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of the peace process, it was another overused cliché, ‘It’s always darkest before the dawn’, that often had the ring of truth. Just 15 days after my first Drumcree in 1997, the IRA announced its second ceasefire. Soon after, Sinn Féin entered a fresh round of peace talks.
    In October, politicians of all shades, from the representatives of the IRA to the spokesmen of the Loyalist paramilitaries, from Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party to John Hume’s nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), met at Stormont for the first all-party talks in 25 years. Then, in November, Gerry Adams led a Sinn Féin delegation to Downing Street, the first time that a Republican leader had gone through the door of Number 10 since the days of Michael Collins and David Lloyd George. Just six years earlier, the IRA had fired mortar bombs that exploded in the back garden. Now, Gerry Adams, who was still a member of the IRA’s Army Council, entered in a tie, a suit and a dark woollen overcoat, the bland attire that a visiting Belgian finance minister might wear.
    By the following Easter, 1998, a peace deal had been hammered out, and in a corner of Britain where dark adjectives such as ‘black’ or ‘bloody’ had attached themselves to the gloomiest days of the Troubles, there was finally a Friday that could truly be described as ‘good’. On the night of the Good Friday Agreement, few things were more touching than the sight of a long line of swooning journalists, men as well as women, waiting for Senator George Mitchell, Bill Clinton’s peace envoy and the chairman of the talks, to autograph copies of the peacedeal. The most self-effacing of men, Mitchell was embarrassed by the fuss and wanted nothing more, after months of fraught negotiations, than to head back to America to see his young son. But his fingerprints were all over Northern Ireland’s historic compromise, and before he could make a dash for the airport everybody wanted his signature on it, too.
    Normally at Easter, the darkness of Christ’s crucifixion on the Friday gives way to the celebration of his resurrection on the Sunday, but in parts of Northern Ireland that weekend this holy liturgy was turned on its head. The optimism of Friday was followed by uncertainty and resentment. On Easter morning in Crossmaglen, in the heart of IRA bandit country, the talk was of betrayal, with Gerry Adams cast as Judas.
    Hundreds of dissident Republicans, many of them active IRA volunteers from the feared County Armagh Brigade, gathered in St Patrick’s churchyard for their annual commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising. There, amidst tombstones etched with the names of dead IRA men, they vowed to continue their armed struggle. Marching briskly to the centre of the graveyard, a man dressed in a combat jacket, balaclava and black beret appeared out of nowhere to address the crowd. ‘There will be no settlement,’ he shouted into a microphone as a British Army Lynx helicopter circled overhead. ‘There’ll be no peace for this country until those people up there leave this country.’
    Another dissident Republican put it even more bluntly: ‘To say this deal is transitional towards a united Ireland is bollocks.’
    The British Army watchtowers of County Armagh; the IRA warning signs at the side of the country roads reading ‘Sniper at Work’; newly painted murals on the gables in the Loyalist areas of Belfast that now included slogans such as ‘Compromise andconflict’ alongside the usual imagery of gun-toting paramilitaries; former prisoners who spoke eloquently of ‘new paradigms’ and genuinely seemed to mean it: all this formed the backdrop to the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, which would essentially decide the question asked intermittently since Partition in 1921 – could the people of Northern Ireland ever peacefully co-exist, and was that