In turning to Northern Ireland one is immediately faced with the explicit nationalist/unionist community division and the political violence that seemingly made its politics very different from everywhere else. This meant that achieving peace as well as any sort of constitutional policy that could meet nationalist pressures for change while also being acceptable to unionists was a huge challenge. In such circumstances, Northern Ireland presented itself as an extreme case where no ideal solution acceptable to all was possible. In seeking to reappraise how the peace process and the 1998 Belfast Agreement were finally arrived at, unsurprisingly the chapter again focuses on the realist politics of how each side struggled to get as much of what they wanted as possible in trying to reach a settlement.

In conducting this reappraisal the chapter utilises the same analytical framework as previous chapters to reveal the key dynamics of change. First, the chapter places a focus on the nature of the territorial strain provided by Northern Ireland, examining the resources feeding nationalist pressures for change in Northern Ireland on the one hand and sustaining UK rule on the other. The chapter explores the idea that the 1980s and 1990s were quintessentially the era in which the resource model of weak periphery–weak centre relative to aspirations became evident to participants in the struggle.

Secondly, the chapter throughout explores how recognition of such resource weaknesses and constraints as well as interests influenced nationalist and unionist political elite leadership, and the codes, strategies and goals that they each developed. In particular, analysis explores the importance of instrumentalist arguments and mechanisms allied to more limited strategic aims in trying to agree constitutional outcomes that were such a theme of politics in Scotland and Wales even in the more visceral atmosphere of Northern Ireland.

Third, the chapter throughout also focuses on the codes, strategies and goals pursued by UK central government. In examining the role of UK central governments, the chapter acknowledges that the political violence had meant that a long-standing approach of indirect control via collaborative local elites in the Northern Ireland Parliament had had to be abandoned in 1972, to be followed by direct UK rule.