Agreement

Published ten years after the Good Friday Agreement, this book is about the people, ideas and movements that created it. But it is also about its limits; how the Agreement's promise was frequently betrayed by an establishment that found it difficult to give up its dominance. Campbell documents the forces strongly resisting change, including those inside the police, military and secret services whose refusal to repudiate their long history of collusion prevented them from contributing to peace-making. Gender is woven into the texture of this story - from the men who sought to dominate the streets to the women who fought for the equality agenda.The book has an inspired sense of people making their own history, and is full of their stories. These are people whose contribution was from the grassroots - loyalist ex-combatant Gusty Spence, the PPU's Dawn Purvis, Unison's Inez McCormack, Thomas Donahue of the AFL-CIO, Father Aidan Troy of Holy Cross School, to name only a few. It is on the efforts of people such as these that the success of the new state will continue to depend.