Irish Academic Press The Destructors: The Story of Northern Ireland's Lost Peace Process

The Destructors is the story of lost opportunities. In 1973, Northern Ireland's first Secretary of State, William Whitelaw, convinced rival unionist and nationalist leaders, such as Brian Faulkner and John Hume, to set aside irreconcilable differences and form a power-sharing executive at Stormont. The opponents of British policy in Northern Ireland - the paramilitary organisations and the unionist politicians who were not central to Whitelaw's plans - sought to efface power-sharing from the constitutional options that would be open to Northern Ireland if the executive collapsed. And in May 1974 they succeeded, when the British government failed to protect the executive from an unconstitutional political strike led by the Ulster Workers' Council. Taking a fresh and dynamic look at what the idea of power-sharing meant to the different parties to the Northern Ireland conflict, The Destructors examines how the Northern Ireland Executive's fate was sealed when the policy of using power-sharing to regulate the troubles was abandoned by British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, following an ill-timed Westminster general election in February 1974. Drawing on previously unavailable British and Irish archival material, and over forty interviews with politicians and officials central to a peace process that led to an Anglo-Irish settlement at Sunningdale, in December 1973, Michael Kerr re-examines why Northern Ireland's power-sharing experiment failed. factionalism. Taking a fresh and dynamic look at what the idea of power-sharing meant to the different parties to the Northern Ireland conflict, The Destructors examines how the Northern Ireland Executive was subsequently destroyed by an unconstitutional political strike that was called by the Ulster Workers Council, in May 1974. And it details how the executive s fate was sealed when power-sharing was abandoned by Heath s successor, Harold Wilson, following an ill-timed Westminster general election in February. Drawing on previously unavailable British and Irish archival material, and over forty interviews with politicians and officials central to a peace process that led to an Anglo-Irish settlement at Sunningdale, in December 1973, Kerr re-examines why Northern Ireland s power-sharing experiment failed.