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How the Peace Was Won
In Northern Ireland, old and bitter enemies are sharing power. Ulster's historical No men - first Ian Paisley and now Peter Robinson - lead a devolved administration with IRA hawk Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister. How was this deal of all deals achieved? How was war transformed into peace?
Award-winning news correspondent Brian Rowan takes us behind the scenes, and follows the path from the Stormontgate spying scandal to the formation of the Executive. His analysis of the Stormontgate affair is provocative and original: it nails the lie that it was all a securocrats' plot. He traces the remote origins of the Peace Process back to the Hume-Adams talks in the late 1980s, but the heart of the book covers the last five years.
How the Peace was Won is the inside track on how the deal was done. Rowan talks to the players in the endgame, and brings his years of reporting experience to the pages of this book. He discusses the dilemmas of reporting a war while living in that conflict - a conflict in which the puppets and strings became a tangled mess. How did Adams and McGuinness change the orders? What made Paisley say yes? How now does the North make peace with its past? In How the Peace was Won the hardest questions are asked and answered.
Author Biography
Brian Rowan was the BBC's Security Editor in Belfast, reporting the period leading to the ceasefire and then to the formal ending of the IRA's armed campaign. Four times he has been a category winner in the Northern Ireland Journalist of the Year awards. He is now a freelance writer and broadcaster, a regular contributor to the Belfast Telegraph, and this is his fourth book on the peace process.
Award-winning news correspondent Brian Rowan takes us behind the scenes, and follows the path from the Stormontgate spying scandal to the formation of the Executive. His analysis of the Stormontgate affair is provocative and original: it nails the lie that it was all a securocrats' plot. He traces the remote origins of the Peace Process back to the Hume-Adams talks in the late 1980s, but the heart of the book covers the last five years.
How the Peace was Won is the inside track on how the deal was done. Rowan talks to the players in the endgame, and brings his years of reporting experience to the pages of this book. He discusses the dilemmas of reporting a war while living in that conflict - a conflict in which the puppets and strings became a tangled mess. How did Adams and McGuinness change the orders? What made Paisley say yes? How now does the North make peace with its past? In How the Peace was Won the hardest questions are asked and answered.
Author Biography
Brian Rowan was the BBC's Security Editor in Belfast, reporting the period leading to the ceasefire and then to the formal ending of the IRA's armed campaign. Four times he has been a category winner in the Northern Ireland Journalist of the Year awards. He is now a freelance writer and broadcaster, a regular contributor to the Belfast Telegraph, and this is his fourth book on the peace process.
260 pages, Paperback
First published August 15, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 25, 2017
Ok book on the Northern Ireland peace process
January 12, 2024
This was a very informative and enjoyable read although at times I did feel that the author was putting a lot of the credit on Adams and MacGuinness and making it appear that Paisley had no option but to agree to peace (I think that he deserves a fair bit of credit too given his never speeches of the previous thirty odd years). This was a good read and cleared up a lot of the confusion over the how the Good Friday Agreement came into being and where the Peace Process is heading. A must for anyone with any kind of interest or need for understanding of the Northern Ireland Peace Process
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews