Sir John Major, then Britain’s prime minister, was gardening at his home in the Cambridgeshire village of Great Stukeley on Saturday March 20th, 1993. It was, he recalls, a “sunny spring afternoon”, right before Mother’s Day. For Major, it turned into a “dark and desperate” time when talks which were the precursor to negotiations for the Belfast Agreement almost ended before they began.
The British government at the time was engaged in tentative back-channel discussions with the IRA. A few months previously, the republicans had sent a secret message via an intermediary declaring that its war was “over” and seeking a way out. Major believes the message came from Martin McGuinness, who always denied sending it.
That sunny Saturday, as he tended the large garden at Finings, his period home on the edge of the village, the British sent a reply to the IRA through the secret backchannel to say they would be prepared to enter exploratory peace talks with Sinn Féin. Then the prime minister’s phone rang.
“I just knew it would be Number 10 [Downing Street]. With them ringing me at home at the weekend like that, I also knew it wasn’t going to be very good news,” says Major, 30 years on.
“But I certainly wasn’t expecting what they told me.”
The Downing Street officials informed Major that at about 12.25pm two bombs had exploded on a busy shopping street in Warrington, a large town 20 miles east of Liverpool. One was placed in a bin outside Boots, the other 100 yards away in a second bin outside Argos. People fleeing the first explosion ran straight into the second and 56 were injured. Three-year-old Johnathan Ball died on the spot. Twelve-year-old Tim Parry suffered devastating injuries, to which he would succumb five days later. Major’s gut reaction was that the nascent peace process had died with the bomb’s victims.
“If at a time when we were beginning to make progress the men of violence could explode a bomb in the way they did, then, I thought, perhaps the cynics were right and we were making a mistake.”
Last month, three decades almost to the minute after the atrocity that nearly wrecked the peace process, a lone piper played at a commemoration on Warrington’s Market Square. The crowd of dignitaries, including Major, faced Bridge Street, the thoroughfare where the IRA murdered the two children who had been among those out shopping for cards and presents for their mothers.
Ireland’s Ambassador to Britain, Martin Fraser, and Heather Humphreys, the Minister for Social Protection, represented the Republic at the commemoration. A crowd of locals gathered around the square. A student choir from Great Sankey High School, which Tim Parry attended, sang You Raise Me Up, the song made famous by Irish band Westlife. Colin Parry, Tim’s father, gave a speech praising Major for overcoming his initial reaction to the bombing to persevere with peace efforts.
“By doing so, I believe he paved the way for the eventual Good Friday Agreement in 1998,” Parry told the assembled crowd. This grieving father was later to become a committed peace activist. But still, the murder of a son leaves bitterness. Parry called the IRA bombers “callous and cynical”.
“For 12 years we had been a family of five until this day 30 years ago, when the IRA made us a family of four,” he said.
Parry was followed to the lectern by Major, now a week shy of his 80th birthday but with his voice as strong as when he was prime minister. He recalled how even as he despaired that Warrington might be the end of the peace process, he clung to hope that it might not be and a determination to keep trying. Hope had to be the “inextinguishable beacon” that would light the way to peace, he said.
Following a lament by the piper, the crowd on Market Square fell silent to remember the victims. Major bowed his head. Nearby, a lone woman in the crowd gripped a security barrier so hard her knuckles went white. She was an ordinary woman, probably a local, and she caught the eye in her bright yellow jacket. A single tear rolled down her cheek.
The Warrington bomb almost derailed the peace process but it also affected the people of this place, their town forever associated with an obscenity.
After the commemoration, Major was among those who went to a reception on the edge of the town centre at the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Peace Centre, which was founded by the Parry family after the bombing. Schoolchildren from Seamount College in Kinvara, Co Galway were there for peace workshops with kids from the local area and Belfast. Major posed with them for photographs.
Later, in a quiet room at the back of the peace centre, he recalls for The Irish Times the wrestle with his own conscience that Warrington sparked in 1993. He agrees that the bombing, as much as any of the atrocities of the Troubles, had a dramatic impact on public attitudes in Britain and Ireland. Five days after the explosion a huge peace rally was held in Dublin. Tim Parry died on the same day.
“If we gave up on the peace process there would be other days like this, other bombs, other children killed, others injured, with the chance of peace moving further and further away,” says Major. “So I decided we couldn’t give up. We had to go back to it and push it as hard as we possibly could.”
Albert Reynolds had become Taoiseach about a year before Warrington. A fortnight after he took office, the prime minister invited him to Downing Street. Major recalls that he and Reynolds left their officials and retired upstairs to the White Room for drinks and a private discussion.
“It became clear in that talk that he was as keen to see the end of violence as I was. And I thought: together we can try,” says Major.
I spent a lot of time trying to put myself into the mind of the high command of the Provisionals. Why in the midst of negotiations were they still planting bombs? It was morally wrong. But I could see they were trying to convince their volunteers, the people backing them, that they were not weakening
It was only five years before the Belfast Agreement, but the early 90s were a world away in terms of the atmosphere of the Troubles. It was clear that Major wanted peace. But what made him think it was even possible? At the time, he had no way of knowing if the IRA backchannel was just a trick.
“I thought: ‘Nothing goes on forever.’ Even the Hundred Years’ War came to an end. Human nature can bring peace about if we are fortunate enough, and if we have the right moment. I thought we had the right moment because I believed that after so long, it must have become apparent to the men of violence that they were not going to change the policy of the British government by violence.
“The only way that they could change their ambitions and achieve a portion of them was by seeking a political settlement. I hoped that was what they were thinking too. So those were all the reasons that compelled me to think we should make a big move forward.”
Major says both he and Reynolds knew from their first discussion in the White Room in 1992 that the path to peace would take years and, as political leaders, they might not last long enough to see the process out. “We knew it would be a long, slow, hard grind and it might not be fully achieved while either of us were still in government.”
The violence continued throughout the early peace talks. Prominent atrocities during this time included the Shankill Road fish shop bombing by the IRA and the Greysteel massacre by loyalists, both in October 1993. Behind the scenes, the Irish and British governments kept working towards peace through intermediaries, clerics and others.
Does Major think the leaders of the Provisional IRA and other groups believed at the time that what they were doing was morally wrong, with the potential for peace on the horizon?
“It is a difficult question to answer. I spent a lot of time trying to put myself into the mind of the high command of the Provisionals. Why in the midst of negotiations were they still planting bombs? I could see the reason from their perspective. It’s awful that they did it. It was morally wrong. But I could see they were trying to convince their volunteers, the people backing them, that they were not weakening and giving way to the British government.”
Through the medium of bombs, Major believes the IRA were “talking to their own people”.
“They were saying: ‘We are not giving way to the blandishments of this [British] government and we are fighting for what we always fought for. And the only way they could show that was to continue with violence. It was a brutal thing to do and it was wrong. But that is why it happened,” says Major.
Albert Reynolds was replaced as Taoiseach by John Bruton in 1994 but the work towards a final peace continued. The basic principles had been established in December 1993, nine months after Warrington, in a joint declaration by Major and Reynolds at Downing Street. The IRA called a ceasefire in 1994, which lasted for two years. As negotiations stalled, the group returned to war in 1996 with huge bombs in Canary Wharf in London and the Arndale shopping centre in Manchester.
Despite all-party talks, Major knew they would never get a final peace deal completed before the general election he would have to fight in 1997. It was left to Tony Blair and a new Labour government in Britain, and a new Fianna Fáil administration in Ireland under Bertie Ahern, to make the final push for a deal between all sides.
Major took no further part in negotiations after his election defeat in 1997, but his work towards the peace that culminated in the Belfast Agreement is recognised by all sides. At his close friend Reynolds’ funeral in 2013, spontaneous applause broke out in the church in Donnybrook when Major’s presence was acknowledged.
The former prime minister was also pictured in the church finally shaking hands with McGuinness, the former IRA leader whom he believes sent his government that first message seeking peace, almost 12 years before. It was Blair who had shaken for the British on the 1998 agreement. This was Major’s way of closing it all off from his side.
“The British and Irish have a pretty rackety past over the centuries. There were many things where there is cause for regret, repentance and forgiveness, on all sides,” he says.
But after the Belfast Agreement, relations between the nations’ political leaders were “better than they had been in a thousand years”. Major believes the political dip caused by Brexit will quickly improve. British and Irish people, meanwhile, continue in their close, complex relationship, bound by ties of history, suffering and hope.
“The importance of this is substantial. It would be folly beyond understanding for there not to be a good relationship between us. At a national level, it would be a failure of politics.”
As the horror of Warrington and what followed it showed, sometimes the madness of politics can pave the only way back to sanity.
