The IRA ceasefire of 31 August 1994 and the loyalist ceasefire six weeks later brought to an end – for a time at least – twenty-five years of violent communal conflict in Northern Ireland. During that period 3,400 people were killed and over 20,000 suffered injury; some were left permanently disabled. The people of Northern Ireland bore the greatest weight of suffering; almost half the population – over 80 per cent in some areas – knew someone killed or injured in the conflict; some experienced multiple personal tragedies. There were also deaths and injuries in the Republic of Ireland, Great Britain and on mainland Europe, sometimes of people with no conceivable relationship to the conflict.

The violence of that period damaged the whole fabric of the liberal democratic state and civic culture in Northern Ireland, the Republic and Great Britain. Normal judicial processes were suspended, there were repeated breaches of human rights, there was collusion between members of the security forces and paramilitaries, a ‘war culture’ emerged built around propaganda and the demonisation of the ‘enemy’, paramilitaries took over the functions of policing in many areas, stores of military weapons were built up in private hands. In Northern Ireland the conflict produced a generation of politicians highly skilled in conflictrelated negotiation but with little or no experience in the normal business of government; in the Republic, it absorbed political and diplomatic resources out of all proportion to the capacity of a small country.