This chapter is about trying to prompt myself to remember the Joint Declaration (JD) of spring 2003. I put it that way for several reasons. I am not a historian or a political scientist, but rather someone who ceased to be a British civil servant in autumn 2004, and who played a minor supporting role in the Northern Ireland peace process between 1990 and 1993 and then between 2002 and 2004. It is surprisingly difficult to remember work you did a decade or more ago. So this chapter is at least partly an account of my struggle to remember, prompted by books, but unprompted by any revisiting of the unpublished government records of the time. Secondly, for reasons which I hope to shed some light on, I think the JD initiative is a somewhat neglected phase of the peace process. It was nothing less than an attempt to secure ‘acts of completion’, to conclude a settlement on some of the most difficult issues left over from the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998. Though there are signs, even in 2014, that there is still unfinished business.

When I was studying history at university (a past I share with many Irish and British talks participants) there was a vogue for a ‘high politics’ view of history, epitomised by historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent, which held that activity within the political elites was what counted, and it was, and should be regarded by historians as being, untainted by social, economic or cultural developments. Such a philosophy sometimes seems to be at work in writing about the peace process. You even sometimes thought you could detect it among talks participants. And this chapter may not be immune from such a temptation.