American mediation in Northern Ireland: From Haass to the Stormont House Agreement

When seemingly out of the blue a dispute about the flying of the Union flag at the end of 2012 prompted what amounted to a fresh crisis in the Northern Ireland peace process, the five parties in Northern Ireland’s power-sharing Executive agreed some months later to seek American mediation in the person of Richard Haass, who had held the Northern Ireland brief duringGeorge W. Bush’s first term.  The presentation first addresses the issue of why American connection has been such an enduring feature of the Northern Ireland peace process under three different American Presidents.  It then examines the outcome of the Haass process and argues that the failure of the talks was partly a consequence of a diminution in the crisis that had prompted the process.  It suggests that the problems that the Haass process had sought to find solutions for were not the consequence of the lack of inter-party agreement, but rather arose from difficulties in implementing existing agreements or from a failure to accept the logic of existing practice that had not previously been seen as requiring fresh agreement among the parties.  Yet ironically, the proposals put forward by Haass were to receive a boost from the agreement that came out of the crisis in the Northern Ireland budget that formed the centrepiece of the talks that eventually led to the Stormont House Agreement in December 2014.  The adoption at this point of some of Haass’s ideas prompted the jibe that the Stormont House Agreement amounted to Haass for slow learners.  It argues that this overstates what has been achieved, though, with American involvement in the background to the talks,shows the continuing vitality and significance of the American connection in the external conflict management of the Northern Ireland problem.