A single-minded peacemonger

MEMOIR: Albert Reynolds: My AutobiographyBy Albert Reynolds, Transworld, 488pp, €20  Fifteen years after resigning as taoiseach, and with his achievements in the North secure, Albert Reynolds tells his own story

ALBERT REYNOLDS was taoiseach for just over two and a half years, but in that short period he seized control of Northern policy and was the main architect of what became known as the peace process. By the time he left office the Provisional IRA’s long campaign of violence was effectively over for good. Many others who served in the taoiseach’s office for far longer achieved much less.

On the day he took over as taoiseach in February 1992, Reynolds astonished everybody, including his own family, by saying that a settlement in the North was his top priority. Nobody had ever heard the Co Longford businessman talk about the issue before, but he was as good as his word and threw himself into the task with a single-minded determination that proved unstoppable.

Reynolds’s achievement was not merely to get the IRA to stop killing people; he managed to get the republican movement to accept the principle of consent. The acceptance that a united Ireland could only come about with the consent of the people in both parts of the island represented a fundamental shift for republicans, and it is one on which all the subsequent political progress in the North has been based.

The tragedy for Reynolds was that the very qualities of stubborn single-mindedness that enabled him to achieve what nobody else could in relation to the North also brought his Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition to an untimely end in November 1994.

It is a pity that his autobiography has only now been published, almost 15 years after his departure from office. He explains this in the prologue by saying he made himself a promise back then to write a book only when time had proved that peace was permanent. “For now,” he writes, “I’m content that what we started in the early 1990s, the silencing of the guns, the end of the conflict, the lasting peace, still holds. Now I can write my book.”

Given that most of the important events described in these pages happened in the early 1990s, the book is remarkably fresh. One of its great strengths is that, like the man himself, it is utterly unpretentious. Unlike most political autobiographies, the book does not have a grandiose self-serving title, simply Albert Reynolds: My Autobiography.

He tells his story in a straightforward, breezy narrative that sweeps the reader along and he indulges in surprisingly little political score-settling. He makes it obvious that he is not a fan of Des O’Malley, or Bertie Ahern, but he rarely indulges in retrospective bile. He is even quite generous towards Dick Spring, the man who tumbled him out of office in 1994.

Reynolds provides a short but vivid description of his childhood and young adulthood in the midlands. He recalls with deep affection the day he walked into a drapery ship in Ballymote, Co Sligo, and first met his wife-to-be, Kathleen Coen. The importance of his relationship with Kathleen in every aspect of his life is an endearing thread that runs right through the book.

In telling his tale, Reynolds is well-served by his ghostwriter, Jill Arlon, who keeps the narrative moving along nicely. The account of controversial episodes, such as the Beef Tribunal and the break-up of Reynolds’s two coalition governments, is partisan, but it would be hard to expect anything else in this kind of autobiography.

IT IS SURPRISING to find that as a young man Reynolds came into contact with the Unionist politician, Harry West, and with Lord Brookeborough through his job in CIÉ organising the transport and delivery of cattle to their farms in Co Fermanagh, which is closer to Longford and Roscommon than most people realise.

Still, there was no indication that the businessman-turned-Fianna-Fáil-politician, Albert Reynolds, had any great interest in Northern Ireland as a political issue. He never spoke about it in the Dáil and while he says in the book that he was unhappy with the way Fianna Fáil opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, negotiated by Garret FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher, he did not go public on the issue at the time.

When he became taoiseach, however, he launched into the search for a solution with gusto. For the previous two decades the holy grail of Irish and British politicians had been to devise a political solution that could bring peace. Reynolds simply stood conventional wisdom on its head, starting from the premise that if peace could be brought about, a political solution would follow.

He was lucky that he came to power just after John Major had taken over as British prime minister. The two men had struck up a warm relationship as finance ministers and this meant that they got off to a flying start when they both reached the top job. Major has recorded that of all the political leaders he dealt with during his time in Downing Street, Reynolds was his favourite, even though they had some ferocious rows. Neither could have brought about progress on the North without the other and Reynolds freely acknowledges that, in Major, he felt he’d found the British statesman most committed to solving the Irish problem since Gladstone.

Things did not run as smoothly between Reynolds and the leader of constitutional nationalism in the North, John Hume. One of the illuminating features of the book is its description of the fraught relationship between Reynolds and Hume, then the SDLP leader, in the run-up to the Downing Street Declaration of 1993. There is some fascinating background material on the so called “Hume-Adams” process and the large egos of all concerned.

Reynolds managed to achieve what he did through the relationship of trust he built up with the republican movement and its leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, through the Belfast-based priest, Fr Alex Reid. Less well-known is the fact that he also developed a close relationship with the Church of Ireland primate, Archbishop Robin Eames, who made an important contribution to the wording of the Downing Street Declaration. Reynolds also developed close ties with the Rev Roy Magee, who briefed him on loyalist opinion.

IN ALL HIS dealings with the British, the republican movement, nationalists, unionists and loyalists, Reynolds managed to get and retain their trust – but he was also prepared to call their bluff when required, and risk collapsing the process. He famously tackled Major at a summit in Dublin and so shocked the British prime minister with the ferocity of his language that a stunned Major snapped his pencil in half. More to the point, the prime minister got the message, and within weeks had agreed the historic Downing Street Declaration, which is the foundation stone on which the peace process was built.

Reynolds also recounts how he gave short shrift to a delegation of leading Irish-Americans who arrived in Ireland at the end of August 1994 with the message that the IRA was prepared to announce a six-month ceasefire. “Who gave you permission to go negotiating for me with your six months?” said the furious taoiseach, in Reynolds’s account. “There’s no way. If you come back from Belfast with your six months, I’ll not be taking it. You can tell Gerry Adams that if six months is on the table he can take it off again. It’s permanent or nothing.”

In the event, just as he got the Downing Street Declaration from the British, Reynolds got the IRA to commit to a cessation of violence which ultimately did prove permanent.

Charles Haughey reputedly told Margaret Thatcher during his teapot diplomacy of 1981 that history would remember the politician who solved the Irish problem rather than the one who was best on the economy. On the Irish side, Reynolds can fairly claim to have been the one who ultimately made the difference.

Stephen Collins is Political Editor of The Irish Timesand author of The Power Game: Ireland Under Fianna Fáil,published by O'Brien Press