Potential is there for committees from hell

I became addicted to committees as an undergraduate

I became addicted to committees as an undergraduate. OD'd on them as a civil servant, went cold turkey at the beginning of my freelance writing career, stayed clean for a couple of years, accepted just one committee-membership on the grounds that it couldn't actually do me any harm, then just one more and soon found myself a hopeless junkie. After six years of having my finances wrecked and my life dominated by my habit, I managed to kick it again, and since then have had only the occasional lapse.

Now I sit only on the board of management of the British Society of Authors, an organisation so well-run and harmonious that board-members have nothing to do but rubber-stamp, there are no factions, nothing to plot about and my duties take up about 20 hours a year.

It was reading interminable accounts about cross-Border (or implementation, if you want to be posh) bodies, not to speak of listening to innumerable politicians and commentators talking about them that set me off down this particular memory boreen. For it suddenly came to me that if it is often ghastly being on a committee with people with whom you broadly agree, it would be a nightmare being on one of the proposed cross-Border bodies.

The committee that shortened my life and greyed my hair prematurely was the British Association for Irish Studies (BAIS), which I chaired for six years. Now there wasn't a person among us who didn't wish Irish Studies well and we were democrats to a man, but we had huge cultural problems, mainly caused by having among us not just English, Welsh and Scots as well as Irish - but huge intra-Irish tensions between Catholics and Protestants from the North, Irish from the Republic and British second-generation Irish.

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We had inter alia republicans, nationalists, unionists and people who didn't give a second's thought to Northern Ireland but just enjoyed mainstream Irish culture. We had people who were variously passionate about, for instance, Ireland's history, literature, music, politics or the Irish language. We had people who thought Ireland had to do with round towers and wolfhounds and those who talked about postmodernism and paradigms in relation to the diaspora. We had conservatives, socialists, Marxists, the politically agnostic and feminists. We had the A-Pint-of-Plain's-Your-Only-Man tendency and the politically correct. We had academics who talked of excellence and feared being swamped by teachers and teachers who complained about elitism.

While we achieved quite a lot from time to time, we had interminable meetings that drove everyone mad and our fifth and sixth years were dominated by almost exclusively intra-Irish faction fighting, culminating in a bitter election that horrified the English.

Now when you consider that in the BAIS we were all on the same side - to begin with at least - what an interesting future there will be for the implementation bodies. As is blindingly clear from the negotiations, there is a startling range of viewpoints. Because of the history of the last 30 years, there has been little opportunity to let cross-Border co-operation evolve intelligently or for the putative participants to learn how to get on together other than under duress.

Let's start with Dublin. The fundamental Southern notion that cross-Border bodies would be all to do with unionists ceding power was memorably demonstrated when Jim McDaid merrily and unilaterally abolished the all-Ireland tourist logo that had been painstakingly agreed both sides of the Border. It was a piece of thoughtlessness that fuelled unionist cynicism and came about because - as Garret FitzGerald spelled out at the time - cross-Border institutions had for so long been part of the nationalist agenda, they were taken for granted in the South and no one was addressing the question of how to cede sovereignty or share power.

Subsequently, during the talks process, it became clear that virtually no work had been done in official circles in the Republic on the issue, and that individual departments were fighting a rearguard action to ensure that none of their little empires had to yield any territory and none of their officials had to face being moved to Belfast. "The emerging message from all of them," said one observer, was "Bugger off."

At the highest level there was tension between the starry-eyed, then ideologically-driven, Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Finance, who think like their counterparts everywhere and made it clear that the DFA needn't think they'd get an extra penny to bring their dreams to fruition.

Since the agreement, say those on the ground, for the moment Bertie Ahern's pragmatism rules. He wants a deal and he's told Ministers and officials to do what is necessary to get it whether vested interests like it or not: "Shut up, we're getting this done." But it won't be Bertie who'll be sitting on the implementation bodies, it'll be Ministers and officials, many of whom are being overridden at the moment for political reasons, but who are biding their time.

The pan-nationalist front is no longer what it was, for it has been diluted by the strength of the relationships between Ahern and Blair and Ahern and Trimble and also because of totally differing attitudes of various parties. Seamus Mallon has the misfortune of being deputy to both John Hume and David Trimble, two congenital political loners, and for good measure he has Sinn Fein always snapping at his heels. It's no wonder he gets touchy and volatile and at times over-ambitious. But on the nationalist side, if the bodies come into being, Mallon and most SDLP members will be honourably trying to make them work for the good of all the people of Northern Ireland, Dublin will be trying covertly to curb their influence on the Republic and Sinn Fein will be still full steam ahead pushing the United Ireland agenda.

Then there are the unionists. Trimble is still just, and only just, keeping his party with him. The UUP have no problems with the idea of co operation, but their criteria are primarily economic rather than political. However, if the DUP and the UKUP were to join them on cross-Border bodies, UUP members will be under relentless scrutiny for supposed Lundy tendencies.

It's not that I'm knocking cross-Border bodies. In theory they could be of great benefit. But right now I cannot avoid the feeling that they have the potential to be committees from the depths of hell.