How his diamond table rescued the Ulster peace deal
ROBERT Hannigan’s rise to the top of the British Establishment began with a diamond table that helped unlock power-sharing in Northern Ireland.
During testy negotiations in Belfast in 2007, Republicans demanded they must sit next to Unionists, but they in turn demanded they must sit opposite their former adversaries.
As an adviser to Tony Blair, Mr Hannigan came up with a diamond-shaped table that allowed the key players to sit both opposite and next to each other, breaking the deadlock.
He quickly rose up the diplomatic ranks, counselling Gordon Brown and David Cameron on security affairs, before being appointed head of the country’s largest spy agency GCHQ, with a seat on Whitehall’s all-powerful Joint Intelligence Committee.
At the time, Mr Hannigan was named the country’s third most powerful Catholic by religious newspaper The Tablet, which noted that he ‘enthusiastically follows hurling and Gaelic football.’ Before entering the Civil Service, he trained to be a priest. But friends say he ‘fell in love and could not go down that path’.
It was through his wife that he first met Father Edmund Higgins, a notorious paedophile.
That friendship would help destroy Mr Hannigan’s otherwise blemish-free career when a sister intelligence agency discovered his past support for the clergyman.
Mr Hannigan has since gone on to take a host of jobs in the private sector, commenting publicly on national security.