ALONGSIDE Stormont talks, a meeting has been announced of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference (BIIGC).
While it is a truism to say talks need to examine why Stormont collapsed, lessons must also be learned from the remarkable abeyance of the BIIGC.
Between 2007 and 2018 it did not meet at all, despite the Good Friday Agreement requiring it to have "regular and frequent meetings" at ministerial level, plus summits of the prime minister and taoiseach "as required".
Alleged breaches or neglect of the Agreement are central to the Stormont deadlock, yet the effective suspension of the BIIGC is arguably the only unambiguous breach and certainly the clearest example of neglect.
While Stormont is the Agreement's defining institution, the BIIGC is in many ways its supreme institution and the wider peace process's ultimate institution, being the formal successor body to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.
Under the Good Friday Agreement, the BIIGC has a remit to promote British-Irish cooperation in all non-devolved matters and subjects of mutual interest.
It has no direct say over Stormont or veto over UK sovereignty.
However, Stormont ministers are to be involved in its meetings as appropriate and the first and deputy first ministers can attend summits, indicating how much cross-over of interests was expected.
The BIIGC is also meant to "keep under review" the workings of north-south and east-west institutions, in all of which Stormont has a role.
The Conference was given a permanent secretariat, comprising a dozen officials from the Northern Ireland Office and a dozen from Ireland's departments of justice and foreign affairs.
They were headquartered in what was then Belfast's tallest building, Windsor House, with a £3.4 million residence for the Irish staff built off the exclusive Malone Road.
The BIIGC was shut down along with Stormont during the series of short suspensions in the first two years of devolution but in the last major collapse, from 2002 to 2007, the British and Irish governments kept it going, to show the Agreement was not dead and to coax Stormont back to life.
A full schedule of meetings was maintained then stepped up for the talks leading to the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, with Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern using the BIIGC as their vehicle to promote and prepare for a deal.
They also used it to threaten the DUP with "joint stewardship of the process" via north-south and east-west institutions if Stormont was not restored.
The return of devolution was sealed by both premiers with a triumphant Conference summit in 2007.
Then came the 11-year, still-unexplained silence.
Policing and justice had been a big part of the Conference's remit so its planned devolution under St Andrews might have created a sense of 'job done'.
In the event, that devolution took another three years and the 2010 Hillsborough Castle Agreement.
So the BIIGC had quick cause to meet again and in any case retained a remit over rights and security. But it did not meet over this, or the financial crisis, the Haass talks or the EU referendum.
The forgetting of the Conference was almost pathetic.
In 2014, its reduced British staff of eight moved back to NIO buildings at Stormont.
The Irish staff decamped from Windsor House the following year. They no longer share a phone number, let alone an office.
Nobody noticed until 2017, when Sinn Féin spun the 2007 threat to the DUP as making the BIIGC a "form of joint authority".
By then, even taoiseach Leo Varadkar seemed unclear on its role. He also called it a form of joint authority before having to correct himself.
Claims have since been made that the Conference is a victim of Brexit tensions or Tory-unionist sympathies but it was abandoned by Labour prime minister Gordon Brown in a different political era.
And where was the Irish government? It takes two to not tango.
The real clue to the BIIGC's demise was a 2012 joint statement by taoiseach Enda Kenny and prime minister David Cameron reorientating the British-Irish relationship around direct communication between their senior civil servants, casually sidelining the Agreement's east-west institutions.
There is a striking parallel here with how Sinn Féin and the DUP ran Stormont.
London and Dublin thought they had reached a point where they could bypass the Agreement's elaborate structures and deal with other directly, until a crisis - in this case Brexit - left them barely on speaking terms, with the structure to keep them talking withered away.
When the BIIGC passes its verdict next month on the Stormont talks, both governments should acknowledge the beam in their own eye.
newton@irishnews.com
