Agreement! The State, Conflict and Change in Northern Ireland by Beatrix Campbell
Lawrence & Wishart, £14.99
CONTENTIOUS parades and Stormont in crisis – what’s changed in Northern Ireland politics in the past decade? That’s why award-winning journalist Beatrix Campbell’s sterling work on the progress of the 1998 Good Friday agreement is such a timely publication.
Much has already been penned on the people, ideas and movements which created this historic agreement. But the literary niche which Campbell fills is to critically analyse what still has to be done to make lasting peace a reality in Ireland rather than empty rhetoric or attractive soundbites.
Campbell clearly sets out what she wants to achieve: “This book has two themes. The first is the great story of the agreement and how it became more than a peace treaty, a thing of beauty; its radical novelty the gift of non-violent movements for more than peace, for change. The second is an exploration of the resistance it met, and the struggles to implement it.”
Campbell achieves both. So often when writers put pen to paper on Ireland they are easily able to identify what went wrong politically over the centuries with this great island. Very few have the courage to provide workable solutions but Campbell is one such brave writer. She does it by focusing on the key questions which still remain unanswered ten years after the agreement, which was intended to bring an end to eight centuries of sectarian slaughter, was signed.
She notes: “A decade after the deal Northern Ireland was still living with an unanswered question – would power accept responsibility for the ‘huge change’ promised by the new beginning? What was not in question, however, was that after a decade the context had been created for a new beginning… to begin.”
By far the most telling section is simply entitled “Collusion” and explores allegations of a working partnership between the state security services and loyalist death squads. It gives me a fantastic feeling to see authors write extensively about collusion. I was part of the Channel 4 Dispatches team which in 1991 investigated similar allegations and we faced the full wrath of the law, concerning our sources, after the programme was aired.
So it’s good to see Campbell take up the gauntlet of investigating – and writing freely about – collusion after the dark days of 1991. What makes her work so inspiring is that she gets straight to the point in the cases she examines. Her five-part section on collusion alone makes this book a compelling read.
She may have set out to probe what still has to be achieved with the Good Friday agreement but her journey – deliberately or accidentally – has produced one of the best and most in-depth accounts of collusion ever written about the Troubles.
John Coulter
