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He said, they said

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

In the wake of the embarrassing failure when David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist Party leader, rejected the IRA’s gesture due to what he saw as its lack of “transparency,” the taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and Tony Blair, the British prime minister, claimed that they knew the scope of the gesture but were prevented by a confidentiality clause from revealing the details.
According to Blair, de Chastelain “gives us certain information — not the full information — but certain information to us, as the two governments. Although we are not at liberty to disclose that information without his [de Chastelain’s] permission, we are working hard to try to find a way in which we can do so because I believe, on the basis of what we know, that people would be satisfied if they knew the full details.”
This week, Ahern repeated the claim on RTE when he told a reporter that he has “more detail than I can say.”
However, de Chastelain last week told a delegation of the Democratic Unionist Party: “The only people who know what went on are Andy [Sens, the American representative on the IICD], the IRA and myself. We didn’t give details to the P.M.s. The IRA only allowed us to admit there was more than the last.
“I gave them no more detail than I gave you,” he told the delegation, which included the party leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, and his deputy, Peter Robinson.
At the same time, legal experts are disputing that there was any legal foundation to de Chastelain’s claim that he could not disclose details of the IRA’s gesture because of a commitment to confidentiality.
In an interview with the BBC, Austin Morgan, who is an authority on the legislation surrounding the Good Friday agreement, outlined the legal background to the setting up of the IICD: “Now there are three documents. The first one is an international agreement between the UK and the Irish state, of 1997, which established the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning. That’s the general’s organization. Now that was set up by the two governments and he is responsible to the two governments. Following that, Westminster and also the Oireachtas in Dublin legislated it, but essentially all they were doing was drawing domestic consequences of an international organization having been set up by the two governments to address the question of decommissioning and, by the way, this was done during the multi-party talks.”
Morgan added: “The decommissioning commission has nothing at all to do with the Belfast agreement, it is referred to therein but the three documents we’re talking about, namely the international agreement, the UK legislation and the Irish legislation are all separate from the Belfast agreement.”
According to Morgan, the parties “accepted that immunity would be granted to the paramilitaries holding the arms . . . so I think that the idea of confidentiality is that the general’s not allowed essentially to wear his chairman’s hat when he’s taking the guns and then wear his good citizen’s hat and help subsequently prosecute someone for holding weapons.”
In Morgan’s view confidentiality is a “question of honor, it’s not a question of law.”
Sources close to the British government said that the confidentiality commitment was arrived at between de Chastelain and the IRA representative who met with the IICD chairman to discuss the mode of decommissioning. The IRA, London believes, imposed it on de Chastelain as a way of protecting the leadership against anger from IRA volunteers who were involved in the acquisition of the arms over the years.
After his meeting with de Chastelain, Paisley issued a statement accusing the British prime minister of being “a liar” by claiming to know more than he did about the decommissioning act. At the time, in the wake of what one insider called a “fiasco,” Blair was eager to indicate that the IRA act was a truly significant one and would meet Unionist demands if only more information about it were made public.

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