In this new edition of The Long Road to Peace in Northern Ireland, former contributors have been given the opportunity to add postscripts, two new essays have been commissioned, and the appendices enlarged. I have added sections of the Opsahl Commission report and Sir George Quigley's Review of the Parades Commission (2002), which address the issues of religion, cultural identity and sectarianism, and have dedicated this edition to Torkel Opsahl and Eric Gallagher, fellow commissioner on the Opsahl Commission. Eric Gallagher was one of the four Protestant clergymen who met the IRA at Feakle in County Clare in 1974. He spent a lifetime trying to overcome the sectarianism that continues to make peace so precarious.

Despite the return of devolved government to Northern Ireland and signs of former extremes working together harmoniously, the mood is more sombre in these additions than five years ago, reflecting a recognition that the inflated expectations of what the Good Friday Agreement could deliver were unrealistic. Peter Shirlow, while recognizing the real achievements of the peace process – not least the 74 per cent decline in the murder rate – highlights the urgency of seriously tackling increasing polarization and sectarianism in Belfast (only 17.7 per cent now living in mixed areas). The Agreement over-emphasized high politics and ‘merely managed polarization’, while the whole ‘edifice’ of sectarianism was ignored. George Quigley too – drawing on his review of the Parades Commission in 2002 – reaches a similar conclusion: the Agreement ‘raised the bar high, requiring enforced fraternity at the top while there was a serious lack of fraternity at the base’.

I do not entirely share Peter Shirlow's pessimism that ‘the conflict cannot be resolved’, although I too have argued that if sectarianism is not seriously tackled, a revival of serious communal violence is a real danger. In the first edition of this collection, many argued that though the war in Northern Ireland was over, the conflict was not (Cox), and that peace-making is a lengthy, evolutionary process, rather than something confined to an initial agreement. Some of the essays (Owen, Mitchell, O'Dowd) pointed to the role of outside agencies, prepared to ‘think the unthinkable and thereby progress events hitherto unimaginable’. Unfortunately, some of those agencies – notably the United States – have become more muted. The consequent internalization of the problem risks privileging traditional sectarian politics.