A Shared Home Place

This timely memoir by one of the most prominent Catholic nationalist politicians in Northern Ireland is a primary source for the social and political history of the province, from the onset of the Troubles in the 1960s to the 1990s peace process and beyond. Its authentic voice lends it a vitality and an urgency that illuminates our recent past. In this book, Mallon describes his happy upbringing in South Armagh as a Catholic in a 90% Protestant village; his turbulent years as a constitutional politician in the violent maelstrom of near-civil war, when he was the target of both loyalist violence and republican vilification; and his central role in the peace process as the man who complemented John Hume, doing the ‘spade-work’ to reach a hard-won deal with the Ulster Unionists. Now in his eighty-third year, he calls for a new beginning in Northern Ireland, based on the ideal that it is a shared home place for all its people, and that Irish unity can only come about through unionist consent. His surprising and innovative proposal, based on a little-known clause in the Good Friday Agreement, shows how this might be implemented.

Seamus Mallon, from the village of Markethill in County Armagh (where he still lives) was Deputy Leader of the SDLP from 1979 to 2001, and party spokesman on policing and justice. He was Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from 1998 to 2001, an MP for Newry and Armagh from 1986 to 2005, as well as a member of Seanad Eireann in 1982. He was the SDLP’s chief negotiator in the talks that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and the main driver of legislation in the House of Commons, ensuring that the Patten Commission’s recommendations on the radical reform of policing in the North were fully implemented - one of the major success stories of the peace process. Andy Pollak is the founding director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh (1999-2013). Previous to that, he was Belfast reporter, religious affairs and education correspondent with the Irish Times, and editor of Fortnight Magazine from 1981-1985. He is coauthor (with Ed Moloney) the Rev. Ian Paisley’s biography. In the early 1990s he was coordinator of the Opsahl Commission, a ‘citizens inquiry’ into ways forward for Northern Ireland, and editor of the influential Opsahl Report.

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Summary

Author Biography

Supplemental Materials