The lessons of Northern Ireland: bad students learning the wrong lessons?

Sitting at the LSE IDEAS ‘Lessons of Northern Ireland’ event, it was fanciful to think of ‘who was bugging who’ during the peace process. Around the table at the seminar we had Jonathan Powell (Tony Blair’s chief of staff for the Northern Ireland talks), Martin Mansergh (the Irish Taoiseach’s special representative on the Northern Ireland talks), Tim Dalton (from the Irish Ministry of Justice who collated Irish government intelligence files), David Trimble (the former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and a leading player in the peace process), and Barbara de Bruin (a member of Sinn Féin’s negotiating team). Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that Jonathan Powell, or Tim Dalton, were privy to the transcripts of telephone calls and other surreptitiously recorded conversations of the people with whom they now shared a seminar room? My educated guess would be that Jonathan, Tim and many others know a lot more than they are prepared, or allowed, to tell us.