The British and peace in Northern Ireland

Perhaps history, like revenge, is best when served cold; and while Thucydides would surely not agree, eyebrows are sometimes raised at the notion of such a thing as ‘contemporary history’. This collection of essays and interviews shows its usefulness, and should be snapped up by students of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Graham Spencer is to be congratulated on assembling the reflections of 14 retired senior officials on the British side in that process, and for his thoughtful introduction and concluding remarks. Welcome, too, is the ‘brief chronology’ of the peace process (filling eight pages) as agreements and atrocities succeeded each other from 1987 onwards. But the scope of this volume is broader: it is also a study of the relationship between British civil servants and their ministers. While never a case of upstairs—downstairs, civil servants knew their place. Very properly, the portraits on the cover are of four prime ministers, John Major and Tony Blair, Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern. Their facial expressions and body language are revealing. In the words of David Cooke, who in 2002 dictated in London, ‘on one grey afternoon’, the first draft of the Joint Declaration of the British and Irish Governments, British officials were not ‘freelancing’: for better or worse, they had to work within government policy. While limiting their freedom of manoeuvre, that constraint must have stimulated their inventiveness in the drafting of documents and the conduct of negotiations—including with their Irish counterparts. Mention might have been made, though, of the need, on occasion, for legal advice to calm the bubbling cauldron of ideas

Government (linguistics · Irish · Negotiation · Political science · Sociology · History · Irish and British Studies · Law