GFA 25 - Remember When Sinn Féin Claimed There Would Be A United Ireland By 2016?
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Over the coming weeks Éirígí will mark this anniversary with a number of analytical articles about the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and related matters. The first article in this series is published below. It focuses on the North/South element of the GFA known as Strand 2 - an element which the Sinn Féin leadership once claimed could deliver a united Ireland by 2016.
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“Certainly it is our view that it can be accomplished over a short period. Gerry Adams has said 2016 and I think that is achievable.” - That’s a quote from Martin McGuinness talking about a United Ireland. He was speaking in November 2003, at the launch of a Sinn Féin manifesto for an upcoming Stormont election.
This quote is important because it reflects the internal thinking of the Adams-McGuinness leadership five years after the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was signed.
Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams and other senior Sinn Féín figures on Good Friday 1998. Having signed up to the Good Friday Agreement, the Adams / McGuinness leadership then started hard-selling it to IRA Volunteers, Sinn Féín members and the wider republican base. The all-Ireland nature of Strand 2 was often included in that sales pitch.
McGuinness further explained how he believed that a united Ireland could be achieved “as we develop the North/South implementation bodies and people co-operate and work together, I think people will see more and more the logic of it.”
The six North/South implementation bodies that McGuinness was referring to emerged from Strand 2 of the GFA – the strand which dealt with ‘North/South’ relations and spawned the North/South Ministerial Council. Those implementation bodies were:
Waterways Ireland
Food Safety Promotion Board
Special EU Programmes Body
North/South Language Body
InterTradeIreland
Foyle, Carlingford and Irish Lights Commission
A further six ‘areas of cooperation’ – crucially without implementation bodies – were also agreed in 1998 — Agriculture, Education, Environment, Health, Tourism and Transport. These too fell under the remit of the North/South Ministerial Council.
(For context, Strand 1 of the GFA focused on the internal institutions within the Six Counties, while Strand 3 focused on the ‘East/West’ relations between Ireland and Britain.)
Waterways Ireland was one of six ‘North/South implementation bodies’ that were set up under Strand 2 of the Good Friday Agreement. All six areas were politically non-controversial and a very long way from the dizzying heights of all-Ireland Policing and Justice that the Adams/McGuinness leadership were publicly putting forward as achievable goals.
Martin McGuinness was not known for making off-the-cuff or unconsidered comments. When he publicly pushed the idea that Strand 2 could deliver a fast-track to a united Ireland he wasn’t on a solo run, but publicly articulating the apparent position of the collective leadership of the IRA and Sinn Féin.
Three years earlier in January 2000, Adams had told a packed hall in New York that “there is no reason why we can’t celebrate the 1916 Rising in the year 2016 in a free and united Ireland.”
The Sinn Féin manifesto that McGuinness was launching in 2003 referred to the North/South Ministerial Council as ‘one of the key elements of the Good Friday Agreement’. The manifesto outlined how Sinn Féin aimed to:
Widen and deepen the co-ordination of the six areas of co-operation
Establish new areas of co-operation, including Community Development, Art and Heritage, Economic Co-operation and Public Investment
Expand the remit of the six existing all-Ireland implementation bodies
Create further implementation bodies (e.g. Policing, Justice, Agriculture, Rural Development, Social Economy, Pollution Control, Mental Health, Further and Higher Education, Communications Infrastructure and Energy)
The 2003 Sinn Féin manifesto didn’t use the phrase ‘embryonic united Ireland’. It didn’t have to. The implication of creating all-Ireland implementation bodies in such critical areas as Policing and Justice were obvious to everyone, including unionists and the British government.
But just in case anyone missed the not-so-subtle implication, Martin McGuinness made the implicit, explicit. As far as he and Gerry Adams were concerned Strand 2 of the GFA contained the potential to deliver a united Ireland by 2016.
Internally, within the IRA and Sinn Féin, the idea that Strand 2 could be used to create a de facto united Ireland was being strongly pushed by many leadership figures in the early 2000s.
During this period a number of high-profile activists, including prominent ex-prisoners, were tasked with identifying additional policy areas for future all-Ireland cooperation and future all-Ireland implementation bodies as well as other all-Ireland initiatives.
This was all red meat for the republican base – the Adams-McGuinness leadership had apparently negotiated an agreement that contained a clear pathway for the creation of scores of all-Ireland implementation bodies that would collectively amount to a de facto united Ireland. And from there it would be a short hop, skip and a jump to a de jure united Ireland.
It all seemed so obvious and achievable -- if only you were willing to replace political reality with political fantasy.
Éirígí activists in Derry in 2007. From its formation in 2006, Éirígí has asserted that the Good Friday Agreement was designed to stabilise and therefore prolong British rule in Ireland.
For Irish republicans who chose reality over fantasy, it was clear that the potential of Strand 2 would remain as nothing more than potential because an unsurmountable unionist veto had been weaved into the very fabric of the GFA.
The text of the GFA explicitly stated that the addition of new areas of all-Ireland cooperation or the creation of new all-Ireland implementation bodies could only occur “by agreement in the (North/South Ministerial) Council and with the specific endorsement of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Oireachtas.”
Because of the voting rules in Stormont this meant that any all-Ireland expansion would need to secure the votes of at least 40% of unionists in Stormont before it could go ahead. In effect this gave unionism a permanent veto, which would remain in place regardless of future demographic changes.
Alternatively, unionists could simply collapse Stormont and in doing so they would also collapse the North/South Ministerial Council as the GFA specified that, “the North/South Ministerial Council and the Northern Ireland Assembly are mutually inter-dependent, and that one cannot successfully function without the other.”
In the weeks, months and years that followed the publication of the Good Friday Agreement the Adams / McGuinness leadership argued privately and publicly that the agreement in general and Strand 2 in particular, could be used to advance the cause of Irish reunification.
Others, including Éirígí following its foundation in 2006, argued that Strand 2 and the wider GFA had no such potential and would instead stabilize and prolong British rule in Ireland. Only time would tell which of these two conflicting positions would be proven correct.
The North/South Ministerial Council meeting in July 2016. The body has met just three times in the last seven years.
A quarter of a century has now passed since the GFA was signed and it is abundantly clear which analysis was correct. Each and every element of Strand 2 is now either on political life-support or politically dead. Sinn Féin no longer talks about the all-Ireland potential of Strand 2. And worse still, nobody seems to have noticed or care.
The North/South Ministerial Council - which Sinn Féin once called a key element of the GFA - has only met 26 times in the last quarter of a century. And has met just three times since 2016.
Given the moribund nature of the North/South Ministerial Council it is unsurprising that there has been no progress in developing new areas of all-Ireland cooperation or new all-Ireland implementation bodies.
Today, there are still just six all-Ireland implementation bodies and six all-Ireland areas of cooperation – unchanged from a quarter of a century ago. The high talk of all-Ireland bodies governing policing and justice was quietly dropped around the same time that Sinn Féin accepted British policing and justice in occupied Ireland.
The North/South Inter-Parliamentary Association - a Strand 2 ‘inter-parliamentary forum’ between Stormont and Leinster House met for the first time in 2012, fourteen years after the Good Friday Agreement came into effect. It hasn’t met since 2016.
The North/South Consultative Forum, a Strand 2 civic form that was to be “representative of civil society, comprising the social partners and other members with expertise in social, cultural, economic and other issues’ was never even convened.
The North/South Inter-Parliamentary Association met for the first time in 2012, fourteen years after it was envisioned in the Good Friday Agreement. It hasn’t met since 2016.
Any objective analysis of Sinn Féin’s strategy to use Strand 2 as a means to build momentum for Irish unity must conclude that this strategy ended in abject failure.
Of course, it would be naïve in the extreme to expect the Adams-McGuinness leadership, or their anointed successors, to publicly admit this failure. To publicly admit that a 'key element’ of the GFA had failed so spectacularly would throw up serious questions about the wider GFA and the negotiating skills and political judgement of the Sinn Féin leadership.
So instead, they just stopped talking about creating scores of powerful new all-Ireland implementation bodies. And quietly dropped all mention of a united Ireland by 2016.
This approach may have prevented internal difficulties for the Sinn Féin leadership, but it didn’t change the objective reality that the Good Friday Agreement has not advanced the Irish republican cause by one inch - a fact which is becoming clearer with each passing year.