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Thank you very much. I'm here to introduce our speaker for the evening and I guess actually given the theme, the pursuit of peace,

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it is somewhat appropriate to have the Lester Pearson chair introduce because, as I recall, he was interested in peace.

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Now I have several things to say. I would be brief.

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First of all, I'd like to congratulate the organisers of this event in behalf of myself, but also my department.

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The focus of Oxford, rightly or wrongly, in the general area facing conflict over the last eight hundred years or so,

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has been more on conflict than resolution.

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More on war than on peace. More on states.

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Ban on people. And looking at my discipline, which is international relations,

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that focuses quite consistent with what I'm used to, the traditions of international relations.

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And by the way, I'm not contesting the fact those traditions embody worthwhile purposes in their own right.

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But there remains the question,

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thinking about this concept of whether the university is contributing as much as it might to the other side of the conversation.

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Why do we have to say about peace resolution and people?

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So this meeting is a very good thing. Not only in itself, but as the beginning.

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Well, not necessarily the beginning, but shall we say, an acceleration of a more serious exploration of peace.

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Now, by this time, you may have the impression that I may have chosen to speak for myself rather than to introduce the speaker.

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I know that is not true. I'm not here to decline.

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I'm merely here. It is my honour to be here to introduce our distinguished, distinguished speaker, Jonathan Karl.

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What can I say about this? Would bore him, but it may not for you.

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He was an accomplished career as a diplomat,

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including responsibility in a lot of delicate negotiations related to conflict prevention and and the management processes

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to force the resolution of potential conflict responsibility in negotiations leading to the handover of Hong Kong.

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I think going back to my on my previous career,

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when I used to do Soviet foreign policy negotiations in UCSC contract context on human rights negotiations with that animal that no longer exists.

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But soon, again, the Soviet Union. I'm sorry.

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The reunification of Germany and then later.

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Not that this is necessarily a contractual relationship, a major role in U.K. diplomacy with respect to the United States.

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But all of those things, while very impressive and I mean that are not, I think why we asked him to be here.

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He also served as chief of staff to Prime Minister Blair for the full ten years of Mr. Blair's tenure in office as prime minister.

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I have to say, looking at it from the outside has to be a remarkable achievement in its own right.

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But that is also not, in my view, why he is here.

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I think what brought him to us. In addition to his prior history in Oxford, of course,

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was his role as principal negotiator on Northern Ireland for the same period where he guided a seemingly endless and apparently hopeless conflict to,

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one hopes, an enduring peace embraced by the parties to that process.

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He has written eloquently about this process in a book.

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Am I allowed to advertise? OK, great hatred.

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Little Room in Peace in Northern Ireland, published in 2008.

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I'm sure it is available at Blackwells in paperback.

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OK. We are. Very young.

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In other words. And to cut it short. And moving on.

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He is a distinguished practitioner of these serious pursuit of peace, which is, as you know, the theme of our conference.

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It is a great honour to meet him and to have him with us.

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And please join me, join me in welcoming Jonathan.

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Well, thank you. Thank you very much indeed. And it's a pleasure to be at the college of my former boss, Stabler, who's here and indeed this.

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He got here richer and he's now pursuing through his Santa Fe Foundation.

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First, I've come to praise you for this initiative because I don't think it really is worth

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bringing together different disciplines to try and work at conflict resolution.

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When I joined the Foreign Office three decades ago, we were given absolutely no training at all in negotiation or conflict resolution,

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and I didn't spend a great part of my career trying to do it. We wrote to each other lots of papers after the event on negotiation with the Russians,

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on negotiating with the Chinese and did negotiate with Americans, which was the worst of all.

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They were the most difficult. But we never really studied it.

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And I think it's interesting that around the world, people are trying to bring together disciplines to look at this.

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If you look at the Harvard Negotiation Project, for example, that brought together psychologists,

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lawyers, people, international relations, it's a really very interesting initiative.

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I'm part of a small group of pretentiously called the Global Leadership Council on Conflict Resolution, organised by the WEF in Davos.

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And we had a rather interesting meeting which had people you'd expect, like Bertie Ahern and the secretary of the Nobel Peace PRISE Committee,

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but had trouble adjusting to a Japanese academic and a psychologist, New York, who specialised in hostage negotiations for the police.

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What was interesting to me was how so many of the skills that are required in this sort of thing that I used to

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do still do a bit applied equally if you can't get a hostage out of the embrace of a criminal in New York City.

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It's also interesting because conflict resolution has become privatised like so much else in life

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as the U.S. gets weaker and as conflicts are increasingly intra country rather than into country.

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There's been a whole growth of private diplomacy bodies that try and deal with conflict resolution and sending video to Rome,

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of course, that played such a role. Mozambicans, too, has roles across the world.

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Toledo, the sorry group in Helsinki, and there's a group in Geneva called the Humanitarian Dialogue Centre that I work with,

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you know, used to work with, which is really a very distinguished an amnesty, which is very effective.

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But it's not, as you told us, which is very effective at getting into these complex in finding the insurgent group,

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getting their confidence and then getting them to talk to governments.

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And what it does need is some theoretical underpinning because it does and it could do it.

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And people who did some thinking about the lessons you can learn from some conflicts, but other conflicts.

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But my experience, which may be relevant to you or interesting to you, is in Northern Ireland,

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which I spent 10 years wrestling with, and I say those paperbacks for sale on a three, four, two or four.

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So I I urge you to go and buy it nice and cheap, even students who can afford it.

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And one of the first things to take care to me, dealing with northern islands from a interdisciplinary nature was the importance of history.

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The place seemed to be drowning in it. And I started dealing with Northern Ireland and I used to joke detainees that if

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you ended up meeting with any of the Northern Irish parties after only 30 minutes,

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you'd have only got to 60 in 89 and would still be three more centuries of complaints and worries to get through before you got to the current day.

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But the incident that really brought home to me the importance of history and the potential

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misunderstanding of it was the first time we had Atomism McGuinness come to Number 10 Downing Street.

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And it was it was a big event. No more TV cameras in the street than they had been when we won the election in May of that year.

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We tried to put off the meeting as long as we could because it wasn't a very attractive political proposition.

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And Alistair Campbell, I remember it sent me a memo saying we should move the Christmas tree because it's just before

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Christmas because it looked much too festive to terrorists in front of the Christmas tree.

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But we left that and that was McGuinness came in and they were there and they were nervous.

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They walked down the long corridor in No.10 and into the cabinet room at the end.

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And Adams made a rather feeble joke about the portraits and all the prime ministers who failed to solve the Irish question.

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And they stood their chairs on the other side of the cabinet table from us, touching the backs of them,

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the windows over the garden behind them, and began to try and break the I said.

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So this was where the damage was done then? And we were aghast.

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And I said, yes, you do. Mortars landed just behind you. The windows came in.

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My brother happened to be sitting there with John Major meeting about Iraq.

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Paul Domeij under the table. Four of overweight policemen came in waving their pistols.

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And he looked absolutely horrified. So, no, I didn't mean that. And this is where the treaty was signed between Collins and Lloyd George.

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Well, the trouble started. So we're just on a completely different historical page.

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She's white, working interdisciplinary. I want to talk a little bit about not the Northern Ireland negotiations themselves so much as

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whether there are lessons from the Northern Ireland negotiations for other conflict resolution.

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The first thing to say, I think, is that the conflicts in Northern Ireland for sui generous,

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the agreement we reached, the Good Friday Agreement was also to be generous. You couldn't take a Good Friday agreement and apply somewhere else.

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Even the power sharing advice would not really work in another situation.

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And the agreement in Northern Ireland, if you look at it carefully, is really an agreement to disagree.

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The unionist still wants the United Kingdom and the nationalists and Republicans still want a united Ireland.

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They didn't agree on the substance. They agreed they pursue their aims by political means and not by other means.

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If you dig away at the debate what the real bargain in the end was,

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was nationalists or Republicans accepting consent that it was the people of Northern Ireland who decide its future.

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And the Republicans nationalists gaining the ending of the Union speech to the orange car can no longer be safe to stop change that.

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No one on come common warm hands. The Catholics, in David Campbell's words, in his Nobel Peace prise speech rather than a Congress.

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But I do think there are lessons. Have a super generous note on this rather complex from the cul de sacs.

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We went down the mistakes we made and from our successes in negotiating.

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It is interesting to see people now from as far away as the Philippines or Pakistan going

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to Northern Ireland to see what lessons they can learn and experience that in the same

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way that people from Northern Ireland went to South Africa to see what they could learn

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from the South African peace negotiation when they were trying to reach their own peace.

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And I think it does matter because people tend to get very bound up in their own conflict and they can't see outside it.

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They get very depressed. I never saw that. Good for them to go and see.

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There are other conflicts that have been resolved and other people who have been in the same sort of tunnel and broken out of it.

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So I think there are lessons that can be learnt from Northern Ireland. When I read it to my book, after I left number 10,

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I went back through my diaries for the period and they very kindly allowed

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me to read all the government papers for the ten years we've been in office.

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There's one thing that jumped out to the pages, too, in terms of the lesson to learn from Northern Ireland.

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That was the importance of process. You have no process at all.

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You have a vacuum and the vacuum is soon filled by violence. We do have a process.

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There's reason to hope. I would say the process is people can believe at some stage he'll be a resolution.

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So I think above all else, what you have to do in a conflict and get a process in place.

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The Middle East is an interesting example. There's actually this problem most of us could probably write on a piece of paper what

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the outcome of an eventual peace agreement in the Middle East will be in terms of land,

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certainly, probably in terms of refugees and even in terms of Jerusalem itself.

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So we have a solution. The trouble is, there's no process to get us from here to a solution lies.

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And Shimon Peres is always the master of the one liner, summed it up rather nicely in saying the good news is there's light at the end of the tunnel.

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And the bad news is there's no tunnel. And it is actually a problem of patience.

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My second general lesson, I think, would be what I call the bicycle theory.

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Once you got a process going, for goodness sake, then let the thing fall over.

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Just keep that bicycle rolling along, however slow it is, how painful it is.

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Always keep the bicycle moving. It doesn't mean you have to do political pain as you go along.

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For us, the release of the terrorist prisoners in Northern Ireland was a very painful thing to do.

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We were highly criticised for it by the Conservative Party and of course, by unions in Northern Ireland.

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But I know that if we hadn't done it, the peace process would have unravelled and collapsed.

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We had to absorb that pain later on.

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And very personally for me was the northern bank robbery in 2004.

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I'd actually arrived in Belfast that morning for talks of Adams McGuinness in the monastery.

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I got off the plane.

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The Northern Ireland office official took me to one side and said that the biggest ever bank robbery in British history had happened.

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The dogs on the street knew was the IRA that had done it.

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We couldn't tell anyone because the police haven't announced that he wouldn't announce it to later.

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And I personally thought, like getting back on the plane and going straight back to London.

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And I decided that actually the only sensible thing to do was to carry on with the talks, to proceed, not to let that bicycle stop.

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So you have to put aside your personal concerns, your personal frustrations and keep that bicycle moving.

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My third lesson, I think, is about breakthrough agreements.

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You get a breakthrough agreement like the Good Friday Agreement, you're exhausted and three days nights, no sleep.

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You have a feeling before you finally got to agreement new lead. The danger is that no one does anything.

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And that agreement collapses because agreements on the answer to the problem.

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Agreement is a piece of paper. It doesn't actually build the trust between unreconciled peoples.

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The real work should actually stop. Once you've got a breakthrough agreement, people shouldn't go away and deserted and leave it alone.

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Nine years after the Good Friday Agreement until we got the parties into government together and overnight.

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And you see the same sort of thing happening, for example, with Oslo, those where you had a breakthrough on Middle East.

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Everyone had euphoria.

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Palestinians were celebrating on the streets, but they were made any effort to sell it to the Israeli people, try to implement it.

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Vaughn gave up on that stage and you said on level two, went back into intifada.

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And the rest is history. You see the same also in Spain, actually, with the Spanish ceasefire.

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ETA about five years ago. We go now.

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Everything that fantastic was going to work. But having got the agreement there, having that State Farm minister having made his statement,

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no one did anything a big agenda that was really going to be enforced.

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The to bomb and things began to unravel again. So for me.

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The important thing to understand is peace is not some event. It's not a piece of paper. It's process.

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And it takes time to build that trust to make it really work.

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There are lots of lessons, I think, in terms of just techniques of managing conflict resolution in Northern Ireland.

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We had to resort to what I would call constructive ambiguity.

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That is where you can't make a agreement quite reach where the two sides are too far apart to bridge that gap.

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And you come up with words that mean one thing to one side. Another thing to another, which we did on the decommissioning.

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For example, we put in words that meant different things, the unionists than the Republicans.

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And that was because we could have sat there for another 10 years and they still wouldn't have agreed on that point.

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But the trouble with constructive ambiguity is that it begins to unravel. People begin to question it.

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People begin to say the reason we agreed to X or Y and we tried from 1998 right

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through to 2003 to make this thing work on the basis of constructive ambiguity.

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And we lost your support. And of course, the support for the agreement fell from just over half to less than a third.

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In the end, we decided we had to force the issue. We couldn't let that constructive ambiguity go on any longer.

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And Tony Blair went to make a speech at the Belfast Harbour Commissioner's office in which he called on the IRA for acts of completion.

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He said they had to choose between the Armalite and the ballot box. You couldn't have the ambiguity anymore.

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We were nervous because we were worried, even at that stage,

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that the IRA would go back to violence, that this would force them out of the peace process.

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We sat I sat nervously by my telephone about three days later and called me saying it's a good speech.

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Would I drop to apply for it? It struck me as a bit later. But the so I did it by Republicans speaking.

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I was absolutely amazed when he delivered it word for word, including saying he could envisage the end of the IRA.

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But actually was a very brave and wise thing of him to do because what he managed to do are responding in that way is to get over that

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difficult moment where you have to make take the ambiguity out of it with the ambiguities become destructive and make the thing clear.

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The similar problem in Cyprus, incidentally, in the last negotiation in terms of constructive ambiguity,

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that got very damaging indeed, technically also as the deadlines can be crucial.

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Overstate the John Major made it, by the way, John Major deserves considerable credit for the effort he put into Northern Ireland peace

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process when the IRA tried to kill him only two months into his prime ministership.

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He really did, for no political gain, make a big effort.

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So I think he made a mistake in terms of trying to drag the thing out. He would never quite get the peace process going off the ceasefire.

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And the IRA began to believe there was never going to be a process in which they could join.

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So we very deliberately, when we came in in 97, said a clear deadline after a ceasefire by which they could enter into the talks.

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Mean a very classic deadline for the end of the talks, which is the talks the last one year from when we come into Panopto be concluded by Easter 98,

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as you might imagine, as we came closer and closer to Easter 98. There was no agreement.

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People called on us to break the deadline to give up on the deadline. We fought very hard about it.

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We decided you had to insist on a deadline or the talks to just go on forever. You'd lose the Republicans.

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They would feel that they messed around forever, had to force the issue to make people reach agreement.

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And it worked in that case because they came to an agreement because of the deadline.

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We then tried to use deadlines repeatedly afterwards from 99 onwards.

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And as we sailed through each of the deadlines about achieving anything, we lost. Ability.

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But we came back to it again in two thousand and six.

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It's an andrews' agreement. We actually try to make people believe we really would drive that car off the wall.

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We passed a law. Made it clear everything would collapse. Certain days in November.

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And that's to be in agreement. And they actually believed us again about the deadline. And it worked to bring about an agreement.

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And the unions in particular decided to pay him like mad about what we call they called forcing house talks.

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We took him on a tour of pretty much all of the state, the homes of England, Wales and Scotland,

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to try and take them away from their constituencies and force them to focus on reaching an agreement.

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And it can work quite effectively if you make them.

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Well, they always do when they come to these talks as they come and they actually come back and hopeful positions been taken before.

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So, for example, when they came to Western Paku, they came to Leeds Castle.

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They pulled back from that quite forward and positions that look quite close to each other as we went into the talks.

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But once you've got them in that building, you can build up momentum.

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You can build a sort of psychology that gets people into trying to reach agreement.

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And it's really worth trying to do it.

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The most successful example, I guess, was George Mitchell, who took part in '99 after the agreement had happened, hadn't been enforced.

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He took me to Winfield House, the American ambassador's residence in London,

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locked them up there with none of their supporters, just the leaders I managed to get them to into agreement.

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So that's tricky. They're taking people away is worth worth trying.

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A lot of what we tried to do in Northern Ireland's local choreography or sequencing, and neither side wanted to go first.

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The unions didn't want to go into government with the IRA still existing with the Republicans having an army behind them.

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The Republicans didn't want to give up that card of having the IRA.

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And as they were sure the unions were going to share a knife across the government, go first.

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So we tried to break the process down into a series of small steps so they could build confidence by one side,

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maybe a little bit in the next slide moving and so on. It sometimes worked.

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We had one disastrous experience in 2003. It was the end of dangerous time,

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partly resulting in the end of David Trimble's time where we deal the complicated

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choreography which was blown apart by the IRA taking John Detasseling,

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the Canadian head of the ICG of the body that verified decommissioning, basically taking him hostage for a day and not releasing him.

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Once we got him back, the whole choreography was supposed to start and we started our bit by announcing that the elections.

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We've got to Josslyn up to Hillsborough, the the stadium in which the secular state of an honour resides.

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And he told us you couldn't say anything about decommissioning, can say what weapons have been decommissioned in any shape or form.

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And the whole thing had relied on him being clear about it. So David Trimble could move forward.

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And we had a press conference which I watched by with David Trimble screaming at me on the telephone,

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particularly when Thomas asked him and asked what he could say anything about weapons.

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So why do you suppose you could say there were no tanks or heavy artillery equipment, which wasn't enormously helpful at the time?

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Another trick that works or trick is the wrong way of putting it, a tool that works quite well.

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It's embarrassment that you can try and make either side feel they'll be blamed if they will cast the talks in Northern Ireland.

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Neither side wanted to lead. They always wanted Dallasite to be the one that broke, broken, and they make it as difficult as possible.

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The other side, they might out. They'd never want to work out themselves.

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I mean, to waste time and make them believe that we blame them if they did walk out.

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In fact, we did blame either side because you need we need to pick the process up again after you failed on that occasion.

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So we never actually pointed the finger at either side the whole way through the nine years.

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But even so, that figure of the threat of pointing the finger at them could be quite effective.

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There is one occasion when he went slightly wrong, we're not going to John Major had in Paisley in the cabinet room with a domeij,

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used to work in the cabinet room in no time rather than in office.

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And Paisley came to see it particularly difficult and particularly insulting comments got so angry that he walked out of the meeting.

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Now, that's a mistake because you will go to your own office and you can't get back in,

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never walk out of your own office security because I could go on endlessly,

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although it doesn't extend to one point of technique about ingenuity sometimes requires an almost ludicrous degree is ingenuity to resolve problems.

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The very last stages of the peace process of trying to get Paisley and Adams to agree to meet, to have a meeting that was going to be televised.

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And we got them to agree to principle that we had to negotiate how long it would be.

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What they would say at the very last issue was where they would sit.

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Eunice wanted to sit opposite Sinn Fein, say look like combatants and enemies.

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And the Sinn Fein wanted to sit next to Ian Paisley so that my colleagues and we couldn't get them to agree.

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So we did in the end was to design a special table that was dominie shaped so I could sit next to each other and opposite each other, so to speak.

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So in conflict resolution, you have to be prepared even to be a cop just to.

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One of the things I learnt from the Northern Ireland peace process that I've seen

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elsewhere in terms of conflict resolution is the danger of setting preconditions.

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John, Major, again, made mistakes in these terms of decommissioning in after the ceasefire.

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I can see exactly why he did it. He wanted he couldn't.

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He felt negotiate with a temporary ceasefire. He felt he had to have a permanent end of violence.

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He wanted the IRA to say that violence was over for good. They wouldn't do that.

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So as a surrogate for that, he looked to them to begin decommissioning their weapons.

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And first, he demanded a decommission all their weapons before they be allowed into talks.

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And naturally, being a terrorist movement in those circumstances dictated to the public,

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you say no, you certainly are not going to decommissioning weapons.

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He then reduced that to decommissioning most of their weapons before they could come into talks.

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They wouldn't agree that then did, reducing what was called Washington full and his secretary.

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They went to to to Washington, to Tolkan decommissioning. And they wouldn't agree to that.

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Gordy left this way. There was a problem that we spent the best part of 10 years time like our work, our way round, which didn't need to be a problem.

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Decommissioning gives you nothing. If you think about it,

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this terrorist could easily done by new weapons as soon as they get rid of them is their intention as you're trying to decommission,

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not their weapons. And that's why did the items in most instances at the end of the process rather than the beginning?

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This problem of preconditions, I think, is equally obvious in the Middle East.

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If you think of Hamas here in the West or the courts actually demanding what strikes me as a fairly reasonable precondition,

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which is they give up violence, they should be prepared to sign up to something like the Mitchell Principles of Non-Violence in Northern Ireland.

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What seems less reasonable to me is to demand that they sign up for exceptions to the state of Israel.

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They'll be rather like having asked the IRA to sign up to accepting the existence of a separate state in Northern Ireland,

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separate from the rest of Ireland before the process began. Robin as part of the process.

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So it be incredibly careful on the government side as much as on the other side for setting preconditions.

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They can leave you the place where you simply can't get out of the bind you created for yourself.

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International involvement is, in my view, a crucial part of trying to solve intrastate difficulties.

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We in Britain refuse to allow international row in Northern Ireland for decades and decades.

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We kept on rejecting any U.N. role when it was suggested. You see the same thing, of course, with India in the case of Kashmir.

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I think that's a mistake. I don't see what you lose by having international involvement.

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It doesn't actually surrender any of your sovereignty or limit any of your options. I had George Mitchell as a facilites I said was actually crucial.

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Having someone that both sides trusted and where they wouldn't have trusted the British government was a facilitator,

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really helped to bring about peace. I hope that will the Middle East can also have the role of international figures as sort of referees.

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We had the International Commission on Decommissioning,

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but we also had the International Monitoring Commission monitoring the ending of terrorist activity by the IAEA and by the known as paramilitaries,

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and also the steps taken by the British army to reduce its presence in Northern Ireland.

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So that sort of guarantor can be really, really very useful indeed.

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I had earlier sorry I'm sorry, came in when we saw our opposer to inspect the weapons dumps when we couldn't quite get to decommissioning.

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Who offers told us some wonderful stories about the hospitality of the IRA as they looked after them,

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driving them around and that type vans in the republic, including providing them with pyjamas and toothpaste in their faces.

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They were kept a particular case. Much of society you don't see much of so is absolutely like a proverbial outhouse.

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And he provided his overalls but hadn't quite got the dimensions right.

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So I tried to squeeze today in all kinds of various holes around the French republic.

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And there's also the role of the facilitation, the strongest of the so in the case of Northern Ireland.

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We were a strong facilitator. We regarded ourselves as neutral from the speech by Beaverbrook in 91,

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on which way he said Britain had no selfish strategic or economic interest in Organon.

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We will have to live with it. Both sides can accept themselves. We have no particular direction.

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We wanted the peace negotiations to go, but we could control what happened economically and what happened in security terms.

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So we were strong forces that we could push things in a particular direction.

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And I remember a conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush in Hillsborough just after the Iraq invasion,

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where it's a long time standing at the gate to the flag of Hillsborough talking about Middle East.

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And afterwards, George Bush gave a press conference in which you said you would devote as much time

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and much effort solving the Middle East as Tony Blair had to Northern Ireland.

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That's actually what's really required in Middle East,

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is an American president who can be a strong facilitator because they can control what happens in terms of security and the economy.

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They can deliver both sides and only that kind of road will ever actually crack.

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Least in my view. And one thing we suffered from endlessly.

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And again, I've seen this across the world in other conflicts is what I call zero sum politics.

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If one side comes out of negotiation, smiling, whatever the substantial and substantial nature of it, the other side thinks it's lost.

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And the Republicans are much cleverer coming out of negotiations, smiling. And unions will always feel that they've lost when the bizarre things.

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And overnight, autumn was the first cease fire in 94.

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Where is the Republicans driving around West Belfast as they want to football game honking on everyone's waving scarves.

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And the unionists who went into terminal depression even know what I always wanted had happened.

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There was a ceasefire in place and that that going through that zero sum politics is crucially important.

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One of the interesting things in overall them was that the IRA never surrendered to the Brits and never

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surrender to unionists when they actually did that decommissioning in the end when they actually stood down.

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It was in response to a speech by Gerry Adams is much easier for them to do it on their own terms,

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their own leader, than it was to look as if you'd done it anyway as a surrender to others.

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I don't think we'd ever be able to sell the agreement if the Republicans hadn't finally learnt that it wasn't all that clever,

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actually, to look like they've won in every negotiation. You're only going to get a lasting peace, one that people can liberate.

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If both sides feel they've been winners, you have to have both sides.

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Think about constituency the other and how they're going to set up their constituency and to their credit.

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Atomism McGuinness did think about that with the DPP and did think about how they could go about making it easier for GOP to claim that they,

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too, had won in peace negotiations. Mike knows what point he must be getting pretty fed up.

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No. I think one of the most important things I learnt from that negotiation and again, I was I've been peripherally involved in since,

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is that you would only ever get a lasting peace if both sides believe they can't win militarily.

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And nobody on the British army had a fairly disastrous start with Bloody Sunday with Internments Siege West Belfast got off to a bad start.

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And they just got out pretty early on that the only way things could be won would be politically.

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They understood that they could keep security at a sufficient level indefinitely.

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They could stop the IRA breaking out further, but they could never actually defeat Yahaya altogether.

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They never be able to suppress it. And they understood they had to be a political solution.

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They understood you had to win hearts and minds to make the thing work.

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So by about the early 80s, they were actually involved, the politicians, in seeing the need to have a political solution.

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The IRA had a similar sort of a welfare system along the way.

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In the late 80s, Atomism McGuinness both joined the Provisionals at a very young age.

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But by the mid 80s, they were no longer fighting age.

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They could see their nephews and nieces, sons, daughters getting arrested and killed because he was he going further.

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They knew they couldn't be defeated. They knew they can never win.

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They don't be able to drive the bricks out by violence and they, too, start to kind of reach out for a political solution.

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They started to talk to John Q. There are a series of so much in speeches by British Secretary of State and Adams

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and McGuinness that both sides came to the conclusion they couldn't win militarily.

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They had to find a political solution. And then you have a durable basis on which to try and pursue peace.

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Unfortunately, someone like Sri Lanka, that isn't the case. Sri Lanka, we had the ceasefire.

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It looked as if we had a lasting peace. Both sides finally off the fighting were reconciled, looking for a political solution.

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And then it fell apart because one side decided they could win militarily and under pressure from the armed forces and from the defence minister,

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they believe they could win. Now they are going to win in terms of territory. They will very soon take all the territory in Sri Lanka.

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But they were sold precisely nothing because the problem will come back and haunt them as a terrorist campaign,

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not as a military campaign to in any way be bloodier and more horrible.

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If they had any sense,

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what they would do is immediately announce a political solution for a position of strength to try and build peace in that position.

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I feel that they worked. If you have one side thinking women, Tony, you won't get two lasting peace.

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And finally, I guess the biggest lesson I learnt from a certain negotiation is funny enough because I'm not sure I understood this in government,

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but from watching my book and thinking about it a bit more is the need to talk to enemies.

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I didn't find it all that easy to talk to Republicans when we were in government.

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My father being shot at by the IRA in 1940. My brother Charles, who grew up for me, just actually been on a definite strain is the IRA.

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I didn't shake that Ms. McGuinness hands the first time when I met them, which is a bit pathetic, but it was important to me at the time.

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So I didn't understand the point to talking to families.

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On the other hand, when I got a call from Martin McGuinness in September 1997, he asked me to come to Derry,

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not to tell you when I'd gone there and taking on Social Security authorities.

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So I got on a plane and got a taxi to Derry and I stood on a street corner until a couple of guys with shaved heads came up to me and said,

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Martin Centres bungled me in the back of that cab. We ran around in circles and they're completely confused.

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Then I got outside the sort of model I put out to the.

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The housing estate knocked on the door. And that was Martin McGuinness with a broken leg inside, making jokes about kneecapping.

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And it wasn't particularly important meeting.

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We didn't break through on anything, but I then had a series of similar meetings and houses dotted around with Belfast and in Derry.

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And I think the importance of that sort of approach is to try and build trust,

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to get to someone else's territory where they can think aloud if you want,

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about what they want to do, rather than to force them to come to your territory or have a formal negotiation with a particular issue.

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Well, we had to find a way fairly early on in 2000, I guess it was on decommissioning.

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We weren't going to get decommissioning, but we wanted to have some progress.

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And I talked to a couple of generals who served in Bosnia and Kosovo, and they've suggested the idea of sealing the dumps and monitoring the dumps.

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So I went to one of these houses and I still passed the suggested items.

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McGuinness and they immediately said it is completely unacceptable and then asked questions for an hour or so.

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At about three weeks later, I went to a formal meeting. They proposed the idea to ask, is there a way forward on this?

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So you can actually find a way of building building trust in those circumstances, of course.

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And you go so far in building trust. I remember one particular session with Adama's McGuinness in the card ministry in West Belfast,

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where I was worried about catching the last plane amongst a very kind of ugly defeater somewhere in the refectory having dinner.

382
00:37:54,150 --> 00:37:59,510
And I was sitting eating and I try to cheque my watch to see if I was going to be too late for play I kept.

383
00:37:59,510 --> 00:38:05,170
And the minute hand come loose and was swinging around. What time was Martin McGuinness said today?

384
00:38:05,170 --> 00:38:09,660
Well, I have a watch menders in my street. Let me take that and I'll get it fixed for you.

385
00:38:09,660 --> 00:38:11,280
I said I want to stay really at the ICAC.

386
00:38:11,280 --> 00:38:17,290
Then they were held on the contract and then I insist to my work to a very kindly gave it back to me at least,

387
00:38:17,290 --> 00:38:25,000
cos although we met negotiation sticks and I of course had to give it to the security authorities to have a cheque for bugs and tracking.

388
00:38:25,000 --> 00:38:32,750
Ravaging that broken minute and I have to say thanks to the audience to see how far you can go and building trust.

389
00:38:32,750 --> 00:38:41,580
But I think I learnt in writing the book was I hadn't really understood the length and depth of the British government's dialogue with the IRA.

390
00:38:41,580 --> 00:38:47,640
Irish government had a casualty IRA from 1974 onwards. It sort of channel before the channel.

391
00:38:47,640 --> 00:38:50,820
It was continuous 1974 on the destroyed intelligence agent.

392
00:38:50,820 --> 00:38:59,230
And I was quite right, my uncle, Brendan Duff Duffy, who did Kandari, and she was just like many times to try and keep the building open.

393
00:38:59,230 --> 00:39:03,310
And if that link had Peter Porter on certain cases, he's fine.

394
00:39:03,310 --> 00:39:09,640
574 the end of the first hunger strike in 1980. Would it be dormant for long periods, too?

395
00:39:09,640 --> 00:39:14,720
But if it hadn't existed in 1993 1994, it's hard to see how you got the ceasefire.

396
00:39:14,720 --> 00:39:20,530
You're talking the IRA. Privately.

397
00:39:20,530 --> 00:39:25,790
I don't see how when the Warrington bomb is going off, for example, when they're exchanging messages, they've been talking formally.

398
00:39:25,790 --> 00:39:29,920
The British government could possibly talk to my two young children were blown to pieces.

399
00:39:29,920 --> 00:39:35,950
So it provided the way in which the British government could reassure Republicans that if they gave up violence,

400
00:39:35,950 --> 00:39:41,670
they would be able to find a political track on a way forward, even though violence was still going on.

401
00:39:41,670 --> 00:39:46,960
Rich Galen couldn't have done that publicly in talks. He could only do it secretly.

402
00:39:46,960 --> 00:39:51,190
Nah, I wouldn't have given up violence if they hadn't had that way of communicating with the British government.

403
00:39:51,190 --> 00:39:59,440
You have to have that kind of thing. If you're going to find a way out of violence in the end and reassure the terrorist group that there

404
00:39:59,440 --> 00:40:04,450
is a political perspective for a political way forward and there's no community that was ready,

405
00:40:04,450 --> 00:40:13,630
you do need to find a way of talking to Hamas, to the Taliban, and even actually, in my view, to al-Qaida, Hamas.

406
00:40:13,630 --> 00:40:17,680
I thought about what I thought the conditions would be for that. The Taliban, it seems bizarre to me.

407
00:40:17,680 --> 00:40:24,500
We're prepared to talk to the Taliban tactically in terms of local commanders, but we're not prepared to talk them strategically.

408
00:40:24,500 --> 00:40:26,620
She's the only find a solution in Afghanistan.

409
00:40:26,620 --> 00:40:32,770
If you are prepared to find a way of talking to them, trying to press their fiscal demands in a coherent way,

410
00:40:32,770 --> 00:40:35,890
find a political role for them, they simply not disappear.

411
00:40:35,890 --> 00:40:39,940
If you just try and deal with them in a military way, al-Qaida, I think this is a little bit harder.

412
00:40:39,940 --> 00:40:44,280
First, you'd have to find something other than it had to want to talk to you,

413
00:40:44,280 --> 00:40:48,590
and then you have to actually have some demands that you could possibly relate to the real world, which will be difficult.

414
00:40:48,590 --> 00:40:56,110
But even in that case, actually, I think having some sort of link at some stage when they get to cohering demands provides a way out.

415
00:40:56,110 --> 00:41:02,170
Is the only way that you can seriously try and tackle peace. This proposal gets misunderstood, quite lost.

416
00:41:02,170 --> 00:41:09,820
George Bush made a speech in Israel in the last day of his presidency in which he talked about appeasement and talking to your enemies.

417
00:41:09,820 --> 00:41:16,720
It strikes me as a pretty big misunderstanding of appeasement because the mistake that Chamberlain made was not in talking to Hitler, talking Hitler.

418
00:41:16,720 --> 00:41:25,470
It was a very good idea. Mistake of thinking that if I didn't chunks of the Czech Republic as much as it then was, he was somehow by mob.

419
00:41:25,470 --> 00:41:29,950
You don't buy letters. You don't give in to terrorists. You do talk to them. Talking to is not appeasement.

420
00:41:29,950 --> 00:41:35,400
Talking to them is trying to find a solution. I've concluded two words, if you would.

421
00:41:35,400 --> 00:41:41,800
But nine months ago, the chief constable in Northern Ireland who said accurately that there is no way in history that a

422
00:41:41,800 --> 00:41:47,230
terrorist problem has been police that is only actually can ever be concluded by political means.

423
00:41:47,230 --> 00:41:54,259
Thank you very much.