Inside Accounts, Volume I

This book offers the most comprehensive account yet of how the Irish Government worked to bring the Northern Ireland conflict to an end. Based on long-form interviews with key officials and political leaders, it throws much-needed new light on how the many tensions and problems that emerged in the peace process were managed and overcome to bring about the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and the political and institutional changes that emerged from that moment. Providing a range of new and original insights on the individual and collective efforts needed to make a peace process work, the book first covers the power-sharing experiment at Sunningdale before detailing the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement and, more substantively, the peace process that followed. Many here have not been interviewed before and each interview-chapter takes the reader into the heart of the negotiating room, detailing the intensity of purpose and commitment needed to reach a political settlement. The interviews reveal the iterative nature of the peace process and, through the voices of those on the inside, provide the most dramatic and authoritative picture yet of how the peace process came to change the course of history.

This book will not just be of interest to those with an academic interest in Irish history, the peace process or political negotiation. Nor will it merely capture the fascination of those working in the field of conflict resolution or those engaged in undergraduate or post-graduate research in related areas both nationally and internationally. More significantly and importantly, and because of the commentaries involved, this book will be of major interest to the general reader and will become a key source for understanding what went on inside the peace process.