, I think Bercia Hearn and Tony Blair likewise. If they hadn't had that drive, if they hadn't used the political momentum of their two election victories, Tony Blair had a massive majority in 97, which he put to work to actually achieve peace in Northern Ireland. If he hadn't spent his political capital on that, if he hadn't had that political victory, it would have been very hard to get to a success. In his book, he accuses me of saying he had a messiah complex. It was Molem said to me that he thought he was effing Jesus, but if he hadn't thought he was effing Jesus, he would have had some trouble getting to the success that he had, because he believed that could be a solution in a way that previous prime ministers hadn't and he believed he could get there. There's a question in my mind whether without that political leadership, you can get to successful conflict resolution negotiations elsewhere. If you look at the Middle east at the moment, the absence of political leadership on both sides of the divide make it very hard to believe you will actually succeed. There's an interesting additional question about whether it's easier to make peace between the extremes, whether it's better to be able to have the DUP in Sinn Fein so no one can outflank them, or better. As we started in Northern Ireland, to try and work with a moderate centre, with the SDLP and the uup, is it always going to be the extremes that lead you to peace, or is there a way of getting there from the centre? Another lesson that I conclude is that you do need to have a process. When I went back over the files, the government allowed me to go back over the number 10 files from 1997 to 2007. When I was writing my book, there was one thing above all else that jumped out of the pages at me, and that was the need to have a process. If you have a process, there's some cause for hope, there's some reason to think you might succeed. There's no process. You have a vacuum. That vacuum will be filled by violence. Shimon Peres, the President of Israel and the master of the one liner, summed it up nicely. In the case of the Middle east peace process, his point was that everyone knows how the Middle east peace process will conclude. We know what the result will be, but there's no process in place. And he said, the good news is there's light at the end of the tunnel. And the bad news is there's no tunnel. And that's exactly the problem in most peace processes, and certainly it was true in Northern Ireland. If you can have that process, if you can hold onto it, what I call the bicycle theory, if you can keep that process moving forward, do not allow it to fall over, absorb political pain if you have to. But whatever you do, hold on to that and never take no for an answer, then you can get to success. I think it's important to have a united group that you're negotiating with. Historically, the British government had tried to divide the Republican movement. Every time it had an opportunity, it would go for the split. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness persuaded Tony Blair very early on that first meeting in Downing street in December 1997, that it would be sensible to try and keep the whole IRA together, to carry as many with them as they could into peace. Although it took a long time, it was very slow, it was very painful to do so. I think that was the right decision. I wanted to try and avoid making peace many times and just make peace once again. I think this has lessons for the Middle East. If you look at Fatah and Hamas, people are saying that the combination of Fatah and Hamas will actually be a difficulty for peace. But if I was an Israeli negotiator, I would want to ensure that you didn't have to make peace twice, make one piece of Fatah and then wait and have to make peace with Hamas later on. It's far more sensible to see some way of making peace with them both at the same time. I think that sometimes people make a mistake in thinking that a peace can be an event rather than a process. When you get a breakthrough agreement, people suddenly say, that's fantastic, and collapse back into relaxation, give up having been exhausted in the process of getting to the breakthrough agreement. Certainly in the case of Oslo, the Oslo Accords in the Middle east, it was extraordinary how those agreements came out. It was extraordinary the reaction to them in terms of enthusiasm, and extraordinary how no one made any effort to implement it or to sell it to either side, and how the hope dissolved and disappeared. If we'd done the same thing with the Good Friday Agreement. It took us nine years after the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement to actually get it implemented, get it in place, and get what I hope is a lasting peace there. So you do need to have that determination after you've had the breakthrough agreement to actually redouble your efforts. That's when the real work starts. My last lesson is I think that what Northern Ireland shows me is that there is no problem in the world. There is no conflict that is actually insoluble. People for a long time thought the Northern Ireland peace was never going to happen. There was never any hope. Prime ministers from Churchill to Thatcher believed there was no solution that could be achieved. Actually it was. If you apply enough political leadership, if you apply enough patience, if the conditions are right, you can make your breakthrough, you have the opportunity. There's a cycle of blood that you sometimes have to go through before you get that window of opportunity. But when you get there, if you see that you can make a breakthrough, you can get to agreement. Doesn't mean to say you will, it doesn't mean to say it's inevitable, far from it. But if you have those factors, you at least have a chance. And in many ways what happened in Northern Ireland was to build on the failures that had gone before. As David was saying, we had Sunningdale, we had the Anglo Irish Agreement, we had the Downing Street Declaration. None of those succeeded. But if they hadn't happened before, it'd been very hard to get to a solution. It was because we had all of those and built on them, learnt the lessons from them that we did get there in the end. So I think there are some lessons. The least are debatable and worth discussing. Thank you.

[A]

Last, but by no means least, Professor Richard English. Richard, Sorry. Okay.

[E]

Thanks very much, Mick. Unlike my fellow panelists, I played absolutely no part at all in bringing peace to Northern Ireland. And it's a great pleasure to get a chance to salute in public the work that Jonathan and David and Martin so powerfully did. It's easy to forget what an extraordinary achievement and what an unlikely looking achievement that was. If you compare, for example, levels of violence in 1972 in Northern Ireland, when 497 people were killed in that year alone, and look forward to the year 2012 when despite the efforts of dissident Republicans, the level of violence will be negligible compared to that. It's an extraordinary and it wasn't an inevitable achievement and it wasn't an easy one. And the work of people like my three fellow panelists played a tremendous part in bringing us to where we are and I think it should be saluted. I agree with what's been said about there not being lessons which you can apply in the sense that I don't think you can look at what happened in Northern Ireland and say because this happened in Northern Ireland, therefore we should think about that being the way it's going to happen in relation to other conflicts around the world. I do think that it's possible to say that if you look at Northern Ireland and synoptically look at other conflicts and other histories of terrorist violence and political violence around the world, there might be some family resemblances between those different conflicts, which mean that you can humbly offer a reading of what historically suggests it makes sense to do, and more importantly, perhaps it makes sense not to do when you face a terrorist crisis. A couple of years ago I published a book trying to set out those family resemblances called Terrorism how to Respond. An attractively priced book, I should say. And the easiest thing for me to do would be to rattle through the seven points from that book and give what Samuel Beckett would have referred to as an expurgated, accelerated, improved and reduced version of the book. But if I can be absolutely candid, I'm so fed up giving lectures about that book that what I'm going to do is I've come up with four other points which I'm going to mention. And if you want to know what I think about the book, then Terrorism how to Respond what I'm going to do is try and set out four things about the Northern Irish experience of dealing with terrorism and moving from something like war to something like peace, which I think run counter to some of the assumptions that still prevail more broadly in relation to Northern Ireland. And I want to challenge them. The first is I find this talking sometimes to people who visit from other parts of the world and come to Northern Ireland and discuss it. There's an assumption that perhaps what happened in Northern Ireland was a process of reconciliation and therefore the ending of political violence. Absolutely nothing to do with that at all. Okay, the two political parties which effectively run Northern Ireland for the most part now, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, are drawn entirely from politically divided communities. My favorite statistic from the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey, which I monitor closely each year, is when you break down who votes for the dup, the party of Ian Paisley as was, and who votes for Sinn Fein in terms of social class and gender and religion. If you break it down in terms of religion, Ian Paisley's old party, the dup, has more Catholic support than Sinn Fein has Protestant support, and the respective statistics are 1% and naught. Okay, it's 1 nil to the DUP. There was a year when it became 21 to Sinn Fein, but it's back now to 1 nil to the DUP. And that underlines the the point, as does, far more trivially the fact when I joined Queen's University in 1989, and then I left it in 2011. 1989 was a year of considerable and awful political violence. 2011, much more peaceful Queens was actually a much more sectarian place in 2011 than it was in 1989. Not, I think, because I've been there for 21 years. But undoubtedly the reason for that is straightforward, which is in 1989, to express sectarian views was something which, when you switch the news on at lunchtime, you'd hear that those sectarian views had consequences to them in the possibility that someone was being murdered twice a week. Whereas now you can have a kind of sectarianism cost free, if you like, because it doesn't have those effects. This is a profoundly sectarian society and it remains such. And therefore the endings of violence have much more to do with the points which Martin and David and Jonathan have outlined very eloquently than it has to do with reconciliation. A second point, which I think sometimes people think is that is that everyone remembers too much about the past in Northern Ireland. In other words, that it's obsessed with. I would argue that it's a place where virtually virtually nothing is remembered accurately in terms of what happened during the Northern Ireland conflict. I used to find, for example, that students, particularly Republican students, would talk about the indelible imprint that the 10 hunger strikers who died tragically in 1981 in prison have had on the Republican community. And in my more mischievous moments, I said, well, name them then. I was always the only person in the room who could name all 10. Okay, if you go from a much more to an even more significant thing, you said, well, during the prison protest of 1970-1981, how many people can you name of the 472 people that the IRA killed in that period or the 111 people whom the UVF killed in that period? And you're down then to very small numbers, understandably, people tend to forget some of the awfulness of what happened in Northern Ireland. Ex paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, at conferences such as the one we've been having today, if there had been people present, tend to refer to themselves perhaps understandably as ex competence. What you've actually never had in Northern Ireland was combat. The vast majority of people who were killed in Northern Ireland conflict were killed when they were defenseless. And I think the nastiness and the awfulness and the viciousness of it is something which emotionally it's important to try and forget. But politically it's absolutely essential to try and remember because there's a sanitizing process. There's the sort of, unlike jihadists, the ira or a quite decent bunch because they used to ring you first and tell you where it was kind of thing. The level of violence, which has been a point that I heard put a number of times, actually. It didn't seem like that when people went into a bar and put a bomb there and didn't phone a warning and it went off in Guildford. It didn't seem like that when loyalists killed people whom they're roaming around North Belfast looking for in a Celtic shirt. A third thing which I want to challenge, as you can tell, having left Queensland now, slightly more off message in terms of some of the things I say about it.

[B]

But.

[E]

A third thing is that there's a myth that prevails that Northern Ireland testifies to the fact that large numbers of people support political violence and that what you get is the domination of the extremes, which understandably is something which is reinforced when you look at the fact that you've had a deal which has involved Sinn Fein, formerly the party of the Provisional IRA and the Democratic Unionist Party, the more aggressively unionist of the two big political parties. However, it's important to remember that during most of the Northern Ireland troubles, the majority of people in both communities emphatically did not support those political parties which represented political violence. It's only after the IRA gave up killing people that Sinn Fein became the dominant party in the north. And that is an important point, not merely shouted out loudly enough when we look at other conflicts around the world, because the normality and rationality and decent morality of most people in conflict situations is a huge, huge resource. When you talk to people who've been involved in countering terrorism as police or as people in the security service, they say there's a spike in information you get about these groups after an egregious atrocity. Why? Because people think, however much I might sympathise with the politics of what these people have done, I just can't stand the killing. And therefore you'll give information. And that resource is absolutely vital and it's often lost. It's partly lost because, for example, on the Nationalist Party, the political party which long opposed violence, which, during the IRA's war against the British state, repeatedly trounced Sinn Fein elections, for the most part, the SDLP has become politically marginalized in the peace. But it's important to remember the hostility that they had to the violence. Fourth thing is the big question about does terrorism work? And I think Jonathan touched on this and again, There's a notion I used to find with students in Queens. When you raised the question of does terrorism work? The standard answer was, yes. Look at Martin McGuinness. To which your reaction was yes, in some ways, people can have a good war, and you can get all sorts of secondary benefits in terms of the central goals of terrorist organizations. None of the terrorist organizations in the Northern Ireland conflict ended the Northern Ireland conflict on the basis of having got what they were killing people for. Whatever Martin McGuinness in his IRA days was aiming at, it wasn't to be the Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland flying at the front of the plane rather than the back of the plane, though those are, of course, secondary advantages. Okay. Whatever it was that the UDA was murdering people for, it wasn't so as Sinn Feinna would become the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Northern Ireland. Okay? And I think there is a humbling lesson for all of us in looking at conflicts. No one comes out of the Northern Ireland conflict looking good. No one. Okay. It's an ugly, ugly specimen. That's an important point to remember when we look at these conflicts. One of the points about it is that I think in addition to the proper, honest respect that states have had in terms of Northern Ireland, that citizens and individuals have had, it's also important to recognize, along with the fact that there hasn't been reconciliation, that we tend still to forget and airbrush out some of the nastiness of what people actually did within very short times into the past, that most people didn't support violence. It's also the fact that terrorism, in terms of the achievement of its central goals, is actually not a particularly effective pastime. Audrey Cronin wrote a wonderful book recently, How Terrorism Ends, in which she's analyzed over 400 terrorist groups and looked at the degree to which they end their campaigns on the basis of achieving their central goals. It's a very small percentage, and I think that's a crucial lesson as we try and not learn lessons from Northern Ireland, but think about responding to terrorism and political violence and associated conflicts while looking at this transformed episode of political violence in Northern Ireland, which now, thanks partly to the efforts of people like my fellow panellists, has largely and thankfully come to an end. Thanks very much.

[A]

Okay. Yeah, I got the.

[B]

I'm.

[A]

I'm just looking for my mic. Where's one mic? Two mics. One up there. Okay, let's. There a gentleman over here on the side. I'll take a. I'll take the gentleman here. Okay.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

No, no, no, no, here, Just follow my finger. Chat with Red. Yeah, please, could you speak up, please? Sorry.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I'm originally from. Well, I've lived here on and off for roughly. Roughly 16 years.

[B]

In.

[A]

In the 2011 assembly election, 45.5% of people didn't vote that were entitled to vote. The vast majority of our relatives don't vote in Northern Ireland.

[B]

Is that not a failure?

[A]

Due process, and does that not vote.

[D]

Badly for the future?

[A]

Okay, question about political advocacy. Gentleman here, please.

[B]

Yes, sorry. My name is Rory Garrity, and I'm a postgrad student here in the lse. I'm doing research on my dissertation on Northern Ireland. I think one of the interesting things that I've listened to all the panelists here tonight is that we talk about Republicanism as terrorism and how wrong that was, and I would agree with that. But do you not think that all terrorism was wrong and that would include the actions of loyalist paramilitaries? And when we talk about the terrorist actions that happened in Northern Ireland, should we not talk about it in community neutral language and say that all terrorism was wrong and avoid, like, avoid pointing all of our anger and all of our thoughts on one particular community? Because I would believe that all of terrorist action was wrong that occurred in Northern Ireland.

[A]

Okay, I'll take a couple more. Lady, over here.

[E]

Watch the microphones.

[A]

They seem to make a kind of backlash.

[F]

Hi, my name is Fiona McMahon, originally from Northern Ireland, and I would like to know, given the state of affairs in Northern Ireland now and since the peace and inverted commons process, do you not think that it is the case that terrorism actually works? Because both of the parties, the DUP and the Sinn Fein party are and were related to terrorist organizations.

[A]

Okay, Fiona, I think we'll. That's enough to start off with, I think. David, why don't you kick off and respond to any of the points that you want to respond to? You were the most economic of all the speakers.

[B]

Yeah, gentlemen, here first. Turn it off. There's no doubt but that the recourse to violence made things worse. I mean, you're talking about in some. Some of the other panelists talking about, in some respects, Northern Ireland being more sectarian now than it was in the 1960s. I think intercommunal feelings are stronger now than they were in the 1960s. And I have no doubt that the recourse to violence made things more difficult. Made things worse. Yes. Both the Sinn Fein and the DUP have, you know, Sinn Fein obviously very much involves in violence. Paisley with the DUP was Always flirting with it around the edges and then usually drawing back as soon as it became. Started to turn serious or might have had some political consequences for him. One of the questions I like to put about, you know, with regard to DUP and Paisley is ask yourself, would there have been the troubles if Paisley had not been there? Answer, probably not. So there's a considerable, you know, burden that they carry with them there. The assembly is not an exciting place. You know, the fact that most people don't vote for it, the fact that I'm heartily glad to be out of it, the fact that in 1998, when we were setting it up, I did my best to try and persuade John Taylor to go and become First Minister so I could stand in Westminster where things were really interesting, instead of having to deal with all these parish pump issues, which really. Oh, you know, so I understand that. And it's also the fact that because Sinn Fein and DUP are so different in their positions, they find it so difficult to agree on matters other than to adopt a populist line and complain about London, you know, all the time, which isn't really, you know, at some point they're going to have to try and actually deal, you know, to try and deal with some of the problems we have in Northern Ireland, if only. It's the question of getting a decent water system that doesn't break down the way it did last year. So, anyway, there's my reflections on this.

[A]

Richard, why don't you have a go there?

[E]

The question about different kinds of terrorism, I absolutely agree with you and I did try. I mean, I did refer to the UDA and the uvf. I tend not to. To single out just one group. I mean, actually the IRA killed far more people than anyone else did in the conflict, which is one reason people talk about them. The other is because their political party, unlike other paramilitary related political parties, have gone into government. It has a different kind of political implication. But I totally agree with you. I mean, I think political murder is political murder and should be condemned. And I absolutely would not want to single out one side. The point about apathy, in some ways, apathy is damaging. I think, for example, some political parties, parties who've had a rather benign effect on Northern Irish politics, don't always get the vote out in huge numbers. And that's a shame. Having said that, political apathy in one sense is a. My friend is saying it's good. It's a sign that things have gone to a point where they're less urgent, dreadful, awful and Therefore you can kind of ignore them and live with them. In other words, politics has become to some degree more boring and that's a good thing. I always thought when I moved to north in 1989, if politics became only local and boring, it would be much better thing than it simultaneously being local and international because of its awful violence. So I think apathy isn't the worst thing in that respect. I think about the point Fiona made about fiat terrorism working. I mean, yes, Sinn Fein, certainly to a degree, as David suggests, the DUP in a more flirtatious rather than full on way, were involved in militant politics. Having said that, the kind of goals they were espousing, insofar as they were, were not the goals that they've now ended up with. I mean, I think my point there would be that what's. They've ended up. That's absolutely true, but they've not ended up ruling in the kind of way that they're projecting. It's not that there's no benefit. It's not. There's no benefit. Well, I mean, I think we have to look at the record. I mean, it's clear that Martin McGuinness in 1972 or Gerry Adams in 1982 were, and their comrades in the movement were aiming for something very different from that which they've got now. They still maintain that you can get it in the future and that's what they want to do. I think that's unlikely. But I mean, I think what they've got is some. I'm not saying there's no effect of terrorism. I'm saying that the central goals are ones which I'm skeptical about being achieved in most cases.

[B]

I think one should say very, you know, firmly that Sinn Fein only started to get votes, serious votes, when it gave, when it distanced itself from violence. And they're in the exec, in the assembly and in the Executive where they are because they have got the votes. Violence didn't get them into the Assembly. Votes got them into the assembly and votes have got them into the administration.

[A]

Administration, yeah.

[C]

I mean, Republican politics going back to the 1920s was always more popular than republican violence. Now, in a lot of elections, bar voting is compulsory, as in Belgium.

[B]

You do.

[C]

You can get quite substantial numbers of people staying at home. This was the first election in Northern Ireland which didn't really revolve deeply about constitutional issues. It was about bread and butter issues. But in some ways, if politics has become boring, well, it's a lot better than the constant funerals of 20 years ago.

[A]

I hope you didn't take my view about apathy being good. When I went to Northern Ireland I couldn't believe the turnip. Well up to 70%. And in some parts of Northern Ireland they voted twice just to show their great enthusiasm. So there we go. Gentleman up here and the gentleman here.

[D]

Thank you. My name is Asoka Obey Sekira. I'm a comparative politics master student here at the lse. I want to ask a quick question.

[B]

Of the panel about the contribution of.

[D]

Third parties in the peace process, principally between the Downing Street Declaration and the.

[B]

Good Friday Agreement being signed. And I speak specifically about the contribution of Senator George Mitchell.

[D]

And as a Sri Lankan, I've seen the failure of Norway as a third party and so. Thank you.

[A]

Great question. Yeah. Conor Gurty, lsc.

[D]

A couple of questions, one for John Powell and one for Lord Trimble. Jonathan, you went through a number of people you thought were central and Nobel Prize star for David, but you didn't mention John Heumann.

[F]

I just wondered whether that was just.

[D]

An accident and if it was an accident, whether now's the time to rectify it.

[F]

And on Lord Trimble very quickly.

[D]

You've done some work recently, David, in Israel. People mightn't be fully familiar with what that work was inquiry and whether you have any and took the opportunity to.

[F]

Give any advice to the Israeli government.

[A]

As to whether there are any lessons.

[D]

That might be brought to their attention.

[F]

With regard to what they call their terrorism problem.

[A]

Okay, I'll take one. There's a lady here. I'll just take this lady's question. Come back and I'll go back, please.

[F]

My name is Maja Trajovsk. I'm a former student at the lsc. I also come from Macedonia where we have a similar agreement called the Okrit Framework Agreement. And I've been following the two processes. But my question is not related to that comparison. It's a question for Jonathan Powell. I'm interested whether the current British government is looking into the possibility of negotiations with Islamist terrorists here in the uk. Whether you think we have a vacuum, a lack of tunnel. Thanks.

[A]

Thank you. We call that a Macedonian question, an open and open ended 1, 1/3 partisan peace process. Why didn't you mention John Hume, David? Israel, Islamists. Where do you want to start, Martin?

[C]

Well, if the question is directed at me, I did mention John Hume.

[A]

He's the one who failed, not you.

[E]

Oh, sorry.

[C]

Okay, so. Well, I have the floor. Can I just say about contribution of contribution of third parties, I mean, I think There is a big distinction between third parties who are essentially mediators, mediators without power. George Mitchell represented President Clinton. He represented, if you like, the economic weight of the United States as well as the political weight. So I think that type of third party mediation, reasonably neutral, but with a lot of power behind it. I thought that that was very effective.

[B]

DAVID well, George chaired the talks and chaired George Mitchell. George Mitchell and did so very fairly. And in the whole couple of years that he was doing that, he only raised his voice once. But I will not reveal the identity of the person who caused him to raise us.

[A]

I can't imagine who.

[B]

Yeah, but he was essentially operating as a pure mediator in that situation, and there wasn't any we never had the sense of there being any power behind.

[C]

You had a few calls from President Clinton, I think, didn't you?

[B]

I had one call from President Clinton on Good Friday, which I turned to my attention advantage.

[D]

I'll give you chapter first, but Jerry.

[C]

Adams had a lot more calls from President.

[B]

I can remember in it was 1999, I think, Parry's Day in Washington, spending, oh, I suppose about an hour in Clinton's first floor study with just Clinton, Gerry Adams and myself, in which Clinton did everything he could to try and persuade Gerry to move on a particular issue. And every argument he could think of did it very eloquently. And I noticed that all he was doing was trying to persuade him he wasn't actually exercising any leverage on him. And I think that just amazed me. Of course, we got nowhere and Clinton's attempts to persuade Adam Adams got nowhere because Adams was in his hunker down mode, you'll be familiar with that. And he was just letting what Clinton say float over him. No pressure was brought to bear, and yet Clinton did have means of bringing pressure to bear on him. And then you contrast that with the Bush White House, which in a small way, but nonetheless did it did actually bring pressure to bear on the Republican movement. And the pressure that the Bush White House brought to bear in the Republican movement bore more fruit than all Clinton's eloquence ever did.

[A]

JONATHAN Yep.

[D]

To defend myself, there were three people who I didn't refer to as I was trying to rush through this, who deserve credit for political leadership. One is John Hume, who took remarkable risks in the late 1980s and indeed sacrificed his political party in the process and really does deserve enormous credit for what he did. I think John Major deserves enormous credit for making the effort on Northern Ireland peace process when he had absolutely no votes to gain from It. I didn't mention him. And actually, funny enough, Ian Paisley, since Davies mentioned him. Ian Paisley may have caused the Troubles, but he also helped them bring them to an end. He told us after he'd. That coming very. Coming quite close to death in 2004, he wanted to come back as Dr. Yes rather than Dr. No. He had a close encounter with his maker and so he deserves credit too. In terms of third parties, I think there are three different sorts of third parties. There's what you call a weak facilitator, which is a role that George Mitchell played in the peace process, where he couldn't really do anything other than take the lowest common denominator given to him. There's a strong facilitator, which is a role that the British and Irish governments essentially played between the parties in Northern Ireland, when they said they had no selfish strategic or economic interest. They then tried to play the role of facilitator. But they could change things on the ground, they could change things in security terms or economic terms. That is the role the US plays in the Middle east as a strong facilitator. It can change things if it wants to, if it chooses to use its muscle. I think you're a bit harsh on. Sorry, the third type, which is the guarantor, which we had with the imc, the International Monitoring Commission, Independent Monitoring Commission and the iicd, the International Independent Decommissioning Commission in Northern Ireland. These were international bodies that had a guaranteeing role, that acted as a referee, if you want, and had real power. I think you're a bit harsh on the Norwegians. It wasn't their fault that the Sri Lankan peace process collapsed. It was because Prabhakar was a lunatic and the Sri Lankan government thought that it could win militarily. That's what caused it to spill, which it has done for the moment. But there's a longer story to that one, to. On, I suspect in terms of Islamic terrorists in the UK making this distinction between talking and negotiating. I think talking is not a gift that you sort of give to someone or don't give to someone, in my view. I think that's not the way you should think about it. The person who refuses to talk is always the person in the wrong. I wouldn't try and negotiate, for example, with Al Qaeda, but I do see the sense of talking to Al Qaeda, having some channel to communicate, at least with the branches of Al Qaeda in Somalia or in the Sahel or in Yemen, at least have some means of communicating with them. And the same I would say would be true of the dissident Republicans in Northern Ireland. There's no point in negotiating with them, but communicating with them makes sense. The same would apply if there was any sort of organized group of Islamic terrorists in the United Kingdom. But I don't see such a group so I don't see even how you could talk to them.

[B]

Can I just add a little footnote? Thinking of the Islamists and all the rest of it, when you've got a situation like this there's an intellectual battle, there's an ideological battle and that has to be won by the government otherwise nothing else is going to flow from it. And I think with regard to Islamists in Britain, the previous government got its prevent strategy wrong and thinking that the problem was purely violent extremists and that they should stretch out to nonviolent extremists. I don't think you should reach out to nonviolent extremists without challenging the ideology and that at this present time it's a matter of challenging that ideology. And I think that Cameron is trying to reinterpret and refocus the prevent strategy on that. Certainly judging by his recent speech that the direction he's going in the question is whether the governmental machine will answer to that rather than just keep on doing what it was doing before, which is its default mode.

[C]

Just to emphasize that point. I think taking up the ideological challenge in any conflict situation is important. It's easy to say people are mindless terrorists don't just ignore the arguments they're putting forward. That's a very big mistake. And I mean certainly say the dissidents who tried to create some activity this week, I mean the Brits out intent to withdraw occupied Ireland. That ideology is totally obsolete and been made obsolete by the success of the Good Friday agreement.

[B]

I haven't answered Conor Geot I was.

[A]

Going to bring you back onto the Israel issue. Yeah, because Conor mentioned that. Yeah, you could David.

[B]

Well I'm not really in a position to to give them advice on how they approach matters. In fact, actually you made reference to Szeeman Peres's one liner and a lovely one liner from Szeeman Paris. It goes back several years. It's the time when Ehud Ulmert's government was negotiated with Mahmoud Abbas and Szeemon came to a conference that I was at and someone asked him how are the talks going on? And she answered quite simple. And it would be true to day still that he said that on all the practical issues we are very close to Agreement. But the emotional issues are getting heavier and more difficult.

[A]

Okay, I've got a gentleman down here and then a lady behind there. I'm taking two people up there. Yeah, please.

[B]

Thank you.

[D]

John Newham, My question is, what advice.

[E]

Would the panel give with respect to.

[C]

The Middle east peace process? Large last week, for example, President Obama.

[E]

Gave a speech which was not well.

[C]

Received by Prime Minister Netanyahu and yet.

[B]

Obama's reception at AIPAC yesterday was, shall.

[D]

We say, more measured.

[C]

Could we have some comments on that, please? Thank you.

[A]

There's a lady behind you. Please. I'm trying to get a rough. Yeah, please.

[F]

Susan Doris, barrister former law student at Queen's I'm just wondering whether you think arising from Northern Ireland that those taking part and holding firmly to the principles of non violence have been adequately credited and in terms of similar conflict resolutions or conflict situations, whether those people that firmly stand to non violence will be credited.

[A]

Lady here and ladyback, please.

[D]

Yeah.

[F]

With the UN 197023 resolution handed over to NATO to execute in Libya, how will such action help counterterrorism in the future given that in the case of Northern Ireland, it was a case of.

[D]

Talks and negotiation that placed them where they are today?

[F]

Yeah, my name is Maite from Basque country. Xin Fen were like direct advisors for the ceasefire of ETA in 2006 and now we have permanency fire of ETA. I would like to know until which extent do you think that ETA is following the path of ira?

[D]

Did you get that question?

[A]

Okay, thanks very much. That's quite a lot of good questions. Richard, why don't you.

[E]

The question at the front here about people who were committedly non violent, who of course were far more numerous and far less famous, and the answer is no, they've not been credited enough with it. And I think that's one of the casualties of a process like this. I think it's an explicable casualty because I think when states, particularly the UK state within which most of the violence was happening, are looking at trying to say, can we stop people being murdered? Can we stop bombs going off? There's an understandable practicality about that. But I think you can see it in electoral terms, in terms of the parties that have fared less well in the peace process, I think you can see it in terms of who gets invited to meet the Queen when she's in the Republic of Ireland. I think you can see who gets to write memoirs that make some money. And I think you can see it in terms of the names that are famous. Your Question about how that would be made different in other situations is a question to which I have no obvious answer. But I mean, I do think that the central lesson of it is that there is a danger. I've said I don't think terrorism works in terms of groups getting to achieve what they're actually essentially wanting to get. I think one thing terrorist groups sometimes do get is a greater share of how it ends up afterwards and a greater sense that they represent the legitimate voice of communities which actually through much of the conflict, didn't really support what they were doing in terms of the violence, at least that they were carrying out. So I think it's a paradox there on the ETA one. I'll be very brief on that. I actually think the differences between the ETA case and the IRA case are much stronger and more important than the similarities. And I. I don't think that there's been much of an echoing in the way that sometimes people think. I think what happens is because there are quite strong relationships between the two communities, if you like, ETA and the IRA and their respective political groups have been quite matey in various different ways and deliberately drawn analogies. There's been a tendency therefore to think that there'll be something mimetic happening in the vast part of Spain. I think actually the differences are much more significant than the similarity.

[B]

A couple comments. The comment about Obama and Middle east, both initially with his call for a complete cessation of settlements and then his comments more recently, he was saying something which would have been very positive if it had been expressed slightly differently. Now, I am a slight disadvantage in this because I haven't been able to and I have not studied the precise context and the precise words he used, but the words as reported were not going to be positive in the situation. And indeed what he said in his recent speech, which Netanyahu was taking vigorous exception to, the same thing, could have been phrased slightly differently and everybody would be saying great. So I think there's a slight problem there and I think he might be better if he was to listen to Dennis Ross, for example, more rather than write the speeches himself. On the lady here about the question of nonviolence, do remember with regard to the process in Northern Ireland that it was initially built on the moderate centre parties. The DUP didn't. They participated in the talks until Sinn Fein came in and then they walked out and didn't participate. Sinn Fein were in the process, but the agreement was made over their heads and with their vigorous objection to it. What happened afterwards were they DUP and Sinn Fein displaced the Alchemist Party in the sdlp. That wasn't inevitable. And wasn't. I don't think I'm being kind to you. I don't think it was intended, but I think it was a consequence of mistakes that were made. Some of those mistakes I see in terms of the mismanagement of the process. I think perhaps in a quiet moment of reflection, myself and the SDLP might also find some mistakes we made ourselves. But it's not my job to explain.

[A]

I think Jonathan wants to say something.

[D]

No, not on that point. The Middle east peace process, in my view, it's missing a P, which is it's not a process. And if it was a process, they'd have some chance of getting somewhere. If they're going to get into a process, they'd be better off to avoid precondition, which is a lesson, I think we learned from Northern Ireland, that preconditions can be very dangerous. Some preconditions, like a ceasefire, make absolute sense, others don't. And if you ask if you set a precondition, like ending settlements, or if you have a precondition, like demanding Hamas recognize Israel at the beginning of the process rather than the end, you're not going to get a process going. So I think those are what I would do, but there's no chance that they will do so. It may be that we're at a period of cycle, as I say, where the preconditions simply aren't there for a successful peace negotiation. So you won't get anywhere on the Basque question. I'm not sure I would agree, Richard. I think there are some interesting parallels there. Most interestingly, yesterday, Bildou, the party representing the Basque. Well, basically, it's Batasuna by another name, came second. It beat the PSE and it beat the BP into third and fourth place. It's a rather extraordinary result. So if the party gives up violence in the way that Batasuna effectively has done, then it can succeed in the way that Sinn did in Northern Arab, but not if it carries on with violence. So I hope it does follow the route of the ira. I didn't understand the Libyan question. I'm afraid so.

[A]

There's quite a lot. But come back. There's a lady here with the mic. Who else has got the microphone over here? The lady there and the gentleman back there. Yeah, please. Yeah.

[F]

My question's Maggie Byrne. I worked on human rights in Northern Ireland for a very long time, and I actually think Northern Ireland learned a lot from elsewhere and has got a lot to offer to other jurists, jurisdictions. Just a sort of in passing question to the chair and to the organisers, whether you tried and failed to get any women for the panel or you just didn't try. It's a very obvious panel and then in a sense a question to the moderate centre that I think Lord Trimble has been trying to present this evening. I looked up because Rosemary Nelson's inquiry has reported today and I certainly haven't read the 500 pages yet. I'm sure you haven't, but I looked up a few years ago in Parliament. You said that you look forward, didn't much approve of public inquiries, but you thought it'd be quite useful if they uncovered the truth about her links to terrorism. So I wondered what you think about what should happen to the rogue RUC and security people who, according to the inquiry, legitimized her as a target for loyalist terrorism.

[B]

I haven't seen the report and I'm completely blind with regard to the report. So you're suggesting something which the report has said. I can't comment on that. I don't know. I haven't seen that. And I'd be interested to see that.

[F]

I'd just sort of be very careful about how the moderate centre sometimes legitimizes attacks on human rights defence lawyers. And I just think, particularly in the absence of a woman on the panel, it'd be quite. I wanted to make reference to her to. Thank you.

[A]

We did actually talk about that case today in the seminar. Gentleman, over here, please.

[D]

James Longman. I'm a political conflict postgrad here at lse. Thank you very much for your respective talks. I was just going to ask, given the problems that you explained exist currently in Northern Ireland, what do you think the prospects for this social cohesion plan are given and sort of being able to embrace the multiple identities that exist in Northern Ireland, rather than overcoming them, as I think is the case.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

The point and the question. There's a gentleman just in front of you there. If you just give him the microphone. Just want to get. We're getting.

[E]

Thank you.

[A]

My name is Peter and I was a soldier in Northern Ireland for several.

[E]

Years back in the 90s.

[A]

Actually, my interest here is more going back to what Mr. Powell said about who you talk to and how you talk to them. I think is there not a sort of rather big difference between what are essentially local political conflicts, whether it be be Basque country, Northern Ireland, Middle east and transnational Islamist terrorism like Al Qaeda, where I think most people would struggle to work out what their aim actually is, and therefore how you combat them is going to be very different from a relatively traditional terrorist with a small T. Regional, local issue. Okay, let's. I've got other people. I take those. Let's. Let's take those anyway. Let's take those two at the end.

[E]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah, please.

[D]

Let me just take that last. Last one. I mean, yes is the answer in part, but I don't think it means not talking to them is. Is. I guess my point, I think the trouble is trying to engage with Al Qaeda central for START will be rather difficult because you have some difficulty tracking them down. And if you did, you might want to kill them. But the. But more than that, what would you actually talk to them about? Which is why I mentioned the franchises. But I think the interesting thing about Al Qaeda is the way that it's developing into a series of different groups, from Abu Sayyed in the Philippines to Al Shabaat in Somalia and Al Qaeda in Yemen and so on. And there are actually transactional issues you could talk to them about and therefore you could start a dialogue that could then lead to a political dialogue. So I would think that actually that's the way it would be more like to develop than trying to somehow track down the people at the centre of things.

[E]

The question, I think it was from James about social cohesion and the future. I think the achievement of a largely segmented something like peace was a huge achievement in itself. And I think making that become solid, making the political process function, even if it doesn't produce better government, at least it's sustained and so forth, is a huge achievement. The next stage of it is to see whether there's some kind of blurring off the communal division. I mean, at the moment, it seems to me the evidence for that is pretty meager. And I think the rewards of playing to a certain kind of sectarian politics are pretty significant. And I think if you look at the degree to which people who are in politics are playing up certain issues and are trying to present themselves as being the muscular defenders of their own community against the other, there are certainly enough rewards in sectarian to make that a difficult thing to move forward. I mean, my political colleagues may want to say something different, but at the moment the signs of that are not entirely auspicious.

[B]

I would suggest just a wee footnote on that. I think you're quite right. We've got a situation at the moment where the parties are putting themselves forward as the best representatives of their sectarian block. The people that you send in to get the best deal. And so on their appeal to that, and it's a little footnote about the comment made earlier, this more aggressively sectarian approach to politics isn't actually engaging the attention of the entire community. Only 55% of them, the other 45% don't want to vote for that sort of politics. And in fact, actually that degree of not being willing to, or anxious or at least not engaged by that sort of politics is actually quite a hopeful sign.

[A]

Okay, I've got another gentleman here and then there's a gentleman in the back. Take the gentleman at the back first, because he came in first then. And I'll take. Ask quickly. I've got one or two other hands. Just quickly deal with. Yeah, please. My questions for Mr. Trimble.

[D]

You made reference to the Sunningdale Agreement.

[A]

Earlier on, and I just wondered what were your opinions of it at the time?

[D]

And would you now condemn mainstream unionists.

[A]

Who made a squalid alliance with paramilitaries.

[D]

To form the Ulster Workers Council in.

[E]

Order to bring down that executive?

[A]

And I've also got a question for the panel. Did the panel see Gerry Adams documentary on Jesus and did they want to.

[D]

Vomit quite as much as I did?

[E]

Thank you.

[A]

That's two very moderate interventions. And there's a gentleman here. And if you could bring the mic forward to this lady here. And that'll be the last question, I think. Yeah. Gentlemen here then.

[F]

Ladies, good evening. I'm from the north of England, which seems to be the source of a large number of the Islamist extremists that we've been talking about. Coincidentally, it also happens to be quite a deprived. I mean, relatively quite a deprived area. I haven't heard anything from the panel in depth about. Well, as much as we can get about whether there is a link between this sort of economic deprivation and sort of extremism. I mean, some of the terrorists that have already been tried or that perished in terrorist attacks have actually been middle class, but all around them there's been a lot of squalor and poverty. So I'm just wondering if there's a narrative linked to that.

[A]

Okay.

[F]

Yes. I'd just like to ask the panel how you can have a statement from the panel saying that the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated on over the heads of Sinn Fein and with vigorous opposition from them. As one of the Sinn Fein negotiators, I'm sure the panel, other members of the panel that I saw at the time are aware that we participated throughout, that we were centrally involved in the Agreement that our party Congress voted in favor of the Good Friday Agreement and that we have been vigorously protecting and promoting the implementation of that agreement since then.

[B]

I'm delighted to hear that.

[A]

Right, okay, thank you, Barbara. I don't think the whole panel said that. Yes, yeah. Deprivation.

[E]

The question about deprivation is a really interesting one. And if there's someone looking for a brilliant PhD thesis to do on a subject, the literature on the connection between economic deprivation and people who engage in terrorism internationally tends to suggest that there's not a very strong connection correlation between them, even though some of the surrounding situations are ones of squalor. In other words, your average terrorist, if such exists internationally, is not from the worst off sections of their own community. One interesting thing about Northern Ireland is that there was a quite strong connection between areas of comparative social deprivation. Not in a global sense, actual social deprivation, but comparative social deprivation and political violence, in that the IRA and their loyalist equivalents in terms of the UDA and so on drew stronger support from less well off areas. I mean, a brilliant thesis to do would be to examine why it is that Northern Ireland doesn't fit. I mean, when people like the brilliant Alan Kruger gave lecture, actually, a series of lectures actually in this room, he raised this as an issue which he didn't have an explanation to. If someone's written up an answer to it, I've not seen it. But I mean, it is an interesting thing. I think the broad answer is yes, there was a connection, but I'm not sure why North Nile in that case is different from some of the other cases you find international.

[A]

Martin, would you like to.

[C]

I think generally, historically, revolution isn't usually made by the. The people who are most deprived. It's actually people who've made some. I mean, for example, the War of Independence started among the relatively more prosperous area in Tipperary rather than. And it didn't happen during the famine, though the revolution was a complete, complete failure in 1848. Yes, I well remember some polite but lengthy sessions with Barbara de Bruyne about articles two and three and how they might be revised. And indeed Sinn Fein was involved in the negotiation. Up to one of my abiding memories, and I'm afraid it's not one of my happier memories is a meeting between Bertie Ahern, Mo Molem, myself, Gerry Adams, Mark Beginners, two sessions of two hours each on the eve of Good Friday going through about 78 different points, but certainly, certainly you were fully engaged. No question about that.

[B]

David. There was a question about Sunningdale. Yes, the agreement that we got in 1998 was much better from a Unionist point of view than Sunningdale. And I will still make the critique of Sunningdale that I made at the time. It was a pity that the government did not pay attention to the absolutely total rejection of Sunningdale in the election in 1974, where we won 11 out of 12 seats on an anti Sunningdale ticket. And I'm still quite proud of my participation in the only successful general political stage in British history, which is not.

[A]

In 1926, but was in 1924. Ballet Lumpy remember it well. Okay. I think we'll draw the proceedings to an end. As I say during the exam, you should never expect people to turn up. Well, you've turned up nearly 200 people to reflect and think about Northern Ireland, a place I'm extraordinarily fond of still, still miss enormously and where I Talk for over 22 years, 22 best years of my life, to be perfectly honest. And it's wonderful for me and many others like us who have been engaged both academically in our own different ways in the Irish question to, in a way, bring it here so that you guys can understand what we're talking about. I really would like to vote a great vote of thanks to all of our four panelists this evening. But without leaving Richard out, I really would like to also extend a special thanks to Jonathan, to David and to Martin, who in their different ways, with many, many others involved in that process, including Sinn Fei, of course. I just want to make that short. Barbara did really bring about a major difference to the peoples of Ireland and to Northern Ireland and to the peoples of Europe. So thank you very much and thanks.