Blair Would Have Met With IRA

Irish Voice News

Blair Would Have Met With IRA

March 19, 2008

By Barry McCaffrey

FORMER British Prime Minister Tony Blair offered to meet the IRA’s ruling Army Council for face-to-face talks after former President Bill Clinton convinced him that it could cement the peace process, a new insider book is set to reveal.

Jonathan Powell, who acted as Tony Blair’s chief of staff for 12 years, reveals in a new book how, at the behest of Clinton in 2001, Blair asked Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to arrange top secret face-to-face talks between himself and the IRA leadership.

Blair’s former aide claims that soon after he left office in 2001 Clinton convinced the British premier that he needed to meet the IRA leadership in person.

Revealing how Blair became convinced that his negotiating skills could persuade the IRA’s Army Council to begin decommissioning its arsenal, Powell said, “Tony was always convinced of the powers of persuasion that he had to win people over.

“About three or four times he suggested to Gerry Adams that he should meet the IRA Army Council.

“Adams said, ‘Well I’m not really sure about that.’ One time he said, ‘Yes, maybe’, but then it came to nothing.”

A former student of Oxford University, Powell and Blair first met while the former was working as a diplomatic secretary at the British Embassy in Washington in the early 1990s. Both men were in Washington to closely follow Clinton’s electoral success in 1993.

For more than 12 years Powell was seen as Blair’s official unofficial envoy, making countless secret trips to Ireland to meet the Republican leadership.

Powell’s book Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland promises to give the single biggest political insight of what the British government was thinking during the decade which led from guns to government in Northern Ireland.

Blair’s top aide admits that while the former prime minister claimed in public during negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 that IRA prisoners would only be released after a two year period, in private he offered a secret deal to Adams which would see the release of IRA prisoners after just one year.

The book further claims that the Sinn Fein leadership often allowed Powell and Blair to re-draft Republican statements in the run up to key parts of the peace process.

Powell also claims that his former boss was prepared to face down the British Army over its refusal to remove watchtowers from the strongly Republican South Armagh. Eventually all watchtowers in south Armagh were removed as part of confidence building measures.

However, Blair’s former aide also claims that Blair came in for strong criticism from the SDLP for what they saw as the British government’s pandering to Republicans.

“Seamus Mallon’s complaint is that we talked to Sinn Fein because they had the guns. My answer to that is, ‘Yes and your point is?’” Powell writes.

“We were talking to the people who had influence on the people with guns.”

Rejecting the notion that it was ever realistic for Blair to have met the IRA’s Army Council wearing balaclavas, Sinn Fein vice president Pat Doherty said, “It was unnecessary and didn’t happen because there was really no need for it to happen.

“Sinn Fein were there negotiating on their own mandate from a Republican perspective, but in terms of the factuality of it, yes Tony Blair, on probably more than one occasion, said he was prepared to meet the IRA.”

After leaving Downing Street last December, Powell was appointed as a senior managing director of Morgan Stanley’s investment banking division.

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