Joint membership of the European Union transformed relations between Britain and Ireland and assisted them in their efforts to resolve communal conflict in Northern Ireland, a conference at University College Dublin was told yesterday.
Prof Brigid Laffan, from the Department of Politics at UCD, said that although US diplomacy was central to the success of the Good Friday negotiations, the agreement itself owed much to the context created by EU membership.
She told a conference of the Institute of British-Irish Studies: "Joint membership of the EU altered the context of British/Irish relations in a radical manner by providing the Irish economy, polity and society with a highly-institutionalised and rule-bound context within which it could adapt to economic and political internationalisation."
She said the EU system offered a far more benign external environment for small states than previously: "EU membership enhanced the presence of the Irish state in the European and global arenas and the European market gave the Irish economy the opportunity to diversify and expand. It provided a continental home for the Irish economy and polity that enabled Ireland to move from dominance and dependence to interdependence.
"The formal equality of the British and Irish states in the EU moderated and tamed the asymmetrical relationship between the two countries and embedded their relationship in a wider multilateral framework."
Prof Laffan said the EU gave British and Irish ministers and officials a forum for continuing contact across the range of public policy issues: "EU meetings, particularly European Councils, provided British and Irish prime ministers with an informal arena to discuss Northern Ireland at the margins of EU deliberations. Bilaterals became such a common occurrence that officials began to prepare for them as a matter of routine.
"In addition to the business content of such meetings, they provided an important opportunity for relationship building between the heads of government."
Given that Northern Ireland was part of the EU as a region of the United Kingdom, European institutions were "external parties" to the problem. "Institutions, notably the Commission, became very interested in Northern Ireland," Prof Laffan said.
The director of the Institute for British-Irish Studies, Mr John Coakley, reviewed the work of the cross-Border bodies set up under the Good Friday agreement. "There is little evidence that political posturing has had a negative impact on the work of the bodies. At the political level as well as the bureaucratic one, common sense seems to have taken precedence over ideological reservations and the logic of co-operation, in areas where the case for this is irresistible, has been accepted," he said.
The bodies had worked smoothly even where the ministers involved had been a "triangle" made up of Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionist Party "a relationship that would have been inconceivable five years ago". But the agreement also provided for areas of North-South co-operation and here progress had been much slower, he said.