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was bound to have a “distinctive
character” all its own, something which
was “inevitable” given their sharply
antagonistic history. Since there was no
“shared history of debate and
negotiation”, dialogue would be a
difficult road to traverse and would
require a period of tentative
exploration (Irish Times, 10 May 1995).
Finally, and most importantly, there
was the need to keep Unionism on
board. This may have encompassed a
degree of self-preservation on the part
of the Conservative British
government, as their parliamentary
majority was slim and slipping away
and Ulster Unionist votes would
provide a necessary support. However,
it was essentially a matter of keeping
Unionists within the process by
mirroring many of their concerns. If
the peace process was to be kept alive,
it would certainly need Ulster
Unionists within it, and as Mayhew
stated, he was not about to call for
round table political talks if it meant
there would be “a large number of
empty chairs” (Irish Times, 5 September
1995).
There are certainly indications that
intelligence filtering up to the British
government stressed that
decommissioning was unlikely to
happen and was relatively unimportant
in terms of gauging Republicans’
commitment to peace in any case
(Mallie and McKittrick, 1996, pp. 350–
351). This implies that a hard line on
disarmament was not an intrinsic
imperative within the higher elements
of government and the security
apparatus. British policy was essentially
related to maintaining a Unionist
interest in the process by pressuring
Republicans on the question of
disarmament. For the British
government, the process remained
brittle while the question of weaponry
remained an unsolved part of the
peace equation. This fragility had been
exacerbated in British eyes by the
inability of the Republican movement
to categorise their ceasefire as permanent,
despite repeated public calls from
the government. Eventually the British
made a “working assumption” that the
IRA ceasefire was a permanent one
(Bew and Gillespie, 1996, p. 74), but
the political cost was to be the
underlining of the decommissioning
issue as a priority.
The ‘Washington 3’
Test
The demand for decommissioning had
become most explicit in March 1995 in
the form of the Washington Test
criteria, announced by Mayhew during
a trip to America. This called for a
“willingness in principle to disarm
progressively”, a practical
understanding of the modalities of
decommissioning, and the actual
decommissioning of some arms as “a
tangible confidence building measure
and to signal the start of a process”
(Irish Times, 8 March 1995). The overt
packaging of the decommissioning
demand in this way made the
government’s position easier to defend
(Mac Ginty, 1998, p. 34) and
impossible to ignore. Whilst
Nationalists and Republicans viewed
the third part of the test, ‘Washington
3’, as a unilateral pre-condition, for
Unionists it represented a capitulation
since it necessitated the
decommissioning of only some
weaponry prior to talks. The British
too viewed it as a “concession, a
weakening of the government’s
position” (Sunday Tribune, 10 September
1995), albeit a necessary one.
The issue was now impossible to
evade, given the emphatic trumpeting
of the Washington criteria, but the
dilemma now facing the government
was that Republicans were failing to
bite at this concessionary hook; instead
the British themselves became impaled.
Dislodging Washington 3 from their
political skin would simply result in
further Unionist disenchantment and
accusations of governmental weakness.
Similarly, assurances from the British
Prime Minister that the advancement
to inclusive political negotiations would
“accelerate beyond belief ” following a
symbolic decommissioning fell on deaf
16 B·I·C·C
ears (Irish Times, 22 September 1995).
Even the question of exploratory
bilateral negotiations between Sinn
Fein and the British government was
dogged by the decommissioning issue,
as the British insisted on the primacy
of disarmament in any discussions,
whilst Sinn Fein wanted a wide-ranging
exchange of views. Eventually a
compromise was reached in the form
of a semantic fudge, which allowed
Britain to raise decommissioning as the
first and separate topic of discussion,
after which Sinn Fein could refer to
any subject they wished (Irish Times, 25
April 1995).
The search for a
British-Irish
consensus
While this sort of semantic wrangling
allowed progress to occur in
exploratory dialogue, it seemed that
there could be no getting round the
blunt terminology of Washington 3.
The British view was that Sinn Fein’s
disqualification from substantive talks
was “self imposed” and there was no
enthusiasm for finding a means to help
Republicans negotiate their way round
the obstacle of prior decommissioning.
The idea that the question of
decommissioning could be separated
from substantive talks was seen as a
dangerous chimera: there was “no twin
track process. There [was] only a single
track. Some parties are further down
that track than others because they
have never been associated with
violence. Those that have been
associated with violence can catch
them up if they take off the brakes
that they themselves have applied”
(Irish Times, 21 June 1995). In this view,
decommissioning was to be the direct
evolutionary leap into political
respectability; a more circuitous route,
even if it could be started speedily,
would simply not do.
However, the British government was
not operating in a political vacuum and
had to take serious heed of its partner