Brokering the Good Friday Agreement

Book excerpt: 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.