It was just like the end of a hand of stud poker last Wednesday. A couple of players are still in the game. Some cards are face up and each player has a few cards close to his chest. It's the turn of the British, to show their cards or up the ante. The British showed a full house. To the rage of the British, republicans responded by showing a pair of deuces.
Why would the British be raging? Let's take the analogy a bit further. You need another player at the table, the unionists. The red cards face up in front of them indicate that they might have a flush, as you would expect with David Trimble playing. Unfortunately they have no chips and can't pay to see republicans' cards.
Republicans suspect that the unionists are holding a busted flush. So do the British. How do you keep the unionists in the game if the British show a full house and it turns out republicans have bluffed them all with rubbish? Being out of funds the unionists' can't even own up to their busted flush.
The answer is the British fund the unionists and make republicans change their hand. This time when the British show their full house and unionists show their busted flush, republicans place four aces on the table. Unionists claim a moral victory. The British kept them in the game even though they'd nothing to play with – they got to see republicans' cards and they weren't bluffing.
Sure, the scenario's flawed, but it's close. The public are entitled to ask why the British behaved as if they were playing a game of poker. Why was it that they didn't know until the day before the planned summit at Hillsborough exactly what the IRA statement said?
Sinn Féin and the UUP have known for some time the details of the joint declaration. Why did the two governments let them know its contents without knowing what the republican quid pro quo was?
Was it not a singularly inept piece of negotiating on the part of the British in particular? It seems they assumed that if Sinn Féin were broadly pleased with the joint declaration then there would be a statement forthcoming from the IRA detailed and specific enough to get David Trimble through his next Ulster Unionist Council meeting.
It seems a fairly basic point to make, but, on the poker analogy again, why didn't the British withhold their declaration until they saw the terms of the IRA statement?
This is a valid question because in their extreme irritation at the shortcomings in the IRA statement the British have let slip how the process works.
Until now all sides have subscribed to the fiction that whenever they see a joint Irish-British proposal, Sinn Féin go to the IRA and 'use their influence' as it says in the Good Friday Agreement, to persuade the IRA to respond positively. We now know that Tony Blair's advisor, Jonathan Powell, met Gerry Adams and others on Wednesday and was shown the IRA statement which P O'Neill would issue at the weekend. Powell knew that once issued it couldn't be 'unissued'. Unionists would have to reject it because Trimble couldn't win a vote in the UUC. There would be no election on May 29.
Since we know that the British know, and have known for years, that the toing and froing between Messrs Adams and McGuinness and the IRA is a fiction, back to the question. Why are we here? Why did the British not insist on seeing an IRA statement long before they proposed publishing the joint declaration and negotiate on the statement? Why did they wait until the day before? Surely it is elementary in negotiations that all documents to be agreed are agreed in negotiations by both sides? Is it the case that previous IRA statements have been non-negotiable?
Since we know the way it works, it's clear that Dublin and London haven't just issued declarations blind, but have had advance sight of the IRA response, but are we to understand that in the past the British or the Irish and British governments have spent months negotiating and then issued declarations immediately on seeing an IRA statement without a chance of altering it?
Are we really to believe that after six months of negotiation on the minutiae of the Irish-British joint declaration the British might have run with it as soon as they saw an IRA statement?
If that has been par for the course so far, then you have to take your hat off to the man with the republican cards face up on the poker table in front of him.
