In this new edition ofThe Long Road to Peace in Northern Ireland, former contributors have been given the opportunity to add postscripts, two new essays have been commissioned, and the appendices enlarged. I have added sections of the Opsahl Commission report and Sir George Quigley’s Review of the Parades Commission (2002), which address the issues of religion, cultural identity and sectarianism, and have dedicated this edition to Torkel Opsahl and Eric Gallagher, fellow commissioner on the Opsahl Commission. Eric Gallagher was one of the four Protestant clergymen who met the IRA at Feakle in County Clare in 1974. He...

The bulk of the essays in this book were delivered as part of Liverpool University’s Institute of Irish Studies Peace Lecture Series, 1996–2000, and they have been left largely unchanged as reflecting opinion at the time they were given. The earlier lectures received generous sponsorship from the Irish Independent Newspaper Group and Lord David Owen’s charityHumanitas. They are dedicated to Torkel Opsahl, the international human rights lawyer, who headed up the 1993 Opsahl Commission in Northern Ireland and died tragically early shortly afterwards, just as he was taking up his new post as head of the Bosnian War...

The creation of the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University in 1988 was an inspired initiative. Never was it so important that we in Ireland should understandeach otherand that both islands should reach out to each other inmutualunderstanding. I do not speak consciously from the standpoint of any political party or community. It is my aim to try to achieve a broad empathy – something which is sadly lacking in the situation. Parties tend to be what in business terms would be described as producer- rather than market-orientated. They appeal to their existing customer base...

Large nations do not like calling for outside intervention, whether diplomatic or military, to help in dealing with conflict within their own sphere of influence, let alone within their own sovereign boundaries. No country has demonstrated that more clearly than the UK, which until 1994 rejected internationalizing its peace effort in relation to the long-standing Irish conflict.

Many nations also guard zealously that provision in the UN Charter which ensures the ‘inherent right of individual or collective self-defence’, and the limitation in Article 2.7 of the UN Charter which states that ‘nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorise the...

Having spent most of my intelligent life in a country riven by conflict, inequality and domination, I have no intention of trivializing the very serious nature of the problems we had to solve, and are still attempting to solve. This I would most certainly do were I to suggest that South Africa’s successfully negotiated transition could be neatly, intellectually packaged and exported to other seemingly intractable conflict areas. It is customary for commentators to pay homage to the uniqueness of every situation, and then to subtly extract and sermonize to others about how it was done in situation x and...

Sometimes real-life events are even more amazing than fiction. At least this was the feeling of the three small groups gathered in the Norwegian government guest-house in Oslo on the night of 19–20 August 1993. The main participants were four Israeli and three Palestinian peace negotiators, hosted by a Norwegian negotiating team of four. The evening of 19 August opened with an official dinner hosted by our late foreign minister Johan Jørgen Holst in honour of his Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, who was conveniently on an official visit to Norway on that very day. The conversation revolved around general...

It would be hard to find a more incorrect summing up of the situation in Northern Ireland, just months before the peace process began to bear fruit. Yet it is not surprising that, even at the highest levels of the US government, there was considerable cynicism about any prospects for movement in Northern Ireland. On the surface, in 1993, attitudes in Northern Ireland appeared as frozen as ever. But underneath the surface, a subtle warming process had begun.

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism were epoch-making events, not just for the world’s superpowers, but also...

Since the early nineteenth century Irish-Americans have sought to persuade the White House and Congress to intervene in the politics of Ireland and, after Partition, Northern Ireland. On all occasions they were singularly unsuccessful. There were three reasons for this failure. First, the White House claimed not to intervene in the internal affairs of another sovereign country, a principle of international relations often honoured more in the breach than in the observance by successive US governments. In the case of the United Kingdom, however, it was invariably honoured. In the nineteenth century and until the outbreak of the Second World...

Lord Chancellor, Lord Mayor, distinguished guests, members and friends of the University of Liverpool, it is a great honour for me to be recognized for my work in Northern Ireland. It’s a special pleasure to have that recognition come from an institution as renowned as this one. The University of Liverpool has rightly achieved a reputation for excellence within the United Kingdom and beyond. I have been asked to speak about my experience in Northern Ireland. Before doing so, I would like to say a few words about my experience in the United States. First, I should warn you that...

The title of this lecture is intended to suggest the underlying rationale of the Northern Ireland Agreement – that no one tradition should be allowed to dominate the other, but that both should have equal respect. It should be read as plural and inclusivist rather than narrow and exclusivist: both march and jig should continue, but not in competition and not at each other’s expense. A slightly sobering footnote to the cultural nuances of continuing division is the failure to secure a common name in popular usage for the Agreement itself. For nationalists it is the Good Friday Agreement. Unionists,...

It is a feature of most forms of mountain-climbing that reaching the peak always takes far longer than might be anticipated by line of sight. Behind one steep and arduous slope there is usually another. The Irish peace process has been of that character, and has required the constant and highly motivated engagement not only of government leaders, but also of teams of officials, to whom no short cuts are available, and whose effectiveness depends heavily on the respect and trust that they can establish. (As I shall go on to explain, the term ‘mountain-climber’ has a somewhat different and...

Harold Wilson said a week is a long time in politics. I have learned since becoming secretary of state for Northern Ireland that some weeks never end. And others, like deadlines, just become extended. I was struck recently by the observation of another elder statesman about the Northern Ireland peace process. At one of many difficult moments he made a speech in Northern Ireland in which he said:

I realize full well that we are asking much of the parties of the Assembly to work together in the interests of the whole community in Northern Ireland. But I must tell...

When I chose this title early in January 2000, the institutions established under the Good Friday Agreement were in place and beginning to work. Although the 31 January deadline for General de Chastelain’s report on decommissioning was looming, it was possible to hope that by then Sinn Féin would have been able to offer, if not a start to IRA decommissioning, at least enough of an outline timetable for it to enable the general to present a genuinely positive report.

So my intention was to trace the beginnings of the current peace process back as far as the Anglo-Irish Agreement...

The pace of events since the first IRA ceasefire in 1994 has been staggering. The nature and speed of these developments have frequently been confusing and erratic, but the pictures of smiling Sinn Féin Executive members seated around the Cabinet table at Stormont alongside their Unionist and SDLP colleagues marks the distance travelled by contemporary republican politicians. Throughout this process a range of commentators, as well as political opponents, have attempted to explain republicanism’s apparent transformation from revolutionary armed movement to semi-constitutional party. Many unionists have understandably remained sceptical of the sincerity of this Damascene conversion, while republican critics see...

In a reflective article on the tenth anniversary of the release from Robben Island of President Nelson Mandela, the distinguished South African novelist, André Brink, recalls a sense of existential disorientation when he noted a blank wall in the airport building in Port Elizabeth announcing ‘YOU ARE NOW HERE’. That was it: a blank wall, no map, no plan. It serves as a useful metaphor for a peace process. A certain amount of disorientation is inevitable, as is the roller coaster between hope and despair. For us the question is which one we ‘would choose to define ourselves by: the...

A bright afternoon in early spring, almost a year after the Good Friday Agreement; we are being plied with tea and explanation just off the Garvaghy road. As it happens, the first of the year’s Orange parades to Drumcree church is scheduled for this day. It will not pass up or down the Garvaghy road, and there will be no trouble. But this afternoon the Garvaghy residents feel penned into their little group of estates. They will not leave by the top, or country end, for there lies Dumcree and in any case it is the long way round to...

During 1992–93 I acted as one of the seven commissioners of the Opsahl Commission: an independent enquiry into ways forward in Northern Ireland, which produced its report in June 1993.² The Commission was a novel exercise in democracy, which sought to involve the people of Northern Ireland in the debate about its future. It received submissions from some 3,000 people and held public meetings and oral hearings throughout the region. The report made a number of recommendations which were subsequently endorsed in public opinion polls in Northern Ireland, Britain and the Republic of Ireland.³ Most of these recommendations stemmed...

The conflict in Northern Ireland is one of contradictory identities based upon, among other things, differing political aspirations and religious affiliations, leading to communal identity defining itself along these lines. The result of this has been the creation of an oppositional identity in which the two communities generally classify themselves according to who they are not, rather than who they are. InThe Journey Towards Reconciliation, John Paul Lederach describes this as a three-stage process. During the first stage, those involved ‘begin to see in another person, not the sameness [they] share, but the differences between [them] that [they] identify...

There is a common concern to explain why the ‘long war’ in Northern Ireland became the ‘long peace’.¹ Such analyses are important but most of them have been driven by an examination of political actors and their actions, and have under-examined the significance of factors such as social class, habituation and the experience of violence in undermining the delivery of meaningful ‘mutual respect’.² Evidently at the political level several obvious stalemates have been broken with regard to the main political parties. They all now either accept (in some cases reluctantly) the principle of consent or (cautiously) endorse the validity of...