A Stormont spin doctor recently baited me with the suggestion that, in future, people would get all their news on the internet, cutting out the middle man of the
established media. Politicians, he argued, could propagandise and consult hundreds
if not thousands of people interested in policy areas through Facebook, and then
tweet their views and news directly to interested parties.
Twitter feeds are indeed quick and easy compared with the plodding print media,
which gives you yesterday's news, and pesky TV companies, which sometimes neglect to
broadcast important press conferences. Unfortunately, though, the standard of
material on Twitter and Facebook can be little better than rumours heard in the pub
or at the hairdresser's. Tweets may be true, half-true or untrue. They are neither
filtered nor evaluated, so the Mayan calendar's predictions of doom in 2012 get
equal billing with the Olympic Games. You choose which to believe.
We journalists do a lot of donkey work for a busy populace. We make mistakes at
times, but we can be sued and held to account. In the final analysis, people stop
paying for our work if we get it wrong too often, or ignore important aspects of a
story. Some citizen journalists develop the same skills but, until they do, relying
on them for information is like getting some bloke you meet in the pub to mend your
car: hit and miss. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than WikiLeaks.
As the political editor of the Belfast Telegraph, I was one of the people called in
to look at the 1,900 or so US diplomatic cables the newspaper (and the Irish
Independent) obtained last March. Most of the Northern Ireland material was finally
sifted by Adrian Rutherford, an intrepid digger and analyst, after I was diverted by
a family bereavement and other commitments.
A good deal of sweat and skill was needed to make sense of the cables, to extract
stories from them, and to report the information in context. The original material
contained lots of conjecture that turned out to be false or misleading. Large parts
were boring and technical. The originals didn't always meet the standards for
publication in a newspaper. All of them needed to be checked against known events.
However, misjudgments made in the past, for instance the persistent tendency to
underestimate Peter Robinson, are fascinating in hindsight. With Robinson, the
perception of his weakness probably increased the DUP leader's leverage. All this
was a service to newspaper readers and took about eight weeks to perform.
Often the material in the cables was correct and insightful, but on some occasions
the assessments of diplomats and the information given to them by local politicians
or diplomats turned out to be wrong. All told, they presented a fascinating insight
into the peace process between 2004 and 2009. The big concern of the British and
Irish governments, at least as told to the American diplomats they briefed, was
bringing and keeping the DUP and Sinn Féin onside.
In the 2003 assembly elections, Sinn Féin and the DUP pulled ahead of the Ulster
Unionists and the SDLP for the first time. Publicly, the two governments appeared to
be supportive of David Trimble and Mark Durkan, the latter two's respective leaders.
The hope seemed to be that these two parties would make a comeback. They had pushed
through the Good Friday agreement in the face of Sinn Féin foot-dragging and
outright opposition from the DUP.
Privately, though, we can see that the real focus was on bringing the DUP and Sinn
Féin along. They were seen as the parties who, however maddening they might be at
times, could push the peace process to the next stage. The focus turned out to be
accurate. Ian Paisley's and Gerry Adams's parties wiped the floor with their more
moderate rivals, winning 14 of the province's 18 Westminster seats in 2005.
By last year, Kamala Lakhdhir, the American consul in Belfast, was reporting in
detail on the SDLP and her assessment was withering. She described Margaret Ritchie,
the leader, as earnest but wooden and her main rival, Dr Alasdair McDonnell, was
likened to a bull in a china shop. Reviving the SDLP was seen as an "uphill task".
In earlier cables, Sinn Féin talked of a back channel through which the DUP was
sounding it out throughout much of 2004. At that time it was the loudly stated
policy of the DUP not to communicate with republicans, nor ever enter government
with them. After publication last week, the DUP issued a carefully worded denial of
this, but the cables show there was no doubt in the minds of Sinn Féin, or the
Irish, British and American governments, that this back channel existed.
For instance, in May 2006, a report to the State Department on a meeting with Bertie
Ahern, then the taoiseach, states: "Ahern expressed disappointment with the DUP's
refusal to engage with Sinn Féin, particularly with 'childish' tactics at the
Northern Assembly Stormont Buildings like ducking out of elevators carrying Sinn
Féin members. He pointed out there had been over 30 instances of quiet contact
between the DUP and Sinn Féin during the December 2004 negotiations."
Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff, has recounted in his memoirs how he
advised Sinn Féin not to put so much stock in the back channel and to rely on open
negotiations through the governments.
Alan McFarland, a negotiator for the UUP in 2004 but who later left the party, has
told me a senior Sinn Féin member told him of contacts with the DUP and named
members to whom he had talked.
Any contacts appear to have been broken off after the Northern Bank robbery in
December 2004, a crime about which Sinn Féin denied all knowledge but which put the
party in the diplomatic deep freeze, especially as it was followed by the murder of
Robert McCartney by a group of republicans returning from a commemoration. The
cables show the Irish and American governments describing Adams's denials of IRA
criminality as "absurd".
Nevertheless, only a few months later, the governments were worrying about how to
get Sinn Féin back on board. In March 2005, Dermot Ahern, the republic's foreign
minister, told the Americans that the PSNI had informed him it was time to "lighten
up" on Sinn Féin as further pressure could be destabilising.
There was a similar courtship of the DUP. After the 2004 crisis, the governments
"churned the process" by stepping up north-south meetings to put pressure on Paisley
to negotiate. Bertie Ahern considered threatening to revive the republic's
constitutional claim to Northern Ireland if Paisley didn't re-engage and stop saying
he would never share power with Sinn Féin.
At times, the governments sounded desperate as they cast around for alternatives,
but it is important to remember that their tactics worked. Sinn Féin was weaned away
from IRA violence and criminality and the DUP was coaxed into doing business with
Adams and Martin McGuinness. Despite all their gaps and mistakes, the WikiLeaks
cables do help fill in gaps in that history. But if you read the originals, do so
with care.
