Much of the memoir-writing devoted to political lives to emerge from Northern Ireland over the course of the last forty years has been undertaken by paramilitaries, or those previously affiliated to such organisations. There have been contributions written by unionist and nationalist politicians, but these have often been overshadowed somewhat, in terms of their popular reception and impact, by the more sensational accounts of the violent conflict. This chapter concentrates in particular upon the memoir-writing of mainstream, ‘constitutional’ politicians, largely from the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). It may be noteworthy that few memoirs have, to date, been published by leading members of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), and the same may be said for other, smaller parties operating in Northern Irish political life.

Of course, a key distinction between these political memoirs and those published in, for example, Great Britain in the same period, is that between the prorogation of the Stormont parliament in 1972 and the restoration of devolved power-sharing government in the wake of the inter-party agreement of 1998, locally elected politicians in Northern Ireland only very rarely held ministerial office. As a direct consequence, although there have been several conventional ministerial memoirs associated with the Stormont era (such as those of former UUP Prime Ministers, Terence O'Neill and Brian Faulkner), the scant opportunities for Northern Irish politicians to exercise authentic legislative or Executive policy functions after 1972 meant that the scope for publishing the ‘usual’ form of political memoir was curtailed. The staple features of British political memoirs, concerning the process of making and implementing decisions in government, are largely absent from the Northern Irish memoirs of the Troubles era. There were, of course, periodic elections to a range of assemblies (including the Constitutional Convention of 1975 and the Northern Ireland Assembly from 1982 to 1986), which provided some of these memoirists with material. Some politicians from the UUP and SDLP were also elected as MPs in Westminster, but their influence was generally limited. The exception to this rule came during the short-lived power-sharing Executive from January until May 1974, and Chapter 7 will devote considerable attention to a case-study of memoir-writing by some of the crucial protagonists during this highly significant interlude.