Leadership Quote by Dick Spring

The line has the soft tread of a politician walking across eggshells: careful, procedural, almost bland on purpose. Dick Spring isn’t offering poetry; he’s offering reassurance. “Many years” is a quiet claim of endurance and legitimacy, a way of saying: this didn’t happen overnight, and no one gets to hijack it as a sudden concession. The repetition of “talks” and the slightly clunky “all the Parties... involved... inclusive talks” signals a speaker threading a needle between moral principle and political hazard. If you say “power-sharing” too plainly, you inflame hardliners. If you omit it, you lose the moderates and international audience. So the sentence performs its politics: it’s inclusion framed as process.

The intent is to normalize a once-unthinkable table. In the Northern Ireland context, “inclusive” is the loaded word: it’s not just about broad representation, it’s about whether parties tied (directly or indirectly) to paramilitary violence can be brought into constitutional politics without granting them a victory narrative. Spring’s phrasing treats inclusion as the inevitable endpoint of responsible diplomacy, not a capitulation. “Trying to bring about” also spreads agency across time and actors, diluting blame and dampening triumphalism.

Subtext: the old strategy of excluding “undesirables” failed, and everyone knows it. By presenting inclusion as a long-sought goal, Spring recasts a strategic pivot as patient statesmanship. It’s the rhetoric of peace processes: incremental, consensus-soaked language designed to make a historic shift feel like common sense.