Negotiations

Toward a new Ireland?

by Jeffrey Gantz

This has to be the weirdest speaker introduction ever. We're at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Professor Louise Richardson is describing the achievements of Martin McGuinness, chief negotiator for Sinn Féin and recently elected Member of Parliament from Northern Ireland's Mid-Ulster seat. The catch is, they're all his achievements as a member of the illegal Irish Republican Army -- an affiliation that McGuinness has always resolutely denied. He maintains his usual odd smile, hard-edged but also shy. Hey, he's Irish.

McGuinness is in the US to try to drum up American support for the current round of peace talks, which are in danger of stalling thanks to David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party (which has greeted Sinn Féin with "a wall of silence") and Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists (who are boycotting the talks altogether). Despite the current stalemate, and the danger that prolonged fruitless negotiation will induce the IRA to break its cease-fire, McGuinness remains optimistic: he tells the packed Harvard audience that "the prospects for peace are better than they have ever been in the last 70 years."

In part that's because he's hopeful the new English prime minister, Labour's Tony Blair, will understand that "Ireland was partitioned against the overwhelming wishes of the majority of the Irish people" and that "the British government must take responsibility." He's confident this can happen: "I believe we have ample sources in people of goodwill."

One such person, American negotiator George Mitchell, whom McGuinness describes as "very honorable, very decent," has scheduled bilateral talks with all sides this week, in an attempt to find some common ground. McGuinness himself still hopes that David Trimble will "go along the road that [South Africa's] F.W. de Klerk has taken" and lead Ulster's Unionists into an Irish future that's grounded in tolerance and understanding rather than hatred and bigotry. If Trimble can't rise to the occasion, McGuinness is counting on Prime Minister Blair -- and perhaps President Clinton -- to give him a nudge.

But he believes the time for change has come. "In the Protestant churches and the Unionist business community, there is support for the peace process. Economists see the partition as nonsense. There is a responsibility on everyone to negotiate. I know that I'm not going to get everything I'm looking for in the talks. It's going to be difficult and dangerous for both sides. But what is the alternative?"