16: Tony Blair: Taking insults, swallowing pride, and negotiating with both sides

Leading

Goalhanger Podcasts

Politics, Government, News

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How was peace achieved in Northern Ireland? What was it like speaking to the IRA, loyalist paramilitary groups and victims simultaneously? Who were the most important individuals involved in the peace process? To mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Alastair and Rory are joined by former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to answer all these questions and more. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive a weekly newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the rest of this politics leading with me, Maurice Heud.
0:08.4	And me, I was to come.
0:10.4	We're about to interview Tony Blair and four listeners who are not absolutely on top of
0:17.6	the Northern Ireland peace process.
0:19.8	We're going to have a very, very intense half-hour conversation, which I think people are
0:23.0	going to love, but just a very, very quick introduction to some of the terms that we're
0:28.2	going to be looking at.
0:30.0	Essentially, Northern Ireland exploded at the end of the 1960s, and it exploded in
0:37.5	a conflict between the Unionist community, predominantly Protestant, very attached to
0:43.1	the United Kingdom, who comprised about two-thirds the population of Northern Ireland, and
0:48.3	the Republican community, predominantly Catholic, who comprised about one-third of the population
0:53.4	or not.
0:54.4	And it had been a trouble that had been brewing in increasing amounts since the 1930s,
0:59.6	and a lot of it initially was about civil rights.
1:01.9	The Republican Catholic community felt discriminated against in terms of housing, in
1:07.8	terms of voting in local council elections, in terms of employment.
1:11.9	And above all, they didn't have proper participation in government.
1:16.1	The place was run by unionists, the police, the judiciary, the members of parliament,
1:21.9	the government.
1:22.9	And in this brief conversation with Tony Blair, we're going to go through his early memories
1:28.2	of this.
1:29.2	Tony Blair was born in 1953, and as he's going to explain, he came from a family which
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