Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness feared they would be killed if republicans did not like the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, Tony Blair has revealed.
Speaking to the latest podcast episode of As I Remember It: Bertie Ahern & The Good Friday Agreement, the former British Prime Minister recalled how the two Sinn Féin MPs felt they were risking their own lives to reach an agreement.
“One of the things that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness used to say to me during the course of this [was], ‘Look, if you end up doing a bad job for the Labour Party, they’re just going to be angry at you. If we end up doing what our guys consider a bad job, we’re dead - and many other people will die along with us,’ Mr Blair said.
“So, this [was] an issue of huge sensitivity.”
Mr Blair famously quipped to journalists that he felt “the hand of history on my shoulder” ahead of the talks and other leaders felt the same.
“David Trimble would say, ‘If we lose this, if I misjudge the moment to take the unionist community to a new place, this situation is not going to return to the status quo before the negotiations - it’s going to be even worse because you’ll have had this failure to reach agreement.’
“So, this is what made it difficult.”
Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams holds a copy of the Good Friday Agreement..The former Prime Minister believes the negotiation was so “high risk” it eventually pushed Northern Ireland’s political leaders to be bold and reach agreement.
“In the end, it almost kind of tipped people out of their comfort zone,” he said.
“Just because they thought, ‘Otherwise, we’re going to have spent several days here with just a monumental failure on our hands.’
The agreement was reached on Good Friday 1998 and endorsed by voters on both sides of the Irish border in referendums later that year.
As I Remember It
As I Remember It is a nine-part series that is now available on all streaming platforms.
For bonus content including interviews, videos, an interactive timeline of the peace process and a full glossary of the key players head to newstalk.com/goodfridayagreement.
Three episodes will be released each week throughout the run - and you can hear episode one here:
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Main image: Tony Blair.
