LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : John Bruton : Struggling to Keep the Process of Peace in Northern Ireland on Track

A few years ago, merely saying the phrase “peace in Northern Ireland” brought derisive laughter. No longer. Just as there is now a multiracial democracy in South Africa--imagine--before too long there could be a nonviolent, democratic Northern Ireland. Imagine.

Or so it seemed last year, when a cease-fire was agreed to by all sides and suddenly the operative word was diplomacy, not terrorism. The diplomatic lines between Dublin and London were humming; the head of Sinn Fein, political branch of the Irish Republican Army, was suggesting jaw-jaw rather than war-war, and the British had pointedly begun what everyone hoped would be the first historic phase of a total troop withdrawal.

But right now, the Northern Ireland peace process appears dead in the water, threatening, with each passing day of inertia, to sink to the bottom of the Irish Sea under the weight of decades of mutual Anglo-Irish hatred and distrust. Into the current void has stepped a most improbable peace-maker. He is John G. Bruton, 48, broad-shouldered, prematurely gray and wholly underestimated. And it is on his shoulders that the future of peace in Belfast, at least to some measure, rests.

He is, fortunately, determined. Though be clear about this: Bruton is no fancy piece of cloth. Plain-spoken and direct, this Irish family man--with one son and three daughters--is, along with his Foreign Minister Dick Spring, in the pivotal role of working behind the scenes and in public to keep the all-important negotiations moving. But he is as worried as he is determined.

Thus with each passing day, with every pointed phone call to British Prime Minister John Major, with every phrase of public praise for President Bill Clinton, with every secret phone call to various Irish leaders in the north, Bruton’s centrality to the peace process becomes more evident.

Can he succeed? Bruton is an old political hand: Right after college in Dublin, in 1969, he was elected to the Dail (the Irish Parliament), as the then-youngest legislator representing the center-right Fine Gael Party. For many years, Bruton, a large, slow-moving, slow-to-warm man, labored in opposition to the majority Fianna Fail Party, often as a spokesman on agriculture. But then, last winter, Fail fell on its face and the garrulous Albert Reynolds was ousted. A new patchwork coalition was miraculously stitched together--the center-right plus parts of the Irish left--and somehow Bruton emerged as the nation’s leader.

The Taoiseach (the Gaelic word for leader of the government) was interviewed in his spacious office in Dublin’s government house, surrounded by a sprawl of furniture, walls of pale Irish oak and portraits of political heroes throughout Irish history.

Question: What’s your overriding goal?

Answer: The priority must be to underpin the peace that we now enjoy in Northern Ireland with a true political settlement, and to do that in a way that -recognizes the rights of both communities in Northern Ireland, and in a way that both communities are happy with. Only then will the peace be irrevocably entrenched. But the first priority of the peace movement is to work on more than one front. It requires work on security-type issues--like the decommissioning of arms, the release of prisoners, the reform of the judicial and police systems; but it also requires movement on all the political issues. Here the two governments have set out their understanding with an outline of a possible settlement.

But there hasn’t been any serious engagement by the parties in Northern Ireland with one another on these issues since 1992--and that is a serious problem. If we are to make the peace process become all that it can be, we need to expand into an active-talks process on the wider political questions. That requires movement from not just the governments but from the main parties in Northern Ireland as well. They have got to be willing to sit around, if not at the same table, then at least at a series of tables ready to discuss the same topics.

Q: Is the British government’s insistence on dealing with the decommissioning issue first--with getting the Irish Republican Army to begin to lay down its arms--interfering with the momentum of the talks?

A: Well, we agreed that we would try to move forward on two issues, not just one. One is the security issue, particularly decommissioning; but the other is how we, as governments, can help get a political dialogue going on the ground in Northern Ireland. We are at this very moment working on this; the contacts between the two governments are quite intense as far as that is concerned. We haven’t come to any decisions at this time, but we are preparing to talk more intensively than usual, moving forward as quickly as possible.

Q: Some are saying that you have been more active and, in a sense, more successful in trying to get the peace process under way. That the British have been dragging their heels, and you sort of pushed harder than the British have?

A: I suppose it is fair to say that while the Irish government has substantial day-to-day responsibilities arising out of the conflict in Northern Ireland . . . the principle day-to-day burden has fallen on the British government. Therefore, it wouldn’t be surprising that they have been cautious, whereas we have, perhaps, the room to be more creative in seeking solutions.

But those two roles complement one another--they don’t conflict. The Irish and British governments have been working very closely together on Northern Ireland-relationship issues since the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish agreement by one of my predecessors, [Prime Minister] Garret Fitzgerald, in 1985, that established a framework wherein progress can be made on a steady basis. Wherein the Irish government is consulted regularly; wherein it can protect the rights and the interests of the Nationalist [Catholic] minority in Northern Ireland, and wherein the occasional difference can be discussed in a civilized and constructive atmosphere.

Sure, there will always be differences between British and Irish governments on these sorts of issues--differences of emphasis, if not differences of policy. But the important thing is the framework of the Anglo-Irish agreement for resolving these exists.

Q: How would you describe your relationship with Prime Minister John Major?

A: Excellent. Both on a personal and political level, I found him to be someone who is deeply engaged in the complexities of the Irish problem and the Northern Irish problem, in particular. He understands very well, he understands the detail, he is prepared to give the time that is needed to master it. He is not an amateur as far as Irish issues are concerned--he is a thorough professional.

Q: How serious is the different perspective between the British and U.S. governments on the issue of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams?

A: Here, again, it is the British having to take a more cautious approach because of their responsibilities and also their concerns about the concerns of the Unionists [Protestants in Northern Ireland who prefer union with Britain]--concerns they have if you have to take a special interest, as the British do, in how problems are going to be seen in the Unionist community.

Q: So the British were right to be furious when the Clinton Administration granted Adams a visa to visit the United States?

A: I believe that the President of the United States played a very creative role in bringing about last year’s cease-fire precisely because of the decision to grant a visa to Mr Adams at the time he did. It afforded Mr. Adams and Sinn Fein an opportunity to look over the hills, so to speak, at another land that might be open to them if they abandoned violence and pursued the path of peace. Through that opportunity--by Adams being given the visa--he was able to come back and persuade the IRA that this is a better way.

Q: How can Washington help the most?

A: I think the American role is not a day-to-day one--it is a strategic rather than a tactical role. The Americans can be helpful in influencing the parties to make that extra concession that might be necessary to help.

So sometimes the Americans may have to put a bit of pressure on the British to do something that they may be reluctant to do; or, equally, the Americans must be ready and willing to use their influence on others, others being the Irish government or people in the [pro-Ireland] Republican movement or the [pro-British] Unionists to get them to engage seriously. America must be seen to be approaching this in a balanced way. It cannot be seen to be part of any one-sided agenda.

Q: Are the British right to insist on decommissioning as a precondition of formal talks?

A: We all agree that there should be substantial progress on the decommissioning issue, but we also agree that it is only one item on the agenda, and it comes down to defining what is “substantial progress.” Does substantial progress have to include physical handing over of arms or can it be “substantial progress” of a political kind--where commitments are entered into or agreements are given on a contingency basis, plus if other things are happening, if other things happen then this would happen . . .? In other words, there is room for trying to find a solution that meets the requirements of “substantial progress” but doesn’t ask people to do things they feel they can’t do at this time.

Q: One wild card in all this is the extremists on both sides. Do the Irish and British governments have good intelligence on what they are up to?

A: Almost by definition you can’t have good intelligence on extremists, because it is not their intelligence that is working! . . . But, broadly speaking, both the Protestant loyalist and Catholic Sinn Fein organizations have been able to maintain a disciplined cease-fire--with the exception of a few minor incidents. And there is no reason not to believe that that discipline--which, after all, has been developed over 25 years and in a very pressured circumstance and in fairly close-knit urban communities--can’t be maintained. I think the risk of free-lance operations is modest.

But there are no guarantees in this world. Obviously, none of these organizations are places where everybody has the same opinion all the time. It wouldn’t be correct to suggest it.

Q: The movement toward peace--was it any one thing that caused that to happen?

A: . . . My own estimate . . . is that after 25 years, the people who are engaged in violence actually recognized that the violence was objectively defeating their objectives. That, for example, the IRA was using violence in trying to unite Ireland and yet the result of the violence was continued division between the two parts of Ireland and between the communities in Ireland. And that loyalists who were using violence for uniting with Britain, their use of violence was undermining union with Britain, because it was causing such a revulsion on the part of the people in Britain against so-called loyalists. So the decision to abandon violence was very much a rational decision based on a calculation that the policy of violence wasn’t working and there should be a rest.

Q: Do you think there is any possibility that the Irish constitution could eventually be changed in any way to satisfy Protestant concerns in the sense that if it were going to be one island, it wouldn’t have to have exclusively Irish Catholic values?

A: Yes, we have said, in the framework document [launched by London and Dublin on Feb. 22], that the Irish government would be willing to change the constitution to recognize the legitimacy of Northern Ireland as a separate entity and to give it recognition, to give it some distance, so as to remove the sense among some Unionists that there is a constitutional threat being held over them by Dublin.

Q: What about allowing abortion and divorce?

A: This has nothing to do with this. They are different issues entirely, and they are issues which are being approached on their merits. But, of course, changing the constitution of Northern Ireland, we would be related to that as part of the settlement.