‘BIIG solution’ that is little known by most people
JOKINGLY referred to sometimes as the ‘BIIG solution,’ the British Irish Intergovernmental Conference is now virtually unknown outside a handful of civil servants and historians.
It grew out of the Anglo-Irish Accord achieved by Garret FitzGerald with Margaret Thatcher in 1985, which established a secretariat at Hillsborough in Co. Down, staffed by civil servants from both jurisdictions.
Its architecture could arguably be said to go back to the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973, which envisaged many of the strands of a settlement that caused Séamus Mallon to famously dub the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners.’
Under the 1998 deal, the BIIGC replaced the Anglo-Irish Conference of 1985, which unionists had always rejected, but which many in that community were happy to sign up to under a new name once there was devolved Government and agreed powersharing as the basis of a permanent peace.
The conference, which is chaired by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Northern Secretary, met a number of times until the 2007 deal that brought the DUP into Government in the North, after which it fell away because of self-administration locally.
There remains a secretariat in Belfast, with Dublin and London discussing matters between the two states, not involving the local powers.
These include all-island and interisland affairs such as drug trafficking, broadcasting, asylum, immigration, cross-border welfare fraud and anti-terrorism cooperation.