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(by Ed Moloney, Sunday Tribune)
Ask anyone in the SDLP who they rate as the best poker player they know and its odds-on that most would nominate their deputy leader, Seamus Mallon."He knows instinctively when an opponent is bluffing and just when he should up the ante. In politics that's a skill he uses to judge the right moment to make a deal, the exact moment his opponent has no other option", confided a colleague who left many an annual SDLP conference with a lighter wallet than he arrived with.Ten days ago Seamus Mallon was arguing to close the deal with the Provos on the Hillsborough Declaration. Their leadership had, according to a variety of sources at Hillsborough, conceded at long last that the Good Friday Agreement included an "obligation" to disarm and was indicating, Unionists at least claim, that once the Easter commemorations were over they would try to sell the rest of the deal, day of reconciliation and the putting of weapons "beyond use" included, to their grassroots.
Mallon had doubts based on a fear that once the Provo leadership got away from Hillsborough and their grassroots had time to digest the reality, the awful reality to them of the declaration the whole thing might start to fray at the edges and disintegrate.
"Seamus wanted the Provos signed up there and then and the rest of the deal hammered out before we left Hillsborough", revealed the same colleague. But other counsels prevailed. The Provos needed time to bring their people around and couldn't go to their Easter marches having given up guns, it was argued, and so the two prime ministers opted for a ten day adjournment.
We will all know reasonably soon whether Seamus Mallon's poker playing instincts were correct. The last seven days however have not augured well with Sinn Féin "formally" rejecting Hillsborough, using language stronger than that used by the IRA and displaying an unyielding demeanour that had been absent from most of the Easter speeches. Add to that the panic that gripped the ranks of Alliance, the PUP and the Women's Coalition and the almost complete absence of any substantive negotiation at Stormont and its no wonder the prophets of doom had a field day last week.
The question that emerges from all this is - what are the Provos up to? Have the prospects of decommissioning and a new executive begun to disintegrate as Seamus Mallon feared or is a deeper game being played?
Both scenarios are credible. The rank and file Provo response to Hillsborough was overwhelmingly negative. Decommissioning was one line in the sand they had been told their leadership would never cross nor allow to be washed away. The implications of decommissioning, as Danny Morrison put it, are truly awful for the republican base for it will allow the dissidents to cry 'we told you so, it was a sell-out by Adams all the while'. After all while ceasefires and Good Friday Agreements can be explained away as tactical and reversible manouevres, decommissioning is incapable of being portrayed in any but black and white colours.
Given the strength of feeling on the issue, and the investment of faith made by middle level leaders in the SF and IRA top brass, it is perfectly possible that the fear of a split is now so great that Sinn Féin leaders have concluded that decommissioning is beyond their ability to deliver. If that's the case the Good Friday Agreement is doomed and what we are witnessing is a damage limitation, blame allocation exercise by Sinn Féin.
The other theories, to which the peace process optimists are holding a firm grip, are all varieties of the notion that the Provos are playing a tactical game of some sort. With one of two stubborn exceptions amidst their mandarins, both governments are inclined to this view and base it on the analytical assumption that having travelled all this distance and time, perhaps starting as long ago as 1985, the Provo leadership is not going to scuttle the ship now, not when safe harbour is in sight.
"I have a very open mind", confessed an Irish participant in the process. "My instinct is that it will work but I'm not sure when. Collapse of course is possible but I don't think it will. My only doubts are the timescale and unpredictable events". A British source echoes: "I suspect its a question of timing".
The other factor behind this quiet optimism is the proximity of the local government elections in the Republic and the Euro polls in both jurisdictions, electoral considerations that are bound to be at the forefront of Sinn Féin minds given the role these played in the formation of the peace strategy.
"Its perhaps harder to read the North but as far as the South is concerned if this issue is not settled the voters will blame Sinn Féin", concluded one observer in Dublin. "Six months ago people here would have allocated the blame for failure more or less equally between them and the Unionists but not now".
If this is the case, then the Provos are more likely to be playing for time and space than implementing an exit strategy, time to get their people used to the idea of decommissioning and space to arrange matters so that the Hillsborough Declaration can be replaced by another agreement which, no matter about its inevitable resemblance to the April First draft, does not have so many Unionist fingerprints all over it.
There have been many deadlines set during the course of this stage of the peace process nearly all of which have been blithely ignored. But the first week of May sees nominations for the Euro elections and the start of that campaign. That's now the real deadline and no-one will be able to ignore this one.