The Downing Street Declaration—or ‘Joint Declaration for Peace’, as the Irish preferred to call it—was announced by John Major and Albert Reynolds on 15 December 1993. It was one of the most important Irish constitutional documents produced during the twentieth century. The declaration established the mechanism—simultaneous referendums North and South—by which Ireland may one day be peacefully united. It was a remarkable achievement. The two governments were consequently able to park the ‘constitutional’ issue—the future of the Irish border—creating space for detailed negotiations on political institutions and security matters and eventually bringing to an end the political violence which had disfigured Northern Ireland for a quarter of a century.

The Joint Declaration grasped the thorniest issues at the heart of the Northern Ireland conflict: self-determination and consent. These two principles encapsulated the clash of political visions in Northern Ireland in its most intractable form. Self-determination was regarded as ‘Provo-speak’. To most ears, this arcane phrase was merely a sophisticated way of saying ‘united Ireland’ or ‘Brits out’. But technically the idea conferred legitimacy on any political structures for the island of Ireland approved by a majority of its inhabitants, voting in a single unit. There had not been an all-Ireland vote of this or any kind since the landslide victory of Sinn Féin in the general election of 1918. The consent principle, on the other hand, was shorthand for the pledge given by successive British governments to Ulster Unionists that Northern Ireland would not cease to be part of the United Kingdom without the agreement of a majority of its citizens. The Writing Peace project reveals fully, for the first time, how these diametrically opposed positions were seemingly reconciled.

The story of the declaration involves extraordinary risks and delicate political judgements. The documents made available by Quill demonstrate the imaginative effort and determination of intermediaries, civil servants and politicians who dared to believe that a resolution to the long war in the North might just be within reach. This introduction traces the evolution of the Joint Declaration from the initial overtures made by the Redemptorist priest Fr Alec Reid to Charles Haughey in 1986, through the Hume–Adams talks, to the tense negotiations between UK and Irish officials in December 1993. It draws on interviews with the principal architects of the declaration (John Chilcot, Quentin Thomas, Martin Mansergh, Séan Ó hUiginn), conducted over several years. It also draws on a series of archives which have now become available for the first time. These include the position papers of the peacemaker Father Reid, contained in the Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich Archive in Armagh, and the Dermot Nally papers in University College Dublin.

Writing Peace sheds new light on the twists and turns of the early peace process. The project includes letters to the Provisional Army Council showing that as far back as April 1987 the IRA leadership was considering dramatically modifying its public position on partition. It shows how the British and Irish delegations approached the bilateral summit at Dublin Castle on 3 December 1993 when the initiative almost collapsed. Above all, it highlights the ingenuity and subtlety of Séan Ó hUiginn, Quentin Thomas and other officials who painstakingly hammered together an ideological formula that proved tolerable to all sides. The fraught issues that confronted them went back to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Was there one people of Ireland or two? Were the Ulster Unionists Irish, British, or a mixture of the two? Would the North and the South determine their future ‘collectively’, ‘concurrently’ or ‘separately’?