Peace process as ‘a long, slow murmuration’: the Mark Durkan interviews
by Allan LEONARD
27 January 2025
The John and Pat Hume Foundation organised three events to launch a book by Graham Spencer — The SDLP, Politics and Peace: The Mark Durkan Interviews. Dawn Purvis chaired the event held at Ulster University, interviewing both author and subject, revealing insights from both.
Dawn Purvis introduced Graham Spencer (Emeritus Professor of Social and Political Conflict, University of Portsmouth) as someone who “has been writing about us here for probably the last 20-odd years”, which is demonstrated in his research output. She explained that this new book is the first in a series of books called Reimagining Ireland, published by Peter Lang.
Purvis asked Spencer what was the impact of 20 interviews with Mark Durkan — amassing at least 40 hours of recordings — “apart from the sore fingers when you were typing”. She put this another way: “What was the difference in terms of producing ‘a normal book’, where you research loads of participants and [this] one individual, over many, many hours?”
Spencer answered that the main difference was Durkan’s experience through the entire peace process, and this was how Spencer organised his interviews — going back to Durkan’s involvement in the SDLP initially, to the Hume-Adams Talks, through the Mayhew talks, back-channel contacts, the negotiations that led up to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, to the problem of decommissioning, Durkan’s perspective on unionism, and then how he sees the future:
“But the thing is, when I was listening to the recordings, so much comes out that you don’t pick up at the time. So, I needed to go back and ask Mark again and flesh out a few more details. I mean, I used to just interview people once or twice, but now invariably it’s five, six, or seven times. In Mark’s case, I probably could have done another 20, but my shoulders probably couldn’t have stood it as far as the transcription was concerned.”
Spencer said that one outcome of getting into the “nitty-gritty” of detail — as Purvis put it — was the emergence of layers in the peace process. He gave the example of Durkan describing his experience of the Poyntzpass atrocity (3 March 1998) and what went on around that at the time, with Spencer adding:
“In the 20-odd years that I’ve been doing this, it’s the constant search for all of the stories.”
Purvis turned to Mark Durkan and asked him how he felt — having been interviewed “thousands upon thousands of times by hundreds of academics and journalists” — to be interviewed over and over again by the same person getting into greater detail nearly every time you were interviewed.
Durkan replied that he thought he was one of many who Spencer was interviewing, like in his previous books, such as Inside Accounts (Volume 1; Volume 2), based on numerous ministers involved in the peace process; he thought that this was “the third leg”, with interviews with local parties. He added that at one point he wasn’t sure how so much of his back story was going to fit into the book. Spencer mooted a future book on the SDLP, which made Durkan think “he’s saving me for that”. Then, party colleague Alex Attwood told Durkan that “they’re trying to sort out when your book’s coming out”: “That was when I realised… that this was going to be a separate sort of piece in itself.”
Much of the rest of the conversation touched upon some key moments in Durkan’s career with the SDLP and his perspectives on the peace process.
Durkan explained how he was involved in the students’ union at Queen’s University Belfast, serving as deputy president of the Union of Students in Ireland. One of his holidays in the USA coincided with the 1983 UK General Election. Afterwards, John Hume contacted and invited Durkan to a meeting at Dublin Castle, when he was offered to work for him in Derry/Londonderry, which he accepted.
Purvis highlighted Hume’s mission to “internationalise” the situation in Northern Ireland, and asked Durkan for his knowledge and thoughts about this, including any role for dialogue for the peace process. Durkan replied that as a teenager growing up in Derry/Londonderry in the 1970s, you were aware of John Hume cultivating this American connection:
“You know, the relationship with (US Speaker of the House) Tip O’Neill and (US Senator) Ted Kennedy… The St Patrick’s Day events, the Speaker’s lunch… You’d read about this in the Derry Journal… There’d be a big splash, because John would make sure the photos were sent back and the stories were there.”
Durkan described his own direct involvement in cultivating the American relationship. In the summer and autumn of 1985, Durkan worked in the office of Senator Ted Kennedy, at the time that Nancy Soderberg also had just started working for the senator, on foreign policy: “Of course, I was feeding her a lot of the ‘Hume-think’ in relations to Ireland.”
Durkan reminded the audience that when he was in the US, it was the time of the New Ireland Forum report — of which UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously replied ‘Out, out, out’ to three suggested options. At the time, there was discussion in the US about establishing an international forum of support for Ireland, something that Tip O’Neill was particularly interested in:
“I used to be brought over to Tip O’Neill’s office… and he would tell me different congressional offices that I needed to be talking to, to line people up, to support the idea of a forum if there ever was an agreement reached between the British and Irish governments. Now, the thing is, he was sorting out all of the congressional people and, you know, I was just like a child pushing the dashboard, thinking you’re making the car go faster.”
Durkan added that O’Neill was determined to make something happen for Ireland, and not least to make sure US tax dollars and various American companies went to Ireland. He explained that this impetus went well back before his involvement — the sense of planting ideas in Washington of convincing people that there’s an alternative to giving money to Noraid, such as encouraging the British and Irish governments to be engaged together, “which was something that the British government had been resisting for so long”.
In response to Purvis’s question about how the Hume-Adams Talks affected the SDLP, Durkan said that a consequence of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement was that a united Ireland could only be brought about by peaceful means, with consent, and without a unionist veto — all these elements in the agreement upheld by the UK government. He explained how Hume felt an onus to take this logic forward, which led to the “Donegal conversations”, about direct dialogue with Irish republicans. Father Alex Reid was involved, who Durkan described as having “a constant gardener approach” to what became known as the Hume-Adams Talks.
Durkan explained that the initial work was to create some form of pan-nationalism forum, lining up the main parties in southern Ireland behind language on self-determination that would match Sinn Féin’s language, so that Sinn Féin could make the argument to the IRA that if all of nationalist Ireland is lined up politically on this position, then test that with the UK government and see where that goes — and therefore stop the armed campaign to allow that to happen.
Durkan got more specific, noting seven papers exchanged between the SDLP and Sinn Féin in 1988. He highlighted one paper from a meeting on 11 July 1988, regarding the pausing of the talks. A primary issue was Hume trying to convince Sinn Féin of some of the favourable consequences from the UK government’s position in the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. However, Hume understood Adams’s response in terms of, “You might say all of these things are implicit in the British government position. If they were explicit in the British government position, somebody might have a good point that they could ask the IRA to think about.” One can credit Peter Brooke, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, for subsequently making the British government position more explicit, Durkan argued.
Mark Durkan made a broader statement that if you want to understand the whole, long peace process of Northern Ireland, “you have to understand it is a whole, long thing”:
“Maybe it’s best understood as a long, slow murmuration. The starlings, at the start, it just looks like nothing’s happening between them. And then it just looks like there’s chaos, there’s going to be collisions. And then there’s a bit of cadence, there’s a bit of synergy. And then at times it fritters away and disappears.”
He added that it’s important to remember the number of different players and elements who came together, not just at a party-political level but people working at all sorts of levels:
“All that dialogue that people might have thought was wasteful… it did all add up to something.”