This book is a collection of experiences and perceptions by senior British officials about their role in the Northern Ireland peace process. It does not take account of the long history of British association with Ireland and Northern Ireland, which has been extensively researched and analysed already. Nor does it contextualise the peace process within the historical tensions and difficulties that have bedevilled the British–Irish relationship since the seventeenth century (Foster 1988; Jackson 2003; Bew 2007). Equally, it does not seek to view the recent phase of British–Irish relations as a continuum of decision-making that led to the separation of Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic in the 1920s, and relate that to the subsequent violence and conflict that persisted up until the end of the twentieth century (Patterson 2006; Fanning 2013; Townshend 2013). Rather this is a work that examines the end of the modern period of conflict in Northern Ireland (which began in the late 1960s and became more popularly known as the Troubles) through inside accounts of British Government officials working at the centre of what became known as the ‘peace process’.

Analysis of efforts to develop peace in Northern Ireland often attributes the inception of the peace process to dialogues between Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams and the Social Democratic and Labour Party's (SDLP) former leader John Hume in the late 1980s. However, attempts to forge peace have a longer timeline and some historical context is called for. The foundations of an attempt to bring about an end to conflict in Northern Ireland can be most obviously seen in the Sunningdale Agreement (SA) of 1973 (the SDLP's Seamus Mallon later famously described the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998 as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’), negotiated between the British and Irish governments with the direct involvement of the Northern Ireland parties, and, since then, the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) of 1985, negotiated between the British and Irish governments without the direct involvement of the Northern Ireland parties.