During critical negotiations weeks before the Belfast Agreement was endorsed in April 1998 the Department of Foreign Affairs requested that inward investment be removed from a list of potential areas for North-South co-operation, declassified papers have revealed.
The Northern Ireland papers also record that in March 1998 one Northern Ireland Office official surmised that “there seemed to be little in the locker on the Irish side” as to what North-South bodies should be established as part of the agreement that was signed on April 10th the following month.
This was a curious interpretation as the issue of North-South bodies, for which the Irish government pushed, was one of the main points of contention in the final week of negotiations that could have wrecked the prospects of the parties finally doing the historic Good Friday deal.
On March 23rd, 1998, less than three weeks before the agreement was signed, senior Northern Ireland civil servant David Ferguson wrote to the various departmental permanent secretaries at Stormont saying there was agreement with Dublin “on a split into areas for co-operation and areas for joint action using existing machinery North and South”.
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“The only exception,” added Ferguson, “is the removal of inward investment from the joint action section, which the DFA [Department of Foreign Affairs] clearly under pressure from their Industrial Development Agency, have on reflection asked to be dropped.”
The documents of that period further disclose that Northern civil servants also had reservations about inward investment being an area for co-operation.
Ferguson, in a reference to the then SDLP leader and future Nobel peace laureate, wrote that the idea of mutual economic investment promotion was “very much a John Hume idea”. Ferguson added that he was assured by senior Department of Foreign Affairs official Ray Bassett that “the SDLP and presumably Mr Hume will be squared away on the point” before any other areas for potential co-operation should surface.
“As to [North-South] implementation bodies,” added Ferguson, “there seemed to be little in the locker on the Irish side apart from some talk of a single Tourist Board [though not first on any list] and a fairly vague idea ... that something might be done in the area of environmental protection.”
He said the environmental protection body suggestion came from the then secretary general of the Department of Foreign Affairs, the late Dermot Gallagher.
Ferguson said he also noted that in discussion with Bassett, there was talk from the Department of Foreign Affairs about “up to a dozen implementation bodies” but that that proposal sounded “a bit like a back of an envelope job to me”.
Ferguson also noted that Dublin appeared to be “backing away not only from specific implementation bodies but also from categorisation”.
This certainly was at odds with the Irish government’s public and private stance on the issue and how the issue of North-South bodies threatened to collapse the final stage of the Belfast Agreement talks.
Initially, Dublin and the SDLP pressed for 40 to 60 areas of co-operation but in the face of stern unionist opposition then taoiseach Bertie Ahern agreed to whittle this down to 12 that included six North-South implementation bodies covering areas such as food safety, waterways and cross-Border trade and six covering agriculture, education, environment, health, transport and tourism.
Bassett acknowledged that at the time Dublin “was not going to die in a ditch” over the proposal for a North-South investment body.
The sensitivity of the issue is acknowledged elsewhere in the declassified documents with one Northern official suggesting that the phrase “all-Ireland” in relation to such matters should be avoided and replaced by “cross-Border” or “North-South” arrangements.
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