SDLP, Politics and Peace

«Compelling, informative, essential»
(Senator George Mitchell)

«Durkan was Hume’s closest and most influential intellectual and political collaborator in an epic endeavour that culminated in the GFA. His witness is exhilarating, profoundly insightful and refreshingly witty.»
(Michael Lillis, diplomatic advisor to Garret FitzGerald and Irish government negotiator of the Anglo-Irish Agreement)

«Once again, Graham Spencer shows his mastery of the interview technique in The SDLP, Politics and Peace: The Mark Durkan Interviews where he draws on Durkan's photographic recall of the peace process to throw new light on what we thought were settled accounts.»
(Professor Padraig O'Malley, John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation, John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston)

Mark Durkan was a central figure in the Northern Ireland peace process. This book of interviews with Durkan details his role with the SDLP and the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement, as well as the problems that came to bedevil power-sharing after and why. A comprehensive inside account of the struggle to end conflict in Northern Ireland these interviews provide invaluable testimony about the steps taken to bring about peace by an individual at the centre of that tortuous process.

Graham Spencer is Emeritus Professor of Social and Political Conflict at the University of Portsmouth. He has written extensively on the Northern Ireland peace process and interviewed a wide cross-section of political and social players involved in that process.