Undeniable contact: the role of civil servants in negotiating the Northern Ireland peace process

Attempts to forge peace in Northern Ireland have a long timeline. The most comprehensive account of the origins of the peace process has been provided by Ó Dochartaigh (2021) and has focused on the heroic work of intermediaries and on deliberations on clandestine bodies. However, current academic debates recognise that the various steps paving the way to the paramilitaries’ ceasefires, the entry of Sinn Féin into the peace talks, and the whole set of principles, which would come to underpin the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998, involved the interplay of national and international historical contexts. This article investigates the interactions between formal and informal negotiating arenas, how these were designed by a process of United Kingdom (UK) dual policy, and the role of Irish and British civil servants in creating a linguistic space that the various Northern Ireland actors could tolerate. Focusing on the late 1980s up to the signing of the Downing Street Declaration of 1993, the article draws on never-before-seen UK and Irish governments archival documents and semi-structured élite interviews. Its findings will highlight how the power and politics of the Northern Ireland peace process have been institutionalised in interactive arenas of governance, through metagovernance, a term referring to the government of governance occurring when several social forces wish to rebalance modes of governance. Metagovernance allows this article to identify how the UK government - the centre - exercised a particular form of power to shape and regulate the freedom and autonomy of Irish and British civils servants in Northern Ireland - the periphery - thus crafting and leading the formal negotiations towards the Northern Ireland peace process.