Free Adventures in Correspondentland by Nick Bryant

truly their desire?
    The temptation was to cover the referendum campaign as if it were a straightforward choice between the future and the past, of reformers against rejectionists. However, in a country where history was ever present, it was far more convoluted. As one would expect, the high priest of the ‘No’ campaign was the Reverend Ian Paisley, whose most famous political catchphrase, delivered in a thunderous voice at maximum volume, was ‘ULSTER SAYS NO’. (At a press conference in the lead-up to the vote, I asked the Big Man, as Reverend Paisley was known, some smart-arse question. ‘Where are you from?’ he bellowed. ‘The BBC,’ I timidly replied. ‘I THOUGHT SO,’ he roared back.) Yet it also included more quietly spoken victims of the Troubles – mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters – who detested the idea of watching the murderers of their relatives released from prison under the terms of the peace deal.
    The ‘Yes’ campaign, meanwhile, was run with the help of Saatchi & Saatchi advertising executives dressed in Paul Smith suits, although its strongest advocates included some of Northern Ireland’s most psychotic murderers and thugs. The poster boy for former Loyalist paramilitaries, for instance, was Michael Stone, a Charles Manson lookalike and notorious assassin. The last time most people in Northern Ireland had seen him was in some of the most infamous television footage from the Troubles,which showed him mounting a lone gun and grenade attack at the funeral in Milltown cemetery of three IRA members shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar.
    In the final week of campaigning, however, Stone was allowed out on day release from Maze Prison to appear at a ‘Yes’ rally organised by former paramilitaries at the Ulster Hall. To cries of ‘We want Michael! We want Michael!’ and with a banner draped from the balcony declaring that ‘Michael Says Yes’, Stone was greeted with such rapture that it made a mockery of the claim that a ‘Yes’ vote equated automatically with progress.
    Days before the Good Friday Agreement, Tony Blair had declared it was no time for soundbites, then revealed that he could feel the ‘hand of history’ virtually massaging his shoulders. But although a prime architect of the agreement, his ‘Hi, guys’ trendy vicar routine always grated on the unionist leaders, who were men of Victorian manners and sensibilities. A member of the band Ugly Rumours at college, who strummed on his electric guitar in his upstairs flat in Downing Street, Blair may have thought of himself as a politician with rock-star charisma. But in the final days of campaigning, he was completely blown away by a rock star with rock-star charisma.
    Bono arrived in Belfast, with The Edge by his side, to perform at a concert intended to arrest a last-minute slump in support for the ‘Yes’ campaign. Somehow, he also managed to persuade David Trimble, the buttoned-down leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, and John Hume of the SDLP to appear with him on stage. In choosing what to sing, Bono had considered the merits of John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’ (too obvious), Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’ (too obscure), The Beatles’ ‘We Can Work it Out’ (too corny) and even Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’ (too silly). Eventually, hesettled on the 1969 love song that Lennon had written for Yoko Ono, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, with the lines of the chorus changed so they now read ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance’.
    Before an ecumenical crowd of some 2000 sixth-formers drawn from Protestant and Catholic schools, Bono belted out the song with marvellous passion. (My most treasured souvenir from my time in Northern Ireland is a bootleg recording of his performance.) Then he introduced the bespectacled middle-aged politicians who had done more than any