By Dave Riley
The start of Irish peace negotiations may have marked a crossroads in Irish history, but signs of such a momentous event were hard to find.
At Stormont Castle in Belfast, Sinn Féin took its seats at the negotiating table with British and Irish civil servants. The nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party and three minor parties were also there for the opening plenary session of talks on September 15. But all five unionist parties refused to take part.
It was the first time since partition that all parties — nationalist and unionist — had been invited to discuss the future of the six counties.
Recent opinion polls had shown overwhelming support among unionists for participation in the talks — some 93% of Ulster Unionist Party supporters wanted their party to take part, while 76% of those who voted for Ian Paisley's hardline Democratic Unionist Party thought their party should be there.
The level of unionist involvement is set to become a bargaining chip, with unionists hoping that further concessions can be extracted in return for taking part in face-to-face negotiations.
The loyalist parties have advocated "proximity talks" — a scenario already rejected by Sinn Féin — in which civil servants would shuttle documents from room to room in Stormont Castle so that unionists could avoid direct encounters with Republicans.
The question now is whether the unionists will again be allowed to stifle the potential for political progress. Recognising that change is inevitable, their only strategy is postponement.
The core issue in the talks is that of consent. As applied by unionists, consent is the traditional tactic of a head count in an artificially created British state. By this means, they are trying to force nationalists into accepting a predetermined outcome to the negotiations.
While it seems inevitable that the UUP will eventually make its way into face-to-face negotiations, there were no signs that party leader David Trimble at least, is ready for compromise.
"With Ulster Unionists at the table, there will be no united Ireland. There will be no joint sovereignty, no joint authority actual or disguised", he said. "There will be no agreement coming out of these talks which is not clearly a United Kingdom solution."
Below are some excerpts from a statement by Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams on the issue of consent:
"British policy in relation to the 'union' lies at the heart of the conflict. All other politics rotate around that central issue. And until such time as that policy changes, the political arguments and debate which revolve around it are in essence academic exercises.
"The consent of nationalists in Ireland to the partition of Ireland was never sought. It has never been freely given. Consent as applied by the British government and the unionists is a coercive measure. It is a veto which forces nationalists in the north to live in a partitionist, undemocratic statelet. It is a veto which forces nationalists in all of Ireland to live in a partitioned country.
"As a result, national and democratic rights are denied and the demands that nationalists acquiesce to unionist domination and the status quo are upheld. This perversion of consent means that it applies only to unionists and becomes a political instrument for bludgeoning nationalists into accepting a unionist outcome to negotiations.
"No duty or responsibility is placed on unionists to seek the consent of nationalists to anything, other than to the continued division of the people of Ireland.
"This abuse of the concept of consent — the veto — demands that the majority of the people of Ireland underwrite the denial of their own national and democratic rights; that they comply with the undemocratic carve-up of Ireland on the basis of an arbitrarily determined sectarian head count. In addition, it utterly inhibits the dialogue necessary for political progress, and removes the incentive which would otherwise exist to seek a political solution.
"Consent must be a matter for persuasion and of political will. It cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula or to who has more votes within this manufactured statelet. If nationalists in the next election, or the one after that, were to secure one vote more than unionists, would that resolve the conflict? Would unionists acquiesce to nationalist demands for a unitary state? I think not!
"Consent must equal agreement. If it is to be a genuinely positive and enabling factor in securing an agreement, which is for the people of Ireland alone to determine, then it has to mean seeking consent in an all-Ireland context. In this context the requirement of democratic consent becomes a positive influence."