Campbell: acknowledge Bertie's vital peace role

CHEMISTRY: The then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern with his British counterpart Tony Blair after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement

John-Paul McCarthy

November 03 2013 02:04 AM

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former director of communications and strategy, says he was "surprised" by the way former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's contribution to the Northern Ireland peace process was being overlooked in the Republic.

Calling this lack of appreciation "just wrong", Mr Campbell told me in a phone interview that in his opinion only "some people" were reluctant to acknowledge Ahern's role in the process that culminated in the successful devolution of powers to a power-sharing executive in Stormont.

When he praised Ahern's political bravery at the public launch of his new Irish Diaries, Campbell said he was greeted by warm applause. When asked if the New Labour operation ever fully understood unionism at an emotional level, Campbell replied that "Tony [Blair] did. Not sure I did." While he described David Trimble as an "extraordinarily courageous operator and leader", Campbell admitted that his diaries are probably unfair on the former Ulster Unionist Party leader.

Mr Campbell explained this defect with reference to Trimble's "exasperating" personality and to the sense that Campbell had that Trimble would have been a Conservative had he been in British politics.

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This made it harder for Campbell to empathise with him, by all accounts.

When asked to respond to unionist critics who accused Blair of seeing the UUP and Sinn Fein/IRA as morally equivalent, Campbell replied: "I can see why they say that." He explained though that this followed the strategic decision taken by Prime Minister Blair at the outset of the political negotiations in late 1997 that they would treat Sinn Fein as political negotiators and not as terrorists.

Mr Campbell also said that he "did not remember" there ever being a serious proposal during the climactic talks at Castle Buildings in April 1998 to formally link prisoner releases with the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons. The prisoner releases required a great deal of what he called "constructive ambiguity" and "dancing around" the tensions between the parties.

Campbell also admitted that some of the American input into the peace process tended towards the "nostalgic", but that this was off-set by the fact that "Bill Clinton got it", as did the Canadian general, John de Chastelain, who too often "gets forgotten" in official accounts of the negotiations. Mr Campbell recalled asking de Chastelain at one point: "What is your life like at the moment?" referring to the general's myriad trips to various arms dumps in obscure locations at all hours of the day and night. Campbell said he was "like a Samuel Beckett character".

When asked at the end to think of issues that the British

government could have handled better with the benefit of hindsight, Campell waskeen to defend the performance of the Blair operation after 1997.

"The objective," he said, "was to get a peace process going without violence." He felt at the end that this objective, if viewed in big-picture terms, had been "very largely met", not least because of the excellent personal chemistry between Ahern and Blair right up to 2007.

Campbell: acknowledge Bertie's vital peace role

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