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Irish leaders talk about their peace Political opponents join in U.S. tour to promote Northern Ireland's economic renaissance Saturday, October 10, 1998 By James O'Toole, Politics Editor, Post-Gazette
Seamus Mallon told a tale of exhaustion, hunger and hope.
"We hadn't been to bed for three days and three nights," he said. "I don't think we'd had anything to eat the previous night. ... We were negotiating right through the night. And I don't think I'll ever forget walking out that door.
"It was snowy," he said, recalling the dawn of last Good Friday. "I had no overcoat. I was cold. I was miserable. I was tired, and I was being interviewed by two of the most experienced journalists in the north of Ireland, and tears were actually coming down their cheeks.
"That experience would never leave; that experience told me the enormity of what we had done. We had devised a new political system which would end violence, political violence, in Ireland forevermore."
At least that was the hope.
Events, most starkly in the form of the August bombing that killed 29 people in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh, would prove how uncertain that hope remains.
But Mallon, the deputy first minister of the assembly created by Northern Ireland's historic Good Friday Agreement, and David Trimble, the assembly's first minister, told an audience in Oakland yesterday that while they were on a hard road, it was one with no turning back. Both acknowledged they would have to overcome more roadblocks to make this government work, but both said neither they nor any of their opponents could conceive of an alternative.
In essence, they promised that in their land's politics, the difficult would prevail over the unthinkable.
Trimble and Mallon -- who Ted Smyth, an H.J. Heinz executive and former Irish diplomat, described as two of the heroes of modern Irish history because of their key roles in the Good Friday Agreement -- were in Pittsburgh as part of a 12-city tour through the United States, promoting investment and economic development. Smyth was with them on the panel, along with Steelers owner Dan Rooney and Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg. They spoke at a University of Pittsburgh forum at the Twentieth Century Club before an audience of about 300.
Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, said that among the key compromises that made the agreement possible were the change in the constitution of the Republic of Ireland, loosening its claim of sovereignty over the island's north, and the complementary recognition of the special relationship of one part of the island with another, through the creation of a new formal body for north-south consultation.
"They've got it right this time," he said.
"No significant section of the population, either in Northern Ireland or in Republican Ireland, will tolerate a return to violence," he forecast. As evidence, he cited "a qualitative difference in the reaction to the tragedy at Omagh."
But evidence of the frictions that will abide with their new government appeared even amid the warm welcome that greeted them in Oakland.
One questioner challenged Trimble for denouncing Irish Republican violence without mentioning the excesses committed by the British Army. Another member of the audience questioned Trimble on the timing of the release of political prisoners. His response -- "We don't have political prisoners; we have people who committed crimes" -- was greeted with scattered derisive laughter.
But Mallon, leader of the Social Democratic Labor Party, while often at odds with Trimble in Irish politics, cautioned that each side's abundant grievances shouldn't be allowed to obscure the larger search for peace.
"It's going to be very difficult for nationalism and unionism to cohabit the government; it's going to be even more difficult for unionism and Sinn Fein to cohabit the government," 'he said. "But, you know, there's no solution without that; it is that diversity that's going to be the ultimate strength of that agreement."
Later, the two leaders joined a variety of Pittsburgh business and community figures at a dinner last night at the Duquesne Club. After several public and private events today, they were to go on to Philadelphia.
Hard on their heels arriving in Pittsburgh will be another once-improbable partner in the new government, Gerry Adams of the Sinn Fein Party. Adams is to be in the city Monday to speak at 3:30 p.m. at a Duquesne University public meeting and at fund-raising events at noon in the Duquesne Club and at 7:30 in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
This was Trimble's first visit to Pittsburgh. Mallon said he had been here in recent years as a guest of the Rooneys.
"On my last visit to Pittsburgh, if I had said that there would be an agreement called the Good Friday agreement, and that as a result ... David Trimble and I would be coming to Pittsburgh today as first and deputy first deputy minister designate of the new assembly, I know what would have happened.
"You'd have got the guys with white coats and taken me away and put me somewhere and said, 'Keep him."'
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