Your very own Agreed Ireland

From the London Review of Books: "Bew’s commentary on the political negotiations behind the scenes, and the realpolitik which lay behind reversals of policy among the mandarinate, is fascinating. This is his home ground in every sense, and his delineation of the shifts and stratagems of the 1990s, bringing Sinn Féin first into discussions and then into government of the state it had sworn to eradicate, deserves very close reading. Tutored by the Irish, the British quickly learned linguistic ingenuity; Orwell would have appreciated the way ‘an “agreed” Ireland’ turned out to mean the very opposite of a ‘united Ireland’, while ‘power-sharing’ came to denote ‘separate spheres’, not reconciliation.

Forms of words mattered as much as they did at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, when a civil war had been fought over a formula of loyalty (not, it should be noted, over the question of a partitioned Ireland, which somehow went through on the nod).

On the language of the IRA’s ‘decommissioning’ of its arsenal, Bew is predictably scathing, and the last section, written in 2006, is called ‘The Breaking of the Good Friday Agreement’. Northern politics has not yet ended up in the asylum, but it remains to be seen whether the spectacle of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley finally running a devolved Northern Ireland together, while ‘peace walls’ (Orwell again) continue to be erected in its towns and cities, bears him out."