BOOK OF THE DAY: Northern Ireland: A Triumph of Politics. Interviews and Analysis 1988-2008 By Frank Millar Irish Academic Press 230pp, €24.95.
A COUPLE of years before this collection of interviews begins Frank Millar was chief executive of the Ulster Unionist Party and widely acknowledged to be the sharpest brain in the party. He is one of the rare people who successfully negotiated the transition from politics to full-time journalism, a journey more usually made in the opposite direction.
During his career at The Irish TimesMillar has made full use of his earlier connections in Northern Irish politics to illuminate the inner workings of the movement towards peace. In this role as a commentator he has played a greater part in bringing the main actors in the Irish political scene to an understanding of each other's position than he could ever have done as a senior figure in the UUP. It is also a testimony to his fairness that politicians of every stripe have been willing to submit to his forensic probing.
This series of remarkable interviews covering the crucial 20 years from 1988 allowed the main contenders in Ireland and Britain to examine each other's fundamental views at each stage in the long process which culminated in the Stormont executive of May 2007.
As each interview appeared in The Irish Timesit became compulsory reading for governments in Dublin and London and for politicians on both sides of the Border especially because some of those politicians refused to speak to each other.
Millar introduces the book with an anecdote which illustrates the distance the participants had to travel. His first interview was in 1988 with John Hume. Millar did not know the way to Hume's Co Donegal retreat and stopped to ask an RUC man at the checkpoint on the Derry-Donegal border. What direction should he take once over the Border? "I can't help you, I'm afraid", said the policeman. "I've never been over there." The interview he got with Hume on that occasion laid out the theoretical basis for the terms of the Belfast Agreement a decade later. When Hume told him at the end of the interview in typically modest language that it "will be regarded as a seminal piece", Millar looked at him quizzically. Yet so it was. Hume had laid out publicly for the first time a new concept of Irish unity elevating people over territory and a way of defining self-determination for the divided Irish people by referendums North and South to ratify any agreement just as happened in 1998.
Frank Millar did not know at the time of the interview in December 1988 that Hume was engaged in a lengthy pas de deux with Gerry Adams which would not become public until five years later and that a lot of his language about unity and self-determination was as much designed to attract republicans as to explain the position to unionists.
On the other side of the fence the most candid interview is with David Trimble who robustly defends what would be his undoing among unionists, his decision to accept the Belfast Agreement and go into an executive with Sinn Féin despite no IRA weapons being decommissioned and despite his promise to the unionist electorate of "no guns, no government".
The series ends fittingly with Bertie Ahern who has yet to be given full credit for what Millar in understated terms describes as "the evolution of Irish policy", in the case of the Fianna Fáil party the risky decision to give up Articles 2 and 3. It is a fitting tribute to Millar's skill that he actually managed to extract straight answers from the former taoiseach.
Brian Feeney is a columnist with the Irish News and the author of Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years.