This chapter was written in 1997 as part of a longer piece covering the years 1939 to 2005 which I titled “Peace Process” and which is deposited in the Boole Library in UCC.

I saw this fictional Colloque as a vehicle for putting on record my views on what was needed at that time to bring communities together in Northern Ireland, at the same time paying particular tribute to Jacques Delors and Noam Chomsky as two intellectuals bringing a lot of clarity to reflection on how to make a better Europe and a better world. As I try to make clear throughout my writing, we must always remember the need for “big picture” thinking.

I have learnt over the years that the most difficult and stressful days relating to any major effort or enterprise are usually those following immediately after the event. Suddenly time weighs heavily on one’s hands, there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. The mind goes into a sort of overdrive, questioning the raison d’être and consequences of the heroic efforts of the previous weeks or months.

Even if clear objectives and a successful outcome have been achieved there suddenly seem to be insurmountable questions and challenges looming over new horizons for which one is ill-equipped to respond.

I have personally experienced such crises of confidence after election or referendum campaigns or major professional events requiring the short-term mobilisation of intellectual and organisational resources, such as the Assises Européennes de la Presse held in Luxembourg in 1991.

My analysis of the relative disappointment in the performance of so many newly elected governments, or in the failure to ensure adequate follow-up to important international agreements (such as the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985), includes a conviction that the main players have had to be so focused on the specific campaign victory or negotiation required that they find it difficult afterwards to mobilise the energy and imagination essential to the next moves.

My management conclusion is that in an ideal world the drive of the A-team of movers and shakers essential to any political achievement must be taken up immediately following that achievement by a B-team resourced to deliver effective implementation. I understand why this so rarely happens. Either the A-team is expected to play the B-team role or it proves impossible to create the confidence and complementarity essential to having A and B players working happily and constructively together.

This is something of a side reflection as I think back to the successful completion at the Irish Institute of European Affairs, Leuven, of the Millenium Colloque, 16-17 June, 2000. I say “successful completion” because the programme had run to time, the speakers had all turned up, and the participation had been as representative as I could have hoped.

There had been no speaker at the dinner closing the Colloque – just thanks to the organising team – but the buzz of talk filling the dining room and the way in which people drifted off in groups to the bar under the eaves in another wing of the Institute, or set off towards their newly-discovered corners of the beautiful Flemish university city, conveyed a collective sense that the event had at least been enjoyed by all concerned. As one of the key organisers I had little time to get the feel of things during the two-day programme. I found myself flitting around the corridors of the historic Irish College to see how things were running in the plenary and workshop sessions, and checking that everything worked and was properly set up in the modern seminar rooms which had been constructed within the College in the ‘80s. The night before the programme concluded I had hardly got to bed for checking the photocopying and distribution of all the supporting papers, speakers’ texts etc.

I had been too tired, or had been glad to say I was too tired, to get involved in what was inevitably drinking into the early hours before people began to think of the next day’s departures.

It was a bonus that the next morning I was able to amble alone in the tufted grass of what had been the medieval college’s orchard, enjoying the warming rays of the early morning sun, as they sparkled all around on the domes and spires of the university buildings beyond the college and splashed down into the orchard from the roofs of the chapel, dormitory and refectory wings. The sense of well-being seemed to justify the previous night’s antisocial decision.

I wondered how some sectors of the Northern Ireland Protestant participation in the Colloque had coped with what was almost certainly their first residential stay in a historic Catholic foundation and where so many of the other participants, particularly Catholics elected to represent tense city centre seats in Belfast or Londonderry, seemed to think that the solution to almost any problem was to bring everyone together for a drink and then to shake hands on what they might perceive to have been the deal. Such perceptions were usually much inflated by the optimism and goodwill induced by alcohol and carried little conviction with anyone who had the strength to say “Sorry, I don’t drink” or “No, I’m not having another one”. Such differences of perception and attitude, often cited as typical of the differences between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, were in a way among the problems of long-term understanding and communication that I hoped the Colloque might help to ease when I had the idea of proposing it to the Institute and its supporters in the Brussels’ Northern Ireland Group in 1998.

My gut understanding of Northern Ireland was that, no matter how many formulae you might try for so-called multi-party or inter-party talks, there could be no hope of progress towards any significant agreement between the Nationalist side and the Unionist side until the die-hards in both camps were prepared to shake hands and agree to try to work together unconditionally.

In 1922 Erskine Childers and Edward Carson had represented the two poles which tore Ireland apart. Their powerful shades still carried credibility in the IRA and in the Orange Order. There would have to be room for such views in the Ireland of the 21st Century. Their potential for violence and destruction would be extremely limited if it was clear that in the communities tolerating them the fear of putting at risk the personal security and economic prosperity attainable in a non-confrontational environment was the predominant concern. Bringing about such a situation must still be a long haul. Improving growth, education and interdenominational contact would help. The steady fracturing of polarities, as the complexity of contemporary society and the evolution of popular culture becomes more widely recognised, is also important. More basically, I feel (particularly as I become more and more convinced that the greatest lost opportunity of all was the jettisoning in 1974 of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive) that it must be possible to lead a majority in the North to see that its situation of mistrust and hatred is irrational and a nonsense in the context of a modern European democracy.

So many things have been tried and done by courageous men and women in the front lines of politics and community work in Ulster that I was at first reluctant to launch my colloque idea from an armchair in Brussels. My simple insight was that much historic change has been brought about by the power of an idea. Such catalytic ideas may in the long term be destructive or constructive, but their dynamic cannot be denied.

Historically, most such ideas sprang from the imagination of a single intellectual or from the work of a group of intellectuals. In Ireland and in Britain, famous around the world for their people’s talents as fixers and pragmatists, to expect interest in the contribution ideas and intellectuals might make to the Northern Ireland question could easily be dismissed as extreme naiveté.

I was pleasantly surprised to get an immediate hearing for the Millenium Colloque proposal from friends in the Institute for European Affairs and the Northern Ireland Group. The organising group quickly agreed to the main lines of the prospectus put to them.

My starting point had been to say that the Northern Ireland situation was not the only one in which some radical new thinking was required. In most countries there was increasing disbelief that democratic institutions and the market economy were adequate mechanisms through which to resolve the problems of contemporary society. Given proclamations of “the end of history” and of “the end of ideology” innovative thinking was required and, like it or not, the most likely sources of such thinking must be in academia and the arts. A colloque in the Irish Institute for European Affairs could be used to encourage a selected panel of distinguished creative thinkers to focus on the future of Northern Ireland in a European context.

My working proposal was that this focus should be treated as not just another colloque but as a carefully prepared experiment. The panel of contributors would be agreed early and the fees offered must be adequate to cover a significant period of preparative research, reflection and preparatory discussion and travel.

Once the preliminary papers started coming in, the precise format of the colloque announcement would be agreed, making it clear that participation would be by invitation only. Media coverage would not be a consideration, the aim would be to confront a truly representative group of people from Northern Ireland with the colloque presentations and with each other. While inevitably some of the final participants would have a political or media profile, the essential selection would target those influential “middle” people found in any community, having the respect of their peers without even having to run for or achieve public office. The Leuven programme just had to be seen to be worthwhile to some people. Once word got around that an influential participation was assured, the difficulty would be to limit the participation of the politicians and the press.

That all this had run to plan had been beyond my wildest dreams. The hunch that there was new thinking around was based on my reading in 1996 and 1997, when I saw how much good work was available which had not been adequately recognised or mined, particularly in an Irish context. Most of the potential speakers addressed initially had responded to the challenge and their publications lists provided a rich resource for colloque participants, and particularly for everyone who had accepted the responsibility of animating working groups. The Colloque proceedings and bibliography will become an important teaching resource for Irish studies.

But, I remind myself, the classroom was never the primary focus for the colloque. Was it out of the question to imagine the thinking and exchanges pulsing around the college as affecting Christians of all persuasions in Northern Ireland in the same way as Councils of the early Church had managed to shape Christendom for centuries? I had never heard Jacques Delors speak before in such a stimulating and engaging way.

Noam Chomsky’s concept of essential change had had the healthy effect of making the whole Northern Ireland scene look so insignificant as to make most people wonder how on earth contemporary crises had come about and achieved the degree of media and international attention they had. Of the native performers, my favourites had been Declan Kiberd and Edna and Michael Longley. Between them they had explored the notions of Irishness and Ulsterness in a way that had surely reminded people of the real sense in which everything is so local that it carries with it personal obligations as to individual rights and responsibilities.

For such internationally-experienced lecturers the audiences in the plenary and workshop sessions must, nevertheless, have been a surprise. The balance of male/female, young/old achieved in the participants’ list had been most gratifying. The discussions made clear through the wide range of accent and engagement that some interest had been aroused. Activists speaking on behalf of the handicapped made a particular impression. I had been particularly glad to see that as soon as some of the older political figures who were household names seemed about to launch into a justification of their contribution to Northern Ireland over the years they were quickly stopped in their tracks by firm chairmanship responding to the clear restlessness of the majorities in the workshops concerned. After all, the experienced politicians were no better equipped than anyone else to answer basic workshop questions like: Who are the Irish? Have they a culture? Are they Christians? Should anyone care?

There would have been no need for the Colloque at all if such men had addressed over the years the larger questions dealt with so interestingly by the initial plenary session lecturers: Can we overcome history and culture? Is there a place for religion in today’s Europe? Can you respect minorities and achieve consensus?

A feature of the Colloque which seemed to have been particularly appreciated was the small bookshop set up in the entrance hall. The surprise bestseller had been Tom Garvin’s “1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy”, first published in 1996.

I remember I was swinging my foot at a decaying tennis ball forgotten in the tufts of orchard grass when I heard the first laughter of breakfast from the dining hall. It would be interesting to see who, among the departure day’s early risers, was talking to who.

Read more: 2001 – Plans for Retirement