Opinion

Newton Emerson: Presence of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in Belfast suggests positive briefings on Stormont

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Newton Emerson
Newton Emerson Newton Emerson

Rightly or wrongly, hope was in the air at the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Queen’s University Belfast, which hosted the main events, had been warned before February’s Stormont deal collapsed that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair would not attend if the executive was not restored. Yet both former leaders showed up and expressed a confidence in Stormont’s resurrection that suggests positive briefings behind the scenes. Comments from Gerry Adams, Peter Robinson, David Trimble and Bertie Ahern all indicated likewise. The weakest response of the day was from the British and Irish governments. Secretary of state Karen Bradley and Tánaiste Simon Coveney had a low-key bilateral meeting then made the usual announcement on resuming talks as soon as possible - and where were the Taoiseach and the Prime Minister? Theresa May recorded a two-minute video tribute to the agreement for the Downing Street website, apparently while standing in her office hallway - the sort of thing any marketing manager could knock up in half an hour. Leo Varadkar sent a single tweet, followed by another tweet showing he was in Dublin’s National Gallery to launch a routine government report.

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Frayed relations between London and Dublin were demonstrated when Conservative Brexit secretary David Davis accused the Irish government of hardening its stance on Brexit under the influence of Sinn Féin. The comments, dismissed by Varadkar as “strange” and “inaccurate”, were so at odds with any basic understanding of Irish politics that various conspiracy theories took hold, most centred around the idea that the Conservatives are creating a Sinn Féin bogeyman for British voters to blame when Northern Ireland wrecks Brexit (or vice-versa.)

However, the simplest explanation remains last year’s assessment by Dominic Cummings, the director of Vote Leave and a former Tory special adviser, that Davis is “as thick as mince” and “as lazy as a toad.”

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Queen’s University history professor Paul Bew has marked the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement by debunking the phrase ‘constructive ambiguity’. The phrase was actually coined in 1974 to describe the Sunningdale Agreement. Apart from decommissioning, as Bew points out, the Good Friday Agreement is rigorous and precise, however ugly the scaffolding it specifies. This is so obviously correct that anyone who has lazily used the term, myself included, must wilt with embarrassment. More to the point, the Good Friday Agreement is ill-served by a cliché that excuses whole parts of it - the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, for example - from lapsing into abeyance when the requirement for them is crystal clear.

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Arlene Foster finally appeared before the RHI inquiry and within minutes asserted twice she had done nothing wrong regarding the doomed energy scheme, contrary to “misinformed” and “malevolent” speculation.

One point of agreement between the DUP leader and her interrogator, the inquiry’s senior counsel David Schoffield QC, was that she had presided over a department with a broad and high workload.

“There were a lot of things going on,” Foster said, listing her ministerial responsibilities at the time of the scheme. Schoffield then tried to tease out an admission that energy policy had been a low priority amid all this frantic work. Foster conceded she had not found it very interesting.

Yet a feature of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, as it was called under Foster’s tenure, is that nearly all its remit was farmed out to well-staffed agencies such as Invest NI, the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, the Health and Safety Executive and the Consumer Council.

To that extent, energy policy was the main thing on Foster’s desk.

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Rates bills were a month late last year while the Northern Ireland Office pondered how to set them in Stormont’s absence without it looking too much like direct rule’s presence.

This year that problem has apparently been solved, as bills have been issued right on time via Westminster legislation with nobody batting an eyelid.

One problem remains, however. A four per cent surcharge (masquerading as a four per cent “discount”) has been applied to monthly as opposed to annual payments. This is three times what it costs government to borrow over a whole year, let alone to borrow a sum paid off through the year. It seems that the glide path to direct rule is being flown by a sneaky budget airline.

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One year ago this week, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell had a piece published in the New European newspaper, in which he wrote: “You hear middle class unionists in the rugby clubs and the golf clubs saying ‘I never thought I would hear myself saying it, but perhaps we would be better off in a united Ireland if that means staying in the EU’.”

This story had subtly changed when he repeated it this week ahead of the Good Friday Agreement anniversary, saying: “You do hear stories of middle-class unionists in the golf and the rugby clubs saying ‘if we’re going to leave the EU, we might as well stay in as a United Ireland’.”

Had Powell forgotten we’d heard this story from him?

newton@irishnews.com