Today is Not a Day for Soundbites

Today is Not a Day for Soundbites.

If I was asked what I would put in a time capsule, I would reply, ‘The Good Friday Agreement’.

And if you want to know why, read my story:

I was born on the very same day that Tony Blair stood on the steps of Stormont and delivered his famous eulogy:

A day like today is not a day for, sort of, sound bites, really – we can leave those at home – but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders, I really do.

So while Tony stood on the steps of that historic building on that historic day, feeling the hand of history on the province, I, who a few moments ago was cocooned in a bath of amniotic fluid, was being handed to my mother after what the midwife termed a textbook birth – unlike the stormy birth pangs of the new Assembly. My mother’s three terms were smoother than the three strands of the Agreement, which could be described as three straws with each party thinking that they’d drawn the shortest one. Their suspicions about each other led to each party believing that the other parties were pulling a fast one and leaving them no choice but to pull out of talks themselves. I was thinking of how apt the word ‘strand’ is as Belfast was built on a sandy ford across the River Farset. The word came from Béal Feirste, or the mouth of the Farset, which was an Irish word meaning ‘sandbar’. As the poet Louis MacNeice wrote in Valediction, Belfast is built on reclaimed land.

If the strands were ever to be woven into a pretty plait like the ones you see on Goldilocks in fairy-tale books, both sides would have had to decommission more than their guns; they would have needed to decommission their ingrained versions of their own histories.

While my mother was going to-and-fro and tiptoeing around me, Jonathan Powell was going to-and-fro among the panes in the Johari Window hoping for a breakthrough. He felt that all this grandstanding, last-minute deal-making, eleventh-hour reprieve was somehow synonymous with the Irish psyche. In the Unionist camp there seemed to be raised voices behind the locked doors. The Sinn Féin camp were purring like Cheshire cats and loved to receive the occasional pat on the back from America or Dublin or indeed from any part of the globe. It was important to them to convey an aura of taking the moral high ground by giving up the armed struggle, one of their cherished ambitions, and they were acting like coming to the negotiating table was almost a holy grail too far. They were getting hell from their rank-and-file volunteers, many of whom had served time in ‘the Kesh’, who felt that they were being short-changed. What could Gerry Adams do to keep the diehards at bay, those whose mantra was Charles Stewart Parnell’s war cry that ‘No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation’? Jonathan Powell even admired Adam’s gall in keeping the talks on track and not losing his temper. Yes, the psyches of the Unionists and Sinn Féin had been moulded in the crucible of history.

I imagined that Jonathan Powell had grown to hate Castle Buildings and dreaded stepping out of the helicopter like some kind of deus ex machina dropping in to save the talks. What was being sold to these politicians was more like snake oil. He must have thought it was like a kind of window dressing and not the real deal. He would have had visions of the Band-Aid not sticking for too long. Powell was aware of how these deals panned out; he knew that if they signed their Good Friday Agreement, it would be plain sailing for a while and then it would all be up in the air. As soon as those blades started rotating and they took off across the Channel tongues would start wagging and heads would start rolling. Not much wonder Tony Blair was so jittery. If India’s memory had undergone what Rushdie terms as chutnification , the memories here were dipped in formaldehyde – Damien Hirst could add to his shark exhibit and dip this province in formaldehyde. Yes, just take the folk on the hill and dip them in formaldehyde, and Castle Buildings as well. Jonathan Powell said, ‘From the very day I set foot in it, I felt I was being chloroformed, rendered hazy with sick building syndrome.’ Apparently he couldn’t believe the state of the place. He commented that its Formica panelling was in a poor state of repair. ‘Couldn’t they spend some money on it and get it spruced up?’, he wondered. He thought the whole place was a warren of corridors and it was impossible to get your bearings and he thought, ‘not much wonder the place was in a tumult… it must have been one of the longest political stalemates in history…and it wasn’t as if they’d never had a good prime minister…’

The Formica was being chipped away gradually and civil rights were being chipped away zealously, and now the building had become ill and the community had fallen apart.

The building reminded Jonathan Powell of the lines from Shelley’s elegy to Keats:

And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time

Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;

Like Humpty Dumpty on the narrow wall, who at any moment could accidently fall, the Agreement could fall apart at any moment and all the prime minister’s horses and all the Taoiseach’s men would struggle to put it together again. So a compromise had to be reached, and the words had to work hard enough to save the deal and ultimately to spare lives. Strand One, the one that would strengthen the umbilical cord with England, was the one that was going to be a thorn in the republicans’ flesh. Their Schroeder staircase was heading down south, whereas the Unionists’ one was heading to Westminster. And Dublin’s staircase was going to have to be rearranged. 

But despite all these shenanigans, and standoffs and stalemates, the Agreement was signed, sealed and delivered on the steps of Stormont on Friday 11^th April 1998. It was a fait accompli, a feat of diplomacy, a tour de force and if future generations open the capsule they will find a blueprint for reaching a consensus against impossible odds. Or if by some twist of fate, the capsule floats into outer space and is intercepted by aliens from an alien planet who are in the throes of a civil war, then will have the playbook for sorting out an intransigent conflict.