Opinion: Major omission

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In a dyspeptic editorial about the new power-sharing government in my ancestral home, Britain’s Daily Telegraph grouses that former Prime Minister John Major was snubbed at the celebration of the breakthrough in Northern Ireland, despite his having made a significant contribution to the peace process.

The Torygraph is correct. By announcing his retirement to coincide with the new government in Belfast, Prime Minister Tony Blair accentuated his own role (which the Torygraph says consisted of kowtowing to the IRA). But in the seemingly interminable run-up to peace in our time, it was Major who joined with Ireland’s Prime Minister in the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, which anticipated the messy compromise (the North is British until it doesn’t want to be, but kinda Irish too) that ended the Troubles.

The phrase that leapt out from the declaration was this: “The Prime Minister, on behalf of the British Government...reiterates, on behalf of the British Government, that they have no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland.”

Colonel Blimp types—and not only in Northern Ireland—had fits about that declaration. And Protestant ‘Loyalists’ in the North surely suspected a subtext: the traditional Englishman’s wish that those crazy people over there, Catholic and Protestant, would just go away.