Britain’s Blair Rides Wave of Acclaim

By spurring the process that could finally restore peace here, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair may have succeeded where many of his predecessors failed. It was Queen Elizabeth herself who once lamented that though her ministers were expending great sums to deal with “these late altercations in Ireland,” all she got in return was “news of fresh losses and calamities.”

That was not the reigning British monarch, by the way, but Elizabeth I, expressing royal displeasure on Dec. 1, 1598. Four centuries later, Blair was at the center of clinching what may be the magic formula for Protestant-Catholic coexistence in Northern Ireland and cooperation with the province’s neighbor and Gaelic sister, the Republic of Ireland.

How great an accomplishment was the 44-year-old Labor leader’s handling of Irish affairs, dubbed by one of his early 20th century predecessors, Arthur James Balfour of the Conservative Party, “that most perplexing and damnable question”?

The Times of London gave its answer Saturday in a cartoon: It shows Blair walking on water.

“What we have done is get the right architecture, the right plans . . . for peace,” said Blair, who flew from the peace talks in Belfast to Spain to join his wife, Cherie, and their three children for the Easter holiday. “But we have to construct the building itself.”

To the devil with such modesty, some British tabloids seemed to say. They are already talking about Blair--along with Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell, the talks’ chairman--as a shoo-in for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The compromise deal Blair helped put together, which must still be endorsed by voters in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic and put in practice, was due to a conjunction of favorable political circumstances, Blair’s calculated gambles, building on past achievements, commitment and perhaps a dash of luck.

First, and decisively, the landslide election victory of Blair’s Labor Party in May 1997 meant that the incoming prime minister did not have to rely, as did his Conservative predecessor, John Major, on the House of Commons votes of David Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party, which hamstrung Major in his ability to alter the status quo here.

When Blair took office, the process of negotiating for peace in Northern Ireland, initiated by Major and Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds in 1993, was dead in the water.

Within two weeks of his election, Blair came here to demonstrate his determination to get the ball rolling again.

*

In his first major speech as prime minister, he also delivered a warning to the members of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army: The “settlement train” was leaving, with or without them.

But to prove to Irish nationalists, and the Roman Catholic minority as a whole, that he was serious about closing a deal, Blair went on to break taboos that Major could not--or would not--break. When he allowed Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams to cross the threshold at 10 Downing St. in December, it was the first such visit by an Irish nationalist in 76 years.

And Adams, branded an “IRA terrorist” by the conservative British press, was no garden-variety nationalist: He had spent 18 months in prison for belonging to a banned organization, and seven years earlier he had approved of an IRA mortar attack on 10 Downing St. itself.

Then in January, Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, Blair’s no-nonsense, touchy-feely minister for Northern Ireland, went into the bowels of the high-security Maze prison to ask Protestant paramilitaries, responsible for most of the recent sectarian killings in Northern Ireland, not to sabotage a peace deal.

It is hard, if not impossible, to imagine her starchy male predecessors doing that.

Blair once said that, as prime minister, he meant to focus on the “big picture.” And no domestic issue is more important than Northern Ireland’s three decades of violent strife, a legacy of Britain’s checkered, eight-century relationship with its smaller, poorer island neighbor to the west.

At the turn of the century, successive crises over home rule for Ireland posed the gravest danger in modern times to the British system of government.

The danger did not evaporate with the independence of today’s Irish Republic in 1921: 63 years later, the IRA tried to kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by bombing a Conservative Party conference in the English seaside resort of Brighton, narrowly missing her but killing five other people.

Confirmation of Blair’s determination to find a way out of what has been called Britain’s last colonial war has come from, of all people, Adams, whose lifelong goal has been getting the British out of the last six counties of Ireland that they possess.

“Tony Blair has met more often as prime minister with the leaders of the parties in Northern Ireland than all of his predecessors throughout ‘the Troubles,’ ” the Sinn Fein president said last week.

To forge a peace deal, Blair also had to woo Trimble, leader of Northern Ireland’s largest party, many of whose members were outraged by the courtesies being shown Adams.

*

The prime minister evidently succeeded, but some Ulster Unionists still talk as though they are on their guard.

“David was close to Blair all right, but it’s like taking paracetamol,” a senior party ally of Trimble’s said during the final phase of the negotiations, referring to a common anti-inflammatory drug. “One a day is OK, but this is being asked to swallow 40 at one go.”

One highly effective inducement Blair may have used to win over the Ulster Unionists, who are likely to head a new Northern Ireland government if the settlement goes into effect, is the more than $5 billion in subsidies the British government pumps into Northern Ireland yearly.

Blair quickly developed good working relations with Ahern and benefited from President Clinton’s commitment to, and interest in, achieving peace in Northern Ireland. But when crunch time in the peace talks came Tuesday, Blair himself flew to Belfast and threw himself into the negotiations.

For 36 hours at a stretch, he said when it was over, he did not sleep or take a break. Photographers allowed inside the talks site at the Stormont British government complex came back with pictures showing him looking haggard and starved for sleep, or sitting at a table cluttered with teacups and other debris and conferring with Mowlam.

The future will tell whether the deal reached on Northern Ireland will be Blair’s finest hour as prime minister of Britain.

His sovereign, at any rate, has expressed a good deal more satisfaction than her namesake did 400 year ago. Elizabeth II “shares everybody’s delight at the outcome,” a Buckingham Palace spokesman said Friday.