Impossible Peace: a conversation with Brian Rowan
by Allan LEONARD
5 September 2024
In a room packed with dozens of guests at the newly established Black Mountain Shared Space, journalist Mervyn Jess facilitated a conversation with Brian Rowan about his Impossible Peace project, to marry old cassette tapes with a document archive to mark the 30th year since the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994. The resulting book, Impossible Peace, was available with compliments, with a cassette player ready for playback next to the two speakers.
Mervyn Jess began by explaining that the archive will be shared through Open University’s Open Learning programme, which is available to everyone. This project is also sponsored by the Irish Government’s Reconciliation Fund and has the backing of the Healing through Remembering group.
Jess asked Rowan what was his catalyst in putting this project together. Rowan answered that when he thought back over the 30 years, he thought of “those who were the key players in this process, no longer with us — critical memory, gone”. He remarked that even looking for some people from 1994 was very hard: “In 10 years, time, it would be too late. Rowan added:
“When I press play on some of these tapes now, I realise I’m listening to the dead, and we’ve had others in our company, recently, listening back to their younger selves.
“These recordings were never meant to be for broadcast. They were part of book research that I was doing, or maybe just trying to gather people’s thoughts while they were fresh in their heads. So, they’re real-time recordings. Some of them go back to just a few weeks after the ceasefire [declarations] of 1994.”
Rowan said that there are two outcomes of this project. One, new writing with 20 contributing essays from some of those “who were at the heart of events in 1994”. Two, through listening to the audio recordings, “you hear the nervousness of peace, you hear the risks involved in peace, you hear the fears of peace”.
He said that people will tell you now when they talk about the peace process that it was as if we knew everything at the time: “We knew very little, to be honest with you.” Rowan explained:
“The people who made those ceasefire decisions had been involved in very tough dialogues, debates, angry conversations, for months upon months, before that news came to us [journalists].”
Jess confirmed this perspective:
“Even weeks before the ceasefires were announced, most people wouldn’t have thought that such an announcement was even possible, never mind it was going to happen… Even to try to explain to the wider public through the media that this was going to happen, I think most people were caught completely unaware that this was even being talked about. When it came, when [the IRA ceasefire] was announced, I think that it took a while for a lot of people to actually grasp it and believe it.”
Jess asked Rowan if that played into his thinking when interviewing the various players at the time. Rowan answered that if he were to say now that he understood the changed mindset, the “crossing of the Rubicon” (as put by contributor Denis Bradley in the book), “I’d be telling a lie.” He recalled meeting a woman in a café who read to him and colleague Eamonn Mallie a statement from the IRA that included the words “a complete cessation of military operations”. Rowan remembered thinking to himself, “What does that phrase mean, or what doesn’t it mean?”
He reflected on the loyalist paramilitary ceasefire statements, too, revealing to the audience that some months before the IRA ceasefire announcement of 31 August 1994, the loyalists were thinking of going first. Rowan said that he learned that Archbishop Robin Eames was involved in some quiet initiative in the background, and that loyalists had shared a document with him in March 1994, which they wanted to share with UK Prime Minister John Major.
But events on the ground, such as a series of tit-for-tat sectarian killings, changed the situation and meant that the loyalists would not go first with a ceasefire. Rowan played an audio clip of an interview with Eames, which Rowan said gave a sense of the nervousness of the situation at that time. Eames spoke about seeing a copy of the ceasefire wording that would be used in the loyalists’ ceasefire on 13 October 1994:
“I thanked God. I thank God particularly because I had said to them, ‘A ceasefire is going to be very, very hollow unless you can say something about the victims of violence.’ I was relieved when I saw they spoke about remorse. I realised also that there’d be mixed feelings in the public mind about this. But I was relieved.”
Rowan played an audio clip of Gusty Spence explaining what he meant by the loyalist ceasefire statement line about remorse, in a broader context:
“I wasn’t reading that statement for Gusty Spence. I was reading that statement for every genuine person out there who had felt remorse about anything ever that had happened in Northern Ireland. From a personal point of view, I wasn’t speaking about 25 years [of the Troubles]. I was speaking about every injustice that had been perpetrated by Protestant on Catholic, or Catholic on Protestant, or government on people of whatever hue.”
Rowan said that the other big line in the loyalist ceasefire statement of October 1994, typed in bold, was “The Union is safe.” With another interview audio clip, then PUP leader David Ervine explained what was meant by this:
“’The union is safe’ is basically an assumption. There are those within unionism and loyalism who would be shattered to hear me say that. But it is an assumption. It’s not a complete assumption, but elements of it are assumptions. The element of assumption, quite frankly, is that there are so many big reputations riding on a peace in Northern Ireland, who say there are no secret deals, that there will be consent and democracy. That being the case, if they are liars — and I doubt that they are — what effectively you would do is give loyalism the moral high ground in any future difficulty that may arise. And I don’t think they would be prepared to do that, whether it be John Hume, Albert Reynolds, John Major, Archbishop Eames, Cahal Daly.”
Rowan shared how he spoke with both John Hume and Gerry Adams, separately, in February and March 1995, when negotiations and talks hadn’t been achieved. In the played audio clip of John Hume, he talks about how his dialogue with Gerry Adams engendered trust:
“We had been meeting for a long time. We even met during the 1992 elections… Throughout my dialogue I realised that Gerry Adams was being straight with me… and I think he accepted that I was being straight with him. In other words, in spite of our deep differences, a great deal of personal trust in our respective points of views.”
Meanwhile, Adams described the IRA’s ceasefire declaration as the best opportunity to bring about peace and justice:
“Yet no one knows — me, you, Dublin, London — how it’s going to turn out. No one knows. No one can call it. What is clear is that if we don’t remove the causes of conflict, we will indeed have not only squandered the best opportunity for 75 years, but the causes of conflict will fester… and resurrect.”
Within months of this interview, the IRA detonated a large bomb in the London Docklands. Jess described how the BBC had planned a positive, post-ceasefire reformatting of the presentation of the news, but this event “brought you right back to reality… We went back to doing what we’d been doing for the previous 25 years.”
Rowan put the event into a longer retrospective:
“It was a grim reminder that 1994 [ceasefires] wasn’t an end, but it was a beginning of a very long end.”
Rowan and Jess continued discussing other events during the peace process, including the Poyntzpass killings, the murder of loyalist Billy Wright, and the post-agreement Omagh bomb.
Remarking on the awarding of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize to political leaders John Hume and David Trimble, with the role of mediators such as Denis Bradley in mind, Rowan said:
“I think the Nobel Peace Prize should have been in a much wider frame. I think it should have been [given] to the parties to the Good Friday Agreement, not just those who made the agreement possible, but those who made the ceasefires possible.”
Rowan uses the words of former RUC Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan to make a point about the importance of momentum in a peace process. Flanagan discussed different security and political perspectives on the question of arms decommissioning:
“From a security point of view, the major threat posed to us by the IRA is through their engineering capability, the ability to improvise weaponry and explosives. The truth is you cannot decommission engineering knowledge. If you comprise the threat as of two major elements — the ability to engage in violence… and the will to engage in violence… It is much more important to eliminate the will to engage in violence… We would accept there are political dimensions. There’s a question of confidence building. There’s a question of a demonstration of absolute commitment… Those are issues and decisions that governments have to make.”
Rowan told the audience that he thought that had the UK Government listened to Flanagan in 1994–95, the IRA ceasefire may not have broken down in February 1996:
“I remember someone saying to me that in a peace process, you have to allow people to swallow in digestible chunks, and what was being asked in those early weeks and early months was much more than people could swallow. But I think Flanagan had a much better sense of the pulse of this place than the Secretary of State [for Northern Ireland] Patrick Mayhew.”
Rowan concluded his presentation with his thinking about peace negotiations:
“One of the big pieces of learning is that peace is not what you demand… Negotiation is not just about what you want, but it’s about what a negotiation needs. It’s about compromise. So, peace not being surrender. Peace needing momentum.
“As I look out at the world today, the hope that we had in ’94 that grew out of the word ceasefire has become such a dirty word in the Middle East. The leadership that we had in ’94, including international involvement and guarantors, is not there in the Middle East at this stage.
“We shouldn’t take for granted what we’ve got, the peace that we have, however flawed — is for all of us now to try to make something better. We have had this remarkable process of change. I actually find that when I’m in rooms like this, I sense more hope than when I’m standing in a corridor at Stormont… I’ve heard more truth in rooms and in conversations that I once considered unimaginable, than you will ever hear in a hundred truth commissions.
“I think we need — and I’m talking about addressing the past that doesn’t shovel it down on top of future generations for the next 30 years, and if we don’t do it soon, we’re going to condemn not just the conflict generation but the next generations… I don’t think legacy can be a debating society. I think we need a government and governments to bring in an international team from outside of us to write the report of the conflict years.
“We need to stop lying about what truth might be. The barrier of truth is not just national security. All of the organisations to the conflict period have truths they will never tell… There are stories that will never be told by the state, by the IRA, by the loyalist organisations… Truth, in our situation, will be edited, it will be redacted, it will be managed.
“When I talk about an international team writing that report, there are going to be big challenges that go beyond those who were directly involved in the violence. There are challenges for the church and what they have to answer for, challenges for the media and what we have to answer for, and challenges for many others.
“So, I think we can have this pretend-conversation about truth and legacy for another 30 years, or we do something sooner rather than later that will not answer all of the questions, but maybe with pens free of emotional ink, write the story from outside of us. And it would be one of those reports that we’re simply going to have to agree to disagree on. There’s no such thing as one narrative, one truth.”
From the audience, Rowan and Jess took questions, which varied from whether any international reporting team would need to be agreed upon by both the UK and Irish governments (“Yes, it would.”), to whether it would need to reach a consensus among the Northern Ireland Executive parties (“No, it wouldn’t,” citing the example of the Chris Patten-led commission on the reform of the police service of Northern Ireland).
Jess remarked on how visiting journalists from the Balkans or the Middle East ask him how journalists from across the divide — Catholics and Protestants — managed to work with each other during the Troubles. He said he told them, “It didn’t really enter into it. We were just doing the job that you were employed to do.”
I spoke to the audience, recalling a conference with politicians, activists, and government officials from Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine gathered to exchange knowledge of respective peace processes. Disappointed by the grandstanding by most of the Israel/Palestine panellists, a colleague replied to me that they hadn’t even started the conversation for peacemaking. I reminded Rowan that he began this evening’s event highlighting all the conversations that took place over many decades, but I suggested that it will take many decades in the Middle East because they aren’t talking with each other.
In response to Jess’s remark about other international journalists working with each other, I spoke about my recent experience of a Kosovo-Northern Ireland exchange project, with professional journalists participating across communal divides in both places.
About truth and legacy, I underlined Rowan’s statement that there will be different narratives. The issue is how do we accommodate these different narratives — what are we going to force young people to remember? What goes into our history curriculum? Where do we send our schoolchildren to go visit?
I concluded with a note of optimism, recalling that the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is written in the language of equality and human rights, and suggested that whether it’s an international commission or not, the frame of reference should be a humanitarian one with reference to the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Rowan reflected on the unbelievability of the 1994 ceasefires at the time and retaining hope for ceasefires and peacemaking elsewhere:
“I found it very difficult to believe [the] 1994 [ceasefires]. I suppose when you’ve reported a conflict for so long it’s difficult to believe that this might be it, over. I didn’t believe we’d get to the Good Friday Agreement, because I was lost in the fog of all that was going on around that. One of them [visiting journalists from Israel/Palestine] came to me afterwards and said to me, ‘Why did you not believe?’ I said believing is like peace itself — it’s a process. You need time to see something that makes you believe. He [responded], ‘I take some hope from that… You didn’t believe in 1994 and 1998 and yet they happened. Maybe we [in Israel/Palestine] have a chance.’
“So, I don’t think [Israel/Palestine] are a million miles behind us, because in 1994 I thought we were a million miles behind getting to where we got to go.
“It needs a moment, needs a leader… somebody who knows how to lead. And it needs those hard dialogues to begin quietly, and who knows — as we didn’t know in 1994 what was going on behind the scenes before it appeared before us. I don’t think it’s hopeless.”
Mervyn Jess finished with a remark about the Northern Ireland peace process:
“Foreign visitors who come here, usually from the Middle East, all the time ask us about our peace process: is it really peace? The answer is, well, it’s not a perfect peace, but what we have in this country today is a hell of a lot better than what we had 30 years ago. And that’s as much as you can say without fear of contradiction, and that’s worth having before we go on to the next stage.”
