1999:A year of change and of promise

By Anne Cadwallader

BELFAST — The year 1999 was one of profound change, a year when history was made, a year of growing hopes and the occasional tragic setback that reminded everyone of the hell out of which Northern Ireland is inexorably climbing.

Its nadir must surely have been the murder in March of lawyer Rosemary Nelson, a woman who had worked tirelessly to represent the weakest and give the protection of the law to people who had no confidence in it.

Its zenith was the nomination, on Nov. 29, of a power-sharing executive, one comprising nationalists and unionists, which began governing when Westminster let go of the reins of power at midnight on Wednesday, Dec. 1.

The changes that 1999 brought can be brought into sharp focus through comparing what the Ulster Unionist Party leader, David Trimble, said at its beginning and its end. In January 1999, he accused Sinn Fein of using "Nazi" propaganda tactics. But by December, he was working with two Sinn Fein ministers — a far cry from a mere 11 months earlier, when he said the party was "spinning the lie that there is nothing in the agreement which requires the IRA to decommission before they can take up ministerial positions. This is absolute rubbish."

Also in January, the "Orange Volunteers," claimed responsibility for the first bombing of the year, at a GAA ground in County Derry. The group said at the time that the nationalist community had "everything to fear."

In February, a former IRA man and author of the book "Killing Rage," Eamon Collins was found dead on a roadside, his body battered and stabbed. No group admitted responsibility and most focus was on a number of South Armagh republicans whom he had crossed.

The 10th anniversary of the murder of Belfast civil rights lawyer Pat Finucane was commemorated the same month by the handing over a major new report from British Irish Rights Watch to the Irish and British governments.

Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionist Party held their first ever official bilateral meeting in the history of Ireland in February, and, according to sources for both sides, while not exactly cordial, neither was it a "slagging match."

Collusion between the RUC, British Army and the UDA/UVF once again soared to the top of the political agenda after a leading loyalist revealed publicly, on TV, that he had been given so much security information he "didn’t know where to put it."

British soldier Lee Clegg, found guilty of murdering Karen Reilly, 18, in 1990, was acquitted in a retrial during March, despite the judge ruling he had lied to the court on at least two occasions and that his bullet had "probably" been the fatal shot.

Nelson murder

Lawyer Rosemary Nelson was murdered, on March 15 outside her Lurgan home in a car bombing. It blew her legs off and caused such grave abdominal injuries that she died within three hours.

She was a wife to Paul and the mother of three young children, two boys, aged 13 and 11, and an 8-year-old daughter. Her death caused the deepest shock among her family and friends, and among a far wider public circle.

The British prime minister, Tony Blair, who had met Nelson in February as part of a delegation from the Garvaghy Road, called her murder a "disgusting, despicable barbarity."

Two days later, in an apparent internal loyalist feud possibly connected to the Nelson murder, loyalist Frankie Curry was gunned down on the loyalist Shankill Road in Belfast. Curry had opposed the Good Friday peace agreement and had apparently fallen out with members of the group he had once led, the Red Hand Commandos.

The IRA told nine families related to people it killed in the 1970s that it has located the sites where their loved ones were buried and had passed the information on to the group the Families of the Disappeared.

It said, "We are sorry that this has taken so long to resolve and for the prolonged anguish caused to their families." By the end of 1999, however, only three bodies had been discovered and returned to their families.

In April, as the loyalist bombing campaign continued, three Catholic families came under attack. No one was hurt in the attacks in Ballycastle, Belfast and Dungannon. Four hundred such attacks would take place by the end of 1999.

April talks go nowhere

Marathon talks involving the main pro-agreement political party leaders and the British and Irish prime ministers at Hillsborough Castle failed to remove the impasse in the peace process, leaving a continuing crisis.

Leading republican Brian Keenan told an Easter rally in County Monaghan that republicans were "very, very frustrated, very angry now and very, very, very impatient. There will be magic rabbits out of the hat."

The Sinn Fein ard fheis in May took place in an atmosphere of anger, frustration and resentment, with party leaders making strenuous attempts to cool tempers and restore morale.

The two governments set June 30 as the new deadline for transferring power from London to Stormont, under an Executive to include Sinn Fein.

In June, a 59-year-old grandmother was murdered in her home by a pipe bomb explosion. Elizabeth O’Neill, a Protestant married to a Catholic, was killed almost instantly when she picked up the device to try to throw it away.

The creation of what was widely described as a pressure-cooker atmosphere through round-the-clock talks in "one last, enormous effort" to save the Good Friday agreement took place at Stormont, but few gave the talks much chance of success.

In July after a week of intensive talks, ending in what Prime Minister Blair called a "seismic shift" in Sinn Fein’s position on decommissioning, a document — "The Way Forward" — was agreed.

But it soon became clear that the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, would not try and persuade his party to accept it. Trimble demanded changes to the proposals, which linked the decommissioning of IRA weapons to the setting up of a power-sharing Executive.

The Orange Order was banned from marching down the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road for the second year running, with fears of a loyalist backlash. The Order failed to muster sufficient numbers to force the RUC to overturn the Parades Commission’s decision.

In a protest at the rerouting of a smaller parade, the largest Orange rally of the year on July 12 rerouted itself to the Ormeau Park in south Belfast with as many as 40,000 marchers parading to one of the city’s largest open spaces, within 200 yards of the nationalist Lower Ormeau district.

Three days later, Trimble and the UUP assembly members remained in their headquarters in Belfast while the "d’Hondt mechanism" to set up an Executive at Stormont was triggered.

Mitchell to the rescue

The Executive was formed but lapsed almost as soon as it was nominated. The British and Irish governments were forced to announce that former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who had brokered the Good Friday deal in 1998, would be brought in to review the workings of the agreement as they pertained to the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the setting up of the Executive.

Conflicting reports in August of possible IRA involvement in both a gun-running operation out of Florida and the brutal killing of a young Belfast man, Charles Bennett, sent a shudder through the peace process, with a month still to go before the Mitchell review is set to begin.

On Aug. 14, the Parades Commission gave permission for an Apprentice Boys march on the Ormeau Road. The local residents group staged a rally against the parade and hundreds of RUC riot police, moving in at dawn, set upon protesters at 6 a.m.

In the afternoon, minor rioting erupted in Derry causing damage in the city center but few injuries. Drunken hooliganism was more in evidence than serious rioting.

The following day, a silence descended on the market town of Omagh at 3:10 p.m. on the anniversary of the 1998 bombing, broken only by sobs and the sound of the wind sweeping through a town that has seen more tears in the last year than it ever believed was possible. Twenty-nine people were killed in the atrocity, which was blamed on republican dissidents.

The SDLP leader, John Hume, underwent emergency surgery for a ruptured intestine in an Austrian hospital, where he had been attending a European conference.

Deep gloom bordering on despair was writ large on the faces of all politicians as they wearily gathered at Stormont to try to rescue the peace process at the beginning of September.

Mitchell said he had no "magic wand" to wave to bring agreement about, but neither would he have agreed to participate, as a facilitator, if he did not believe agreement was possible.

The Patten Commission on the future of policing issued its report. While it did not recommend the RUC’s disbandment, it was radical and met with fury from both the UUP and the Rev. Ian Paisley’s DUP.

In October, self-confessed RUC agent and UDA quartermaster William Stobie was dramatically freed on bail in a major embarrassment for the RUC Special Branch. Stobie is accused of supplying the guns used to kill Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane in February 1989.

The UUP warmly welcomed the appointment of Peter Mandelson, a close confidante of Blair, to become 12th secretary of state for Northern Ireland.

Nationalists harbored deep concerns about Mandelson’s arrival, knowing the UUP had lobbied long and hard for his appointment to replace Mo Mowlam. She made no secret of her regret at going.

In what became an endurance test, hopes of a breakthrough in the Mitchell Review on the continuing deadlock over IRA decommissioning were variously described as "slim" and "very tiny" in November.

Arms breakthrough

Finally, a genuine breakthrough in the seemingly intractable deadlock over decommissioning took place on Nov. 15 before the eyes of the long-suffering people of Northern Ireland — although few knew where, or how, it would end. A week earlier, Echo sources revealed, the IRA had assured Mitchell that it was no longer on a war footing.

There was no dramatic announcement on the steps of Stormont, but a complex series of statements and briefings that left no doubt in anyone’s mind that this was the out-workings of a carefully choreographed deal.

Trimble called a meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council at the Waterfront Hall. The vote at the end of an intense and heated debate, was 480 votes in favor to 349 votes against (58 percent to 4).

The people of Northern Ireland began governing themselves from midnight on Wednesday, Dec. 1, with a 12-person power-sharing executive, including unionists and republicans, holding the reins of power for the first time.

At a truly historic meeting of the Assembly, the SDLP’s Seamus Mallon was reinstated as deputy first minister, to work again in parallel with the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, who remains first minister.

There were now three new SDLP ministers, three UUP ministers, two DUP ministers and two Sinn Fein ministers. The North/South Ministerial Council and British-Irish Council were established.