The Destructors: The Story of Northern Ireland’s Lost Peace Process

The Destructors is the story of lost opportunities. On New Year’s Day, 1974, Northern Ireland’s first Secretary of State, William Whitelaw, convinced unionist and nationalist leaders, such as Brian Faulkner and John Hume, to set aside irreconcilable differences and long-held principles and enter into a power-sharing government at Stormont. A few months later, the government collapsed, poisoned by factionalism. Taking a fresh and dynamic look at what the idea of power-sharing meant to the different parties to the Northern Ireland conflict, The Destructors examines how the Northern Ireland Executive was subsequently destroyed by an unconstitutional political strike that was called by the Ulster Workers’ Council, in May 1974. And it details how the executive’s fate was sealed when power-sharing was abandoned by Heath’s successor, Harold Wilson, following an ill-timed Westminster general election in February. Drawing on previously unavailable British and Irish archival material, and over forty interviews with politicians and officials central to a peace process that led to an Anglo-Irish settlement at Sunningdale, in December 1973, Kerr re-examines why Northern Ireland’s power-sharing experiment failed.