Making Peace
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Politics, according to Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, used his mastery of this art to achieve the seemingly impossible: a peace settlement in Northern Ireland. This is his account of his role as chairman of the interparty negotiations and of how the major nationalist and unionist political parties--and the British and Irish governments--managed to forge the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. Recruited by President Clinton to serve as an intermediary in the peace process, Mitchell spent nearly three years trying to create the conditions that made the final agreement possible. It wasn't easy. The IRA temporarily abandoned its ceasefire in the middle of the process, and extremist unionist and nationalist paramilitary groups tried their utmost to thwart the process by continuing to conduct bombings and shootings. Mitchell describes the twists and turns of the peace process in comprehensive detail, and his overview of the conflict provides a concise introduction to the turbulent history of Northern Ireland. He came to know all of the major protagonists very well, and his shrewd assessments of Gerry Adams ("sincerely trying hard, in difficult and dangerous circumstances, to bring his supporters into the grand tent of democracy"), David Trimble ("he saw the opportunity to end a long and bitter conflict, and he did not want to go down in the history books as the man who let it pass") and other political leaders enrich the book. In discussing the crucial final negotiating session, the narrative becomes as fast-paced as any thriller. While noting that the peace remains fragile, Mitchell provides solid evidence for believing the Good Friday agreement will hold and that the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland have finally come to an end.