The peace process

The peace process was the movement from protest and armed conflict toward electoral politics and negotiated government in Northern Ireland. In the book, its decisive achievement is the ending of a bloody conflict; its defining limitation is that the settlement made room for a shared political future without establishing a common way to reckon with the past. Its course runs through changing political opportunities: a civil-rights march that made peaceful change seem possible, violence that helped drive some activists toward the Irish Republican Army, a turn toward elections, and an agreement whose provisions for release and political transition were more specific than its arrangements for truth and accountability.

From civil-rights protest to armed struggle

On 1 January 1969, student protesters gathered outside City Hall in Donegall Square, Belfast, to begin a march to Derry. They were protesting systemic discrimination against Catholics. Catholics faced exclusion from desirable jobs and housing and had little power within Northern Ireland’s political system: in the half-century before the march, no Catholic had held executive office at Stormont. Emigration also kept the Catholic population nearly static despite a birth rate approximately twice that of Protestants. These conditions gave the march a political purpose broader than the procession itself: its participants hoped that peaceful action could challenge entrenched injustice.

The marchers’ hopes belonged to a wider confidence that young people and nonviolent protest could alter political conditions. Some were prepared for violence, and some believed that a forceful response might expose injustice to public view. But the experience of the march, especially the attack at Burntollet Bridge, changed the prospects as Dolours Price understood them. She had believed peaceful resistance might overcome discrimination; afterward, she concluded that marching would not convert those opposed to change. In 1971, she joined the Irish Republican Army, describing the choice as a return to the convictions of her republican family. Her path shows how the peace process cannot be separated from the earlier failure of peaceful protest to secure change, or from the armed campaign that followed.

Price’s enlistment also exposed a struggle over who could participate in that campaign and on what terms. When Seán Mac Stíofáin initially proposed that she join Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary, she objected to being confined to supporting work and insisted that she wanted to fight as a soldier. A special meeting of the Provisionals’ Army Council then decided that women could join as full members for the first time. The decision reflected Price’s insistence on equality and may also have answered the practical pressure of men being imprisoned in large numbers. The movement’s later political transition thus followed a history in which membership, tactics, and the boundaries of participation had themselves been contested.

From armed struggle to electoral politics

The shift toward elections did not begin as a simple rejection of armed action. The republican movement had a long tradition of abstentionism: many believed that parliamentary participation could dilute revolutionary aims. The election of Bobby Sands, who ran for a parliamentary seat while on hunger strike, challenged that suspicion. His candidacy linked the prison protest to an electoral strategy, even though he died before taking his seat. The episode helped change what political action could mean for the movement, making an election campaign a way to draw attention to the prisoners and to the cause they represented.

A further change came as Gerry Adams embraced electoral politics. In 1983, a decade after he had sent Price to bomb London, Adams sought a parliamentary seat representing West Belfast. He said he would boycott Westminster if elected, retaining a commitment to abstention from taking a seat while nonetheless campaigning for votes. Price canvassed for him and drove voters to polling stations. Adams won. Price’s participation marks a consequential adaptation: she had abandoned violence as a means of pursuing a united Ireland for herself, but not republicanism. She could support a political strategy that carried the movement’s aims into elections rather than treating electoral activity as surrender. In this account, the passage from armed struggle to politics is a change in means, not an uncomplicated disappearance of earlier loyalties.

The settlement and the problem of the past

The Good Friday Agreement helped establish a transition focused on future government and political progress. It provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners held at the time of the agreement, and it capped at two years any future sentences for Troubles-related crimes. But it did not create a truth-and-reconciliation mechanism through which former combatants could exchange testimony for legal immunity, as had happened in South Africa after apartheid. The absence mattered in a conflict that ended in a political stalemate rather than an acknowledged victory by either side. Power sharing addressed how political authority would be exercised; it did not settle how the violence of the preceding decades would be accounted for or commemorated.

The Belfast Project emerged against this gap. Its architects sought oral histories from former republican and loyalist paramilitaries at a time when the peace settlement had released prisoners but offered no general process for confronting the history of the conflict. The project’s secrecy and confidentiality promises reflected the risks of recording testimony while former participants might still face prosecution. Yet the project’s own arrangements were ambiguous: its organizers had not settled who could access the interviews or precisely when they could be made public. When British authorities sought recordings, interviewers feared that participants who had shared their histories could be exposed. The resulting dispute showed how difficult it was to preserve testimony when no agreed public process existed for receiving it.

The legal landscape sharpened that difficulty. There was no broad amnesty in exchange for accounts of past crimes. One limited exception, established by 1999 legislation, offered immunity to people who voluntarily provided information to help recover the bodies of the disappeared. Otherwise, unsolved murders remained open criminal cases, and former paramilitaries or soldiers could still be prosecuted. The book describes this as a fragmented, case-by-case approach rather than a settled framework for dealing with the past. Police investigations, inquests, and special inquiries continued, while a legacy unit faced a backlog of nearly a thousand cases. Without an agreed mechanism, even decisions about which cases to pursue could be seen as unequal or partisan.

Peace without a final settlement of conflict

The transition reduced violence without erasing the organizations or divisions formed during the conflict. A 2015 report released by Theresa Villiers stated that the main paramilitary groups remained in existence, including the Provisional IRA, though in much reduced form and with access to weapons. It described the organization as having a wholly political focus. The report also made a more surprising argument: the continued cohesion of paramilitary groups had helped the movement from extreme violence to political progress. Their authority and internal discipline could influence and restrain members, limiting dissent that might otherwise destabilize the transition.

That interpretation stands in tension with the experience of former republicans who viewed Sinn Féin’s resistance to internal opposition as self-interested and coercive. Yet the report’s argument suggests that the same organizational discipline that could suppress dissent also helped contain a combustible situation. The peace process therefore appears not as the immediate dissolution of armed structures, but as a transformation in which some of their hierarchies persisted and were redirected toward political management.

Nor did political transition make division disappear from everyday life. Nearly two decades after the Good Friday Agreement, Belfast remained divided by religiously patterned neighbourhoods and peace walls; most children still attended segregated primary schools. The book’s account holds these continuities beside the fact that Northern Ireland was peaceful apart from occasional dissident attacks. The result is a deliberately unsettled meaning of peace: the settlement ended large-scale conflict and opened a durable political path, but left physical divisions, contested memories, and unanswered questions of responsibility in place. The peace process is thus both an achievement and an unfinished reckoning.