Diplomatic negotiations are rarely fully described by their participants in books, for two reasons. They are usually secret until much later, and their intricacies can be boring. Politicians often include brief accounts in their memoirs, but these seldom reveal much about the process as a whole because, as I discovered by interviewing scores of them for my biography of Margaret Thatcher, they cannot avoid focussing almost exclusivelyon what they did and said (or think they did and said).
This book, however, overcomes the secrecy rule, because it is published nearly 40 years after the events described; and it overcomes the boredom problem because of the literary skill and intellectual grasp of its author. It is clear, precise, readable, sometimes drily funny.
The late Sir David Goodall, a Foreign Office man, held high rank in the Cabinet Office for most of the period when the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) of 1985 was conceived, written and performed. Indeed, though he modestly does not say so, it might not have happened if he and the then cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, had not been in their posts. It was Goodall, in a walk along the Grand Canal in Dublin, who first received (from his opposite number Michael Lillis) the Irish government’s ideas.
Goodall kindly showed me his memoir to help my biography. This book edits, comments on and publishes his account in full for the first time. The editor, the publisher and almost all the contributors are Irish, a fact which emphasises the direction of the negotiations.
As the author saw it, the purpose was ‘according the Irish [by which he means the government of the Republic] some form of political involvement in Northern Ireland in return for a formal Irish recognition of the Union’.
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