What is the often overlooked role that the EU played in Northern Ireland peacebuilding? What were the challenges of the EU getting buy-in from the Northern Irish community and how were these tackled? What lessons can be learnt from this for other peacebuilding initiatives?
For this episode I was very grateful to be joined by Dr Giada Lagana, lecturer in politics at Cardiff university, to discuss all the above and more!
Sources highlighted in the episode for those interested to learn more:
What is the often overlooked role that the EU played in Northern Ireland peacebuilding? What were the challenges of the EU getting buy-in from the Northern Irish community and how were these tackled? What lessons can be learnt from this for other peacebuilding initiatives?
For this episode I was very grateful to be joined by Dr Giada Lagana, lecturer in politics at Cardiff university, to discuss all the above and more!
Sources highlighted in the episode for those interested to learn more:
Welcome to the Modern British Political History podcast. So for this one I'm joined by Giada Lagana, who is a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University. Welcome to the podcast, Giada. It's great to have you on, Ciao.
Speaker 2:Ciao, thank you so much for having me. I'm really glad to have this opportunity and I hope I will be up to the task.
Speaker 1:So we're talking about Northern Ireland for this one, giada and I don't know a huge amount about Northern Ireland and the troubles, and I think it's something people should know more about in the UK. Really, sometimes in parts of the UK people don't know enough about this really important subject. So my first question to you and it's a really big question but if you could summarize why was there a conflict in Northern Ireland? Just to give listeners who are less familiar with it a bit of a starting point.
Speaker 2:OK, I'll try to do my best, but, as you said, this is a huge question and it tends to take a whole semester when I teach about it just to be explained Now. First of all, the only initial point that I would like to make is that I tend not to use too much the expression that troubles, because in Northern Ireland this has very much British, unionist connotation. A more neutral term is talking about the Northern Ireland conflict and let's say, to summarize in very generic and very quick terms, violent conflict broke out in Northern Ireland in the late 60s between the nationalist minority, mainly Catholic population who saw to undo the partition of Ireland, which started much earlier, notably in 1921. And the unionists and mainly Protestant majority that wished to uphold the union with Great Britain. Now, socio-economic disparities reinforced the political and religious differences between the two communities, as unionists used their dominant position to discriminate against the nationalist and maintain their subordination.
Speaker 2:Although then the UK government remained responsible for the region, the Irish government supported the minority claims for an end to partition as the ultimate solution to the conflict, which in itself caused major problems, with then worry of antagonizing London by openly lobbying international opinion in support. To this end, the southern government, the Dublin government hoped in particular I'm going to touch on this point because I know that afterwards we are going to talk a little bit about the European dimension and the EU in this but then Dublin hoped that Ireland's joining the European community alongside the UK in 73 would decrease the relevance of the Irish border and ease the path towards the reunification of the island. And this tendency was thought to add the peace process also, in particular all through the 90s up until the achievement of the signing of the peace accord known as the Belfast Good Friday Agreement in 1998. And some feel that it can also enable nowadays, let's say, the ultimate latter goal of Irish reunification in the light of the Brexit process. I hope that was clear and as summarized as possible.
Speaker 1:That's really helpful to lay some groundwork for the conversation. So what, giada? What got you interested in this subject? So I think I'm right in saying you did your BA in Italy. So I imagine there's not a huge amount day to day where Italians are thinking about the conflict in Northern Ireland. So what first got you interested in this subject?
Speaker 2:OK, so there is a mixture of personal coincidences and passion. Let's say there is an Irish pub in my village in the middle of the end.
Speaker 1:As there is in many villages across the world, isn't there?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And when I was 17, the owner of this Irish pub in my village, in Vernand, advised my mum to let me go alone to Ireland to learn English, because Ireland was a very safe place, a very welcoming place, and it could have been a good experience for me. On the plane to Ireland, I met an Irishman, with all his family, and he was a really passionate of Irish history. On that flight and afterwards, when I met him again, he started just to talk to me about all these greatest men in Irish history, starting from Imon de Valera, michael Collins and Daniel O'Connell. And the first place he got me to visit was Kilmenham Jail.
Speaker 2:And when I actually moved to France, I was told that I could pick my own subject for my dissertation and I chose to study the media treatment that the Vatican, through its media outlet, the Observatore Romano, its daily paper, had done of the Northern Ireland conflict. And even while studying more and more about Irish history, but also in that first person who introduced me to Irish history, I never found anywhere else where people love their country as much as Irish people. And it is something that I will probably make a lot of people unhappy by saying that Italians don't do that Italians not love their country as much as, for example, irish people do. We love our food, but we don't have the same sense of pride and nationalism, and I really wanted to know more. And it's still there after more than 15 years.
Speaker 1:The rest is history. I guess after then I'm just going to be weighing back into some of the questions I had. So why do you think people in Britain tend to not always have, particularly in Britain itself, the island of Britain? They don't always have a huge understanding of the conflict in Northern Ireland and I wonder why you think that might be as someone who has a more external perspective on this kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Well, I think now there are a number of reasons for that the people who tend to have more knowledge of it outside, of course, academia and maybe the history teacher in schools etc. Or the people who are naturally passionate for history. But, let's say, the older generation tend to know something about it because either they live through it by then listening in televisions or in the news of reading the newspapers at the time and probably just getting that kind of news oh, the IRA struck again today and hundreds of deaths in Belfast or in Northern Ireland in general. But it's also the type of coverage that tends to be quite negative and so in terms of, let's say, the everyday life, it tends to make people a little bit afraid. So Northern Ireland was perceived, and still is perceived, an area where war rate and a dangerous place and a place that you wouldn't forcibly go on holiday to Belfast if you knew that the IRA could strike or also the Protestant slash unionist paramilitary groups could strike.
Speaker 2:The other people who have some knowledge of it is because they started it in school. But in general, what I learned from my students, for example, is that, yes, it is a topic that it is touched in high school, but, again, only marginally. And one of the reasons is that in high school we are all so preoccupied to learn everything about World War I and World War II and ancient and modern history. There is already so much on the programs that well, you get to the time at university if you want to learn more about it. But another reason I think that is the foundation of the marginal knowledge of the Northern Ireland conflict in the island of Britain is also that people are tired. People are tired two years in Northern Ireland.
Speaker 2:There are issues For what they know. There are always issues in Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland will always be problematic. So there is a little bit of this tendency let's just move forward because, by the way, that problem will never be solved. Or there is also, legitimately, the people who think, oh, why we cannot just get rid of this issue? By the way, it has always been an issue and it always will be. And it's incredible because Northern Ireland is such a small place compared to others and compared even within the UK itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there is so much history packed into such a small place, isn't there? And I completely agree with your point that in school I don't remember. You know, I went to secondary school in England and I spent probably more time learning about Henry VIII than his six wives, and I probably did about Northern Ireland, which is just still very recent history. So, yeah, it's just one of the.
Speaker 2:But what is also important to highlight, by the way, henry, is that it is not singular to Britain or the UK in general. In the Southern Ireland most of the students in high school have the same very marginal knowledge of the conflict that people in the UK have A lot of times, even in families in Ireland, etc. I've been told that I knew a lot more about Northern Ireland and Irish history in general than David. So it's not a singular to the UK, but it's common also in the Republic of.
Speaker 1:Ireland Are there in Italy? Are there any similar types of issues where people don't want to maybe talk about it as much because it's troubling or difficult in that same way, are there any equivalent?
Speaker 2:Not in the same level and on the same scale, because the same, let's say, the history of South Tyrol, for example, has never reached the same level of death and violence that Northern Ireland has had. But yeah, we know very little about South Tyrol except that it is an area of Italy that doesn't want to be Italian and again, probably making a lot of people unhappy. And then contemporary history in general in Italy is there is never enough time to get to all the 80s, the late 70s. So I know about Manipulita and the history of Betinocraxy, because there is a recent film that has been published and then it pushed me to go and read a little bit more about those type of scandals. But all of that it's still a little bit too much in the drawer, I'd say.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's an interesting thing about history, so this podcast is about contemporary history, and I think sometimes that's the hardest history to really know very well, because it's almost just right behind you and you almost can't quite see it, whereas I think a lot more people, like you say, in the UK, would probably know more about the Second World War and quite a lot less about the conflict in Northern Ireland at that point. Maybe if their parents had been around at that time, they might have told them a little bit about it, maybe, but it's that problem of history you can't quite sometimes see what's just behind you, isn't it? So we're going to talk a bit about the EU and its role in peace building. I was wondering, though could you say what point the EU got involved in the peace building process and maybe what kind of happened just a bit before that point the lead up to the EU getting involved in peace building in Northern Ireland?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. Now it is also. This aspect of Northern Ireland and of the history of the conflict has always been very much overlooked, in particular because the European Union has never been perceived any other than, yes, a super-national institution that has provided some money to Northern Ireland, most notably in the form of the peace programmes, but has never really sat around any table of the negotiations, and therefore it was an actor that had to be included among the peace builders in the region. What is important for me to highlight is that it's not because you cannot see something or someone sitting around the table of the negotiation that it means that it wasn't there and that it wasn't involved.
Speaker 2:The history of peace building in Northern Ireland dates way back, so way back, way before the 90s. Some scholars, including, for example, dr Thomas Lee, who is one of my colleagues in CARDI for my PhD supervisor, professor Nilo Docherty from the University of Galway, have argued that the attempts of building peace in Northern Ireland from the UK government itself the evidence exists dating from the late 70s. The same Sanindel experience, which was one of the first experiments in terms of power sharing in Northern Ireland, can be seen as one of the first attempts to solve the problem of the conflict and to build peace, and some of the men involved in the Sanindel agreement later became key figures in the Northern Ireland office and of the whole peace process and the talks in Northern Ireland. Everything is highly interconnected and has had to encompass many stages and many forms before becoming what we know today being the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. But the main issue, I think, is that peace building is an ongoing historical practice that needs to be incorporated into a public policy agenda for peace and for what relates to the European community, as it was at the time.
Speaker 2:It got involved in Northern Ireland because it was asked to and it was asked to be involved by the people who, mostly at the time, believed in the European project, who were certainly. The first of them was the Northern Ireland member of the European Parliament, john Nume, who also was one of the architects of the 1998 Belfast Good Friday Agreement and also got the Nobel Peace Prize, and he used the European Parliament to lobby on the European elites. He was sitting at the time among people like Willy Brandt, people like François Mitterrand, who had political leverage not only within Europe but on the international scene. And well, all those speeches within the European Parliament make people aware that a region of the community was in a situation of conflict and it was the duty of the community to do something. And other members of the European Parliament from other political groups, from the European People's Party, from the same cellist group where you sat, started to ask to know more, started to ask what can we do to help you?
Speaker 2:And there were a number of exercises first, to historicize the Northern Ireland conflict within the European institutions not a bit through reports that were written about the history of the conflict. What was very smart, I think, is that all those reports, the most important one being the Haggurup report, were completed and compiled by neutral people, so people who were not from Ireland, from the UK or from Northern Ireland. The main author, the author of the Haggurup report, the MEP Niels Haggurup, was from Denmark and he went to Northern Ireland. He spoke to people, he read documents from all the political parties, north, south and from the UK and then informed on what was the situation and on what could be done from the part of the European community. And that has remained up until today the blueprint for what has become the European Union peace-building strategy for Northern Ireland and to solve the Northern Ireland conflict.
Speaker 1:And Giada, you mentioned that idea of I think you used the word about neutrality. Was the EU seen by the people in Northern Ireland as being a neutral, good faith actor, because that feels like it's quite important for the EU to be accepted as having a role in this. That people need to see it in that way, don't they?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely, and no, it wasn't. At the beginning there were many, let's say, political symbolism connected to the European Union that made it perceived, in particular by the Protestant Unionist community, as an entity who would basically force them, in time, to get to a united Ireland. But I always use this quote and I'm paraphrasing here because I don't remember it word by word, but it was used by Reverend Ian Paisley, who was the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, who is a very well-known party and one of the major majority party for the Unionist community in Northern Ireland, and it was an MEP and it was always very open to work with the others MEPs also, in particular with John Nume within the European Parliament, and the way, let's say, he sold it to his community was we are going to milk the cow dry and once we have milked this cow dry, we are going to shut the cow, which in general can be paraphrased as okay if the European Union, the European community as it was at the time. I use often the terms interchangeably, because now everyone knows that the EU has always been everyone calls it the European Union, but we all know that before 93 it was the European community or European economic community, so the European Union was very smart to understand that because it had not the right to be a political actor, a fully political actor, within the conflict. It had to work through the high politics of the two member states and governments involved, the Irish and the UK governments.
Speaker 2:The European Union could not go to Northern Ireland and say, okay, we are going to implement this type of policies, of this building, because this is out of the authority of the EU itself.
Speaker 2:So it needed to work through what already existed and in particular, it needed to bring together the two governments, the Irish and UK government, to help building peace in the area.
Speaker 2:And that's what it did. And in that action, let's say in that strategy, he found the three Northern Ireland MEPs that at the time were John Hume, ian Paisley John Hume, of course, for the Nationalists slash Catholic community, ian Paisley for the Unionist and Protestant, and Jim Nicholson again Unionist and Protestant community to be very cooperative, to really work together for the goods of Northern Ireland. And the European Parliament is the first political arena where that happened. So the point after the 80s was to translate that at the local level, to translate that cooperation at the Northern Ireland level, which was a big work and it was aided by a number of political events that happened locally, in particular at the Irish UK level. One of those certainly is the Downing Street Declaration, or also just the Anglo-Irish agreement, which institutionalized an Irish role into Northern Ireland's affair, or at least recognized that the Republic of Ireland had a say, even if a marginal one, on what was happening in Northern Ireland, but especially that it had a say in trying to help building peace and the violence.
Speaker 1:And tell us a bit more of what the EU brought. So it sounds like there's that element of being able to bring different parties together that they're bringing. Is there also an element of funding that they're bringing to this as well, and their resources that they're bringing and that kind of thing?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely, let's say. In the various, what many now years in which I have studied this, I think the main achievement that the European Union influenced Northern Ireland brought was to empower civil society groups to take ownership of their own peace process. Because, you see, peace building and peace is not just about institutions and high politics that certainly is absolutely key but where the European Union could really make the difference was also to build peace from below. What has been called and theorized by yes, people like great scholars like John Paul Ledrak, has the bottom-up peace building, and the European Union and that particular money. That was the started that was created after the paramilitary ceasefires in 1992, the peace package created in 1993 under Jacques Delors and, in particular, with the European Commission Task Force, was to really going on the streets of all the main cities and towns and areas in Northern Ireland sending officials, representatives from the European Commission, saying okay, what do you need? How can we help you? And I've read the first report that this task force wrote.
Speaker 2:It was a massive amount of work, but the first thing then, created through peace one, was to start bringing to life and giving money to those organizations. Some of them already existed, some others got created by this European Union funding to help I don't know former, newly released prisoners to find jobs, helping women, widower or victims, families of the victims to again basic needs, employment, reconstruction, all that you can think about. That makes a society work and all that work was really done by these organizations. And of course, then there are many issues also on that, especially because, first of all, working with the European Union is a very bureaucratized process. So a lot of the spending, a lot of this money needed to be justified. But you see, often you can't really ask, or can you, to a community group to justify all the drinks that they have served in one of the meetings where they brought the families of the victims and the former paramilitaries together for a storytelling project or so.
Speaker 1:But that's also the it's quite hard to quantify these things, isn't it? I mean, you might be a group and what you've achieved is I don't know these families over here. Get to know these families over here better, but that's not something that's very easy on a spedge to say.
Speaker 2:You know, this is the value and the priority is also mostly thinking about what you have achieved, the contents of those discussions, if that is a project that can run over the long term, instead of just thinking how can you tell me how did you spend the money for the food that you have served on that day?
Speaker 2:I'm just making this example to show, but that was also part of working within the European Peace Programs and also often those peace programs add a specific time frame. Now I don't remember by art all the time all the specific years of the peace programs, but let's say that the peace one finished in 1997 and the start of peace too was 1999. That gap of one year often meant that those organizations could simply not continue their work without the EU money and then they had to stop what they were doing. But as I said before, peace building is a long term process and should have been thought through and planned in a way that would include it into any specific renewed agenda of public policy for a new peaceful Northern Ireland and that also I suppose it can be a bit demoralizing as well If you have money or resources given to you and then taken away.
Speaker 1:that can be quite disheartening, can't it?
Speaker 2:Yes, and it's especially also impacts negatively on what you could or you have already achieved, because it puts even if it is just temporary a temporary stops. So these are just some of the criticisms that have been moved to the peace programs and they are very practical and very real, and I think that some work has been done on the part of the European Commission in particular to try to tackle this issue. But I have to do more interviews, in particular to the participants of programs like Peace 4 and now Peace Plus, to see if at least some of these issues have been solved outside of this. And this just because often I speak so positively about the European Union and some people well, that's even some of the stakeholders tends to say okay, but there are also issues with this. So I point out the issue in order to show awareness.
Speaker 2:But it is, in my opinion, undoubtful the fact that the peace package in itself is a unique instrument. It is also unique in the sense that the European Union has created something similar only for Northern Ireland, and it comes from a very precise historicization of the context and it has been updated on the basis of how the context of Northern Ireland was changing, so that every single peace program was really aimed to impact on an area of need Peace for young people, for example, peace to industrial and urban regeneration, peace three, memory and reconciliation. And what I have always argued is that from this uniqueness and from all of this also, the European Union should learn on how to design its more generic peacebuilding strategy, because there is so much to be learned from Northern Ireland itself that all that knowledge should not be going to waste, but should also be used to improve the European Union itself.
Speaker 2:And to what extent in Ireland, have awareness of the impact and what has been done in terms of funding and other works projects that More awareness has been raised by Brexit itself, because when, let's say, you are in danger or you are actually losing something, then you realise that something existed and was actually also helping you positively.
Speaker 2:But I think that everyone everywhere this is not just on the island of Ireland in general it is true in the whole European Union Everyone gives the European Union and anything the European Union does for granted, and this is a problem not as much of the member states yes, a little bit, but I think this is mostly a problem of the European Union, because it is so bad to advertise what it does and, let's say, to blow its trumpet, if we want to call it like that. Definitely there is more awareness after Brexit, as I have already said, and more awareness and more recognition exist in the Republic of Ireland, because the Republic of Ireland has always been, let's say, more Europe positive than other member states, in particular, mostly also because the Republic of Ireland owes a lot of its incredible economic boom to European membership. But definitely even nowadays, after Brexit, more awareness is needed and more also should be done everywhere, not just between these islands.
Speaker 1:On a related point. So I think a lot more people, potentially, or many people, know about Tony Blair's role in helping with the Northern Ireland peace process and I think to a lesser extent people know about John Major's role. I think possibly it's undervalued maybe John Major's role, but both of them had a role and people might have a sense of what they contributed. How would you evaluate the EU's impact in creating peace in relation to Tony Blair's role and his government's role and John Major's role?
Speaker 2:Well, as I was saying before, they are very different in their nature, in the sense that the European Union role was of a completely different nature than the roles that any prime ministers has had in building peace in Northern Ireland. The fact that the UK government was directly involved into the situation in Northern Ireland because it had the responsibility for Northern Ireland. The European Union was asked to intervene but had to work through the high politics A very interesting study that I have published just this May, so it's very recent. I have analysed most of the archives existing from the 90s and the time in which the first talks about peace started, about Northern Ireland within the UK government, then between the UK government and the Irish government, and then in relations in general to Northern Ireland and creating an executive. All those talks that then brought the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
Speaker 2:And in all those phases there was always a very important European dimension where the EU was also just brought on the table of the negotiations to keep people talking because especially in the first stage of those sets of negotiations, we are talking about people who didn't even want to be in the same room and often the European related aspects of, for example, cross-border cooperation, keeping the Irish border open, keeping the flows of people and goods alive across the Irish border and between and across the Irish sea, for example.
Speaker 2:Well, it was a way to at least having people talking about matters that would perceive the more neutral, instead of, for example, talking about the disarmament of the paramilitary groups and what I have. Recently publicly interviewed the Irish Tishok, former Irish Tishok Berthyrn, who worked very closely with Blair over the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and he told me that him and Blair were always keeping their colleagues into the European Council and into the European institution in general updated of anything that they were doing in Belfast and everything that was happening in Belfast during the month of April 1998. And one of their first trips after the signing of the agreement was to Brussels to present the achievement and to make sure that the EU kept supporting what they had done, because they knew and Berthyrn told me so, they knew that the institutional part was essential but they could not achieve societal peace without the help of the European Union.
Speaker 1:That's interesting and it's given me a new perspective on why both John Major and Tony Blair where some of their pro-European Union principles, some of that might have been gestated possibly within when they were trying to create the peace process actually working with the EU and seeing the value of it from that perspective might have influenced some of their thinking.
Speaker 2:Yes, and then you see, in terms of probably it is also not known as much, because most of what I found was in background discussions, background notes about the EU dimension, but it didn't translate in anything more, for example, of Article 3 of the Downing Street Declaration, a couple of mentions to the European dimension and the EU institutions, into the official text of the Good Friday Agreement. But what I have argued, that what I personally think is that even if it is just one article, even if it is just one mention, in the event, while official document, it had months and months of discussions, of exchanges on the back. So that dimension was there. It wasn't the most essential one, it wasn't the most visible one, but it was there and it helped to move things forward. It was part of the puzzle.
Speaker 1:My last question, Giada, is about why do you think this still matters now and what's the legacy of the EU's role in peacebuilding in Northern Ireland?
Speaker 2:It definitely still matters now because of Brexit and also because, as we said at the very beginning, it's not like the issues all issues have been resolved in Northern Ireland, or that the disagreements about the territoriality, about the union, which union has been resolved, and almost Brexit opened up more discussions about which nature of which union it is in the future of the island of Ireland.
Speaker 2:End of Northern Ireland.
Speaker 2:In particular, I think that one of the main points to take from these aspects of the story that still matters nowadays is that concept of togetherness, because at the end, what the politicians of the 80s and the 90s were able to achieve, they were able to achieve because one day they decided that they could actually work together and that they put so much work and effort to bring the people out around the table of the negotiations and trying to open up that table of the negotiations to everyone, also to those that they were calling terrorists a fun day before, but they were part of the Northern Ireland society, so they needed to be included.
Speaker 2:Like at the very beginning also, there was an effort to make everyone understand that also the Southern government had a part to play and needed to be accepted around the table of the negotiations. Probably what the Brexit process hasn't learned from all of this is that I don't think that everyone can say that everyone was included around the table of the negotiations of the Brexit process, notably not the Northern Ireland parties itself and not Northern Ireland civil society, as we saw, was empowered and was essential in building peace at the everyday level in the region. So if anything needs to be taken out of all of this, is the importance of togetherness and of bringing everyone around the table of the negotiations, especially when you are discussing their own future, because peace building, to maintain its integrity, must work on the people and must be able to offer a form of peace that is defensible, also rhetorically defensible, across all the platforms and all the aspects of the everyday life of people.
Speaker 1:That's a really hopeful and really inspiring message to finish the podcast on. Last thing I was going to ask is if people want to learn more about this, who are listening. What would you recommend to them both, please? If you'd like to talk about any of your own work, this is a chance to or if there are other pieces of work that you'd like to point to, that'd be really helpful.
Speaker 2:Well, on the website of the Irish Association for Contemporary European Studies, there are IACES, there are a lot of resources, policy briefs, policy reports, links to video on YouTube of public interviews and events that have been organized by the association, where you can see Bertie Ier not only speaking about what I was talking about before, links to books that have been published by all the members of the association.
Speaker 2:Research centers, such as also, for example, the Welsh Government Center at Cardiff University, are advertising a lot of works in terms of the future of the union, but also specifically works related to Northern Ireland cooperation across the Irish Sea. And, of course, all these community groups in Northern Ireland that I was talking about are all included into the PEACE platform, which is accessible through the Special EU Programmes Party, SUPB website, where you can find all, for example, the programs that have been programs and initiatives that have been funded through the PEACE programs, and you can learn more about all the groundwork that has been done at the societal level and that is still ongoing, and also with contacts of people and for everyone who would like to participate or volunteer in any of this project. I'm sure that there will always be space.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. We'll say goodbye to those listening to the podcast now and I'll say a big thank you, giada and Arrivederci.
Speaker 2:Arrivederci, grazie mille. Thank you so much, I really enjoyed it.