- Event type: CREATE_FROM
Northern Ireland Brooke/Mayhew Talks 1991-1992
WORK IN PROGRESS - IN THE FINAL STAGES OF EDITING A series of talks launched by Peter Brooke, Secretary of State for Northern in Ireland, which began in April 1991, and were carried on intermittently by Brooke and his successor, Patrick Mayhew, until November 1992.
Office of the Strand 1 Chairman (British Government Delegation)
In order to adequately reflect the role of the Chairman and his staff in re-drafting documents and controlling the flow of information during bilateral negotiations, we are representing them as a separate committee. In contrast to other Quill negotiations, in these Talks much of the actual work of negotiation and making proposals took place in bilateral meetings between the Chairman and the party delegations. The minutes of these sessions have been preserved in the same format as the minutes of the plenary sessions, and the sessions are modelled from the minutes as separate Committees (British Government/Alliance Bilaterals, etc.). The Chairman would move between these meetings, reporting on the positions of the other delegations and trying to reach accommodation. It is beyond the scope of the current project to model all the internal government meetings which took place during the Talks (although documentation for at least some of them exists in the National Archives), but we can draw on evidence within the sources we are using to show that proposals and agendas for the bilaterals were agreed within the Government team. For example, in a particular round of meetings, the Chairman will open the meeting with a near-identical agenda and summary of the current position of the other parties. To adequately model the fact that the flow of ideas between the delegations was filtered by the Chairman in this way, we have set up a committee called the 'Office of the Chairman' to show the conclusions of each bilateral discussion passing through the Chairman's Office and being redrafted before being passed on to the next delegation.
To see the full record of a committee, click on the corresponding committee on the map below.
Session 13142: 1992-04-24 07:00:00
Invitations and letters are issued to the party delegations ahead of the new talks.
Document View:
Working Document: Political Talks Realities and Common Themes: Paragraph 18
The Nature of the Northern Ireland Community
----------
Political Talks: Realities and Common Themes [HMG Paper of 29 June 1991] - Paragraph 18
18. There seems general support for the view that there are [at least] two distinct communal identities in Northern Ireland, both of which need to be given full recognition by the other so that they can be appropriately accommodated in the political system here, • taking account of the wider framework of relationships within these islands.
[Alliance Principles 1 and 2; SDLP para 15; DUP paras 46, 47; UUP para 36]
----------
[Extracts drawn together from the parties' position second position papers that are printed in the Internal Record of the 1908 session on 1 July and appear to have been circulated for discussion at the meeting.]
Alliance para 6: "Given that there are, as in every community,
distinct identities ..... it is necessary to create common
institutions and instruments of government which all can
participate and with which all can identify".
SDLP para 3: "The goal of the talks is to accommodate two sets
of legitimate rights - the right of Unionist and Nationalist to
effective political and symbolic expression of their identity".
UDUP para 4: "We cannot but recognise that there are separate
identities which reach out beyond the confines of Northern
Ireland itself".
[Editor's Note: We assume that the discrepancy in paragraph numbering between the original government paper and the extracts in the record of the meeting on 1 July relates to the fact that the parties submitted a second round of papers.]
Decisions yet to be taken
- Working Document: Political Talks Realities and Common Themes: Paragraph 18 (introduced on 1992-04-24 07:00:00 - CREATE_FROM - e842557) [This document]
Document Timeline
- Working Document: Political Talks Realities and Common Themes: Paragraph 18 (introduced on 1992-04-24 07:00:00 - CREATE_FROM - e842557) [This document] [view current proposal at this moment]