The Long Road To Peace In Northern Ireland

He’s been imprisoned, shot at, denounced, shunned, and banned, yet Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams remains resolute in his belief that peace is the only viable option for the Irish people. Adams led the oldest revolutionary movement in Ireland on an extraordinary journey from armed insurrection to active participation in government. Now he tells the story of the tumultuous series of events that led to the historic Good Friday Agreement as only he can: with a tireless crusader’s conviction and an insider’s penetrating insight. In vivid detail, Adams describes the harrowing attack on his life, and he offers new details about the peace process. We learn of previously undisclosed talks between republicans and the British government, and of conflicts and surprising alliances between key players. Adams reveals details of his discussions with the IRA leadership and tells how republicans differed, “dissidents” emerged, and the first IRA cessation of violence broke down. He recounts meetings in the Clinton White House, tells what roles Irish-Americans and South Africans played in the process, and describes the secret involvement of those within the Catholic Church. Then—triumphantly—this inspiring story climaxes with the Good Friday Agreement: what was agreed and what was promised. Gerry Adams brings a sense of immediacy to this story of hope in what was long considered an intractable conflict. He conveys the acute tensions of the peace process and the ever-present sense of teetering on the brink of both joyous accomplishment and continued despair. With a sharp eye and sensitive ear for the more humorous foibles of political allies and enemies alike, Adams offers illuminating portraits of the leading characters through cease-fires and standoffs, discussions and confrontations. Among the featured players are John Major, Tony Blair, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jean Kennedy Smith, and Nelson Mandela. As the preeminent republican strategist of his generation, Gerry Adams provides the first comprehensive account of the principles and tactics underpinning modern Irish republicanism. And in a world where peace processes are needed more urgently than ever, A Farther Shore provides a template for conflict resolution.

The ratification of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was the culmination of a lengthy and contentious peace process that involved the efforts of a committed team of political actors. In 2001, Marianne Elliott brought together a collection of essays by many of these pivotal figures in The Long Road to Peace in Northern Ireland, an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and politicians. Now Elliott, one of the most prominent chroniclers of Irish history, presents a fully updated edition with new essays commissioned to explore the events of the past five years. A period that saw successes such as the decommissioning of the Provisional IRA but also a rise in drug trafficking and organized crime, as a generation of men who have done nothing other than serve as paramilitaries are now finding their skills most valued as criminals. With contributions from U.S. Senator George J. Mitchell, Sir David Goodall, Jan Egeland, Lord Owen, and Peter Mandelsohn, the second edition of The Long Road to Peace in Northern Ireland is an illuminating record of the ongoing peace process—and its consequences—told by the people directly involved in its evolution.

Is the unique inside story, revealing the truth behind the headlines of how the peace process was begun, and brought to fruition. Adams conveys the tensions, the sense of teetering on the brink, and he has a sharp eye and acute ear for the more humorous foibles of political allies and enemies alike.

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Western Europe, grade: 2+ (B), University of Kent (Brussels School of International Studies), language: English, abstract: Six years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed and after a promising, although troubled start of the institutional framework it has put in place, Northern Ireland is, following the suspension of devolution on 14 October 2002, yet again under direct rule from Westminster. Centuries of conflict, decades of violent troubles and diametrically opposed demands of the groups involved make the Northern Ireland question to one of the most difficult conflicts of our time. Nevertheless, there was genuine optimism both among the parties involved and the international community that the Agreement would succeed and resolve the conflict. However, in the political reality of Northern Ireland, the Agreement soon reached its limits, and people realised that it takes more than an assembly and a power-sharing executive to overcome Ulster’s deep-rooted sectarian divisions. Internal disagreement in the unionist and nationalist camps over the direction the Agreement is likely to take them and the still unresolved question of IRA weapons decommissioning leave the future of the Agreement in serious doubt. The Agreement has been widely acknowledged as being consociational and consistent with the four principles of power-sharing identified by Lijphart. This paper will thus also discuss the theoretical foundation of the Agreement. Here, it will particularly focus on the role of the voting system (Single Transferable Vote) employed for the Assembly elections, which is unusual for consociational models. This paper will conclude that the Agreement is undeniably a major breakthrough. Even if the Agreement itself does not solve the conflict, by creating a prolonged period of peace in which political dialogue can take place, it could be a vital step towards a future settlement. But is the current situation in Northern Ireland really a transitional period likely to lead to a solution of the conflict in the future or is it what Trimble calls the ‘continuation of war by other means’? The Agreement was certainly not an overall failure as it has managed to bring parties together in political institutions which have refused to sit together in the same room for decades. But its limitations must also be clear: the war might be over but the conflict is far from ended. Since the Agreement has failed to address the underlying issues of the conflict and merely regulates violence, it cannot be regarded as a permanent and sustainable solution.

Irish civil servants and political advisers reveal their role in the Northern Ireland peace process. Their testimonies evoke a strong sense of the highly sensitive political environment in which they worked. They reflect on the impact of an ever-changing political landscape on prospects for advancing the peace process, and on the evolution of policy and thinking about Northern Ireland from the outbreak of violence in 1968 to the conclusion of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. These personal accounts offer insight into how the Irish tried to shape the course of the negotiation of a hard-won agreement.

From the Plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century to the entry into peace talks in the late twentieth century the Northern Irish people have been engaged in conflict - Catholic against Protestant, Republican against Unionist. The traumas of violence in the Northern Ireland Troubles have cast a long shadow. For many years, this appeared to be an intractable conflict with no pathway out. Mass mobilisations of people and dramatic political crises punctuated a seemingly endless succession of bloodshed. When in the 1990s and early 21st century, peace was painfully built, it brought together unlikely rivals, making Northern Ireland a model for conflict resolution internationally. But disagreement about the future of the province remains, and for the first time in decades one can now seriously speak of a democratic end to the Union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain as a foreseeable possibility. The Northern Ireland problem remains a fundamental issue as the United Kingdom recasts its relationship with Europe and the world. In this completely revised edition of his Very Short Introduction Marc Mulholland explores the pivotal moments in Northern Irish history - the rise of republicanism in the 1800s, Home Rule and the civil rights movement, the growth of Sinn Fein and the provisional IRA, and the DUP, before bringing the story up to date, drawing on newly available memoirs by paramilitary militants to offer previously unexplored perspectives, as well as recent work on Nothern Irish gender relations. Mulholland also includes a new chapter on the state of affairs in 21st Century Northern Ireland, considering the question of Irish unity in the light of both Brexit and the approaching anniversary of the 1921 partition, and drawing new lessons for the future. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Fifteen minutes before five o'clock on Good Friday, 1998, Senator George Mitchell was informed that his long and difficult quest for an Irish peace accord had succeeded--the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland, and the governments of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, would sign the agreement. Now Mitchell, who served as independent chairman of the peace talks for the length of the process, tells us the inside story of the grueling road to this momentous accord. For more than two years, Mitchell, who was Senate majority leader under Presidents Bush and Clinton, labored to bring together parties whose mutual hostility--after decades of violence and mistrust--seemed insurmountable: Sinn Fein, represented by Gerry Adams; the Catholic moderates, led by John Hume; the majority Protestant party, headed by David Trimble; Ian Paisley's hard-line unionists; and, not least, the governments of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, headed by Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair. The world watched as the tense and dramatic process unfolded, sometimes teetering on the brink of failure. Here, for the first time, we are given a behind-the-scenes view of the principal players--the personalities who shaped the process--and of the contentious, at times vitriolic, proceedings. We learn how, as the deadline approached, extremist violence and factional intransigence almost drove the talks to collapse. And we witness the intensity of the final negotiating session, the interventions of Ahern and Blair, the late-night phone calls from President Clinton, a last-ditch attempt at disruption by Paisley, and ultimately an agreement that, despite subsequent inflammatory acts aimed at destroying it, has set Northern Ireland's future on track toward a more lasting peace.

Making peace in Northern Ireland was the greatest success of the Blair government, and one of the greatest achievements in British politics since the Second World War. In Jonathan Powell's masterly account we learn just how close the talks leading to the Good Friday agreement came to collapse and how the parties finally reached a deal. Pithy, outspoken and precise, Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff and chief negotiator, gives us that rarest of things, a true insider's account of politics at the highest level. He demonstrates how the events in Northern Ireland have valuable lessons for those seeking to end conflict in other parts of the world and shows us how the process of making peace is sometimes messy and often blackly comic.