A last-minute breakthrough was achieved with the aid of the ingenious device of creating a new category of extra ministers. Faulkner would have a majority within the eleven-strong executive, which was to be made up of six Unionists, four SDLP and one Alliance. But four extra non-voting ministers were to be appointed, so that the full executive would consist of seven Unionists, six SDLP and two Alliance members. This piece of sleight-of-hand meant that Faulkner could claim he had a Unionist majority while non-Unionists could simultaneously claim he had not. This is a well writt Where the book is vivid, as it often is, is in its careful use of quotes as emotional as the two authors refuse to be. John Major's strong commitment to solving the seemingly insoluble shines out of one tub-thumping challenge to Gerry Adams delivered after the Canary Wharf bomb of 1995.

Peace came to Northern Ireland because the truculent parties got the best that was available to them after taking decades to work out that they had been pursuing political fantasies, not because Blair or anyone else showered them with wisdom and grace or applied any particular genius to contriving a deal." Making Sense Of The Troubles is a very good place to start if your knowledge of the events in Northern Ireland is poor or scattered like mine was. The text is easy to understand and follow. Essential reading at the moment when tensions are once again on the rise in NI. It was exactly what I was looking for to help me understand what took place. The authors also I thought managed to provide a very fair and neutral picture of the events. I went to Protestant churches, schools and groups. I didn’t understand what Catholicism was or why there was one primary school with children we were discouraged from playing with, until high school when I found out a friend in my year was catholic, and later asked my parents about it. Politics was not discussed. Compellingly written and very even-handed. By far the clearest account of what happened in the Northern Ireland conflict and more importantly why it happened' Irish NewsThere could have been no more definitive display of political motivation than the spectacle of ten men giving their lives in an awesome display of self-sacrifice and dedication. It was possible to view this as outlandish fanaticism, and many did; but it was not possible to claim that there were indistinguishable from ordinary criminals.

Whether the new government system succeeds or fails, however, there is a widespread sense that a corner has been turned. It is too much to expect a future of friendship and harmony, for all those involved inflicted much damage on each other. Yet it is not too much to hope that the major campaigns of organised violence are in their last days, and that the death toll will continue to decline." As well as the violence, it is crucial to understand the politics and the personalities of The Troubles. The authors do a particularly good job of tracing the changing thinking of both republicans, who gradually came to see the power of the ballot box as at least a complement to revolutionary violence, and of constitutional nationalists. The latter are personified in the towering figure of John Hume, who brought an “ability to combine theory with practical politics. He was among those who challenged the traditional nationalist assertion that the root of the problem was the British presence in Northern Ireland. He argued that the heart of the Irish question was not the British but the Protestants, that the problem was the divisions between Unionist and nationalist, and that partition was not the cause of division but a symptom of it. The mission of nationalism, he contended, was not to drive out the British but to convince Unionism that its concerns could be accommodated in an agreed Ireland.” The IRA wanted a united Ireland, the Unionists wanted to remain part of the UK, the mainstream Catholics just wanted to live as they pleased, the mainstream Protestants wanted to keep treating Catholics like dirt, and the British Army was just trying to keep it from boiling over. Making Sense stays true to its objective, to tell ‘a straightforward and gripping story … in an accessible way’. It is a straightforward read. An perfect level of detail to be able to cover so much of such a complex history but still keeping it within a reasonable length.Really, as civil wars go, it was not much to write home about. The United Nations estimated casualties of the Sri Lankan civil war as somewhere between 80 and 100,000 killed between 1982 and 2009. Now that’s what you call a civil war.