Politics: Richard Bourke, a young Irish academic at London University, has written a thoughtful and scholarly work. It is informed by a profound knowledge of political theory from Dean Tucker and Edmund Burke to the present day, writes Steven King.
This polished presentation also contains valuable original material on the attitudes of the British cabinet regarding the early phase of the Ulster Troubles culled from the Public Record Office at Kew in Surrey, England.
As far as the Belfast Agreement is concerned, though, Dr Bourke is something of a sceptic. He regards as naive those who believe the warring parties in the North have made a common investment in democracy and reconciliation. Given the recent political problems of the process, his scepticism is perfectly understandable. But his argument does not merely revisit the obvious problems - suspensions, evidence of continued IRA activity and the apparent weakening of the centre. He thinks there was a flaw at the heart of the whole project - a worm in the apple, so to speak, right from the start.
"Yet a familiar misconception still haunts the workings of the current Agreement: a bare numerical advantage amongst the Northern Ireland protagonists is still entitled to decide whether the population as a whole should ultimately form part of a British or an Irish democracy. Since there exists an expectation that the size of the nationalist electorate will continue to expand over the coming generation, and since the unionist majority is acknowledged to have undergone a steady diminution over the course of the preceding eighty years, the hope that democratic hostilities have been definitely placated by the Good Friday Agreement is not certain to be satisfied," as he puts it.
Dr Bourke has a reasonable point and it requires a reasonable answer from those of us involved in the negotiation of the Belfast Agreement. It is, of course, perfectly fair to say that the logic of John Hume's critique of unionist majoritarianism in the old Stormont implies that a simple nationalist majority should not be enough to push unionists into an all-Ireland state. It would be more logical, if we were to follow Hume's thinking through, that a majority in both communities would be required for that. Why then did unionists not hold out for the dual-consent principle?
In part it was a simple matter of pragmatism. The nationalists who accepted the dual-majority idea thought that the price would have to be dual authority, not the three-stranded settlement of the Agreement which is much more acceptable to unionists. In short, the feeling was that the price would have been too high.
More positively, the consent or will of the majority in Northern Ireland had been the cornerstone of both British and unionist policy for decades. We wished above all to vindicate the democratic rights of the majority in the face of the IRA's long and brutal attempt to coerce it by political violence. This was, and is, the great achievement of the Agreement from a unionist point of view.
Then there is the issue of the census and fears of demographic change. The Ulster Unionist leadership always believed that these fears were exaggerated - a belief that was triumphantly validated by the results of the 2001 census. We were also well aware that the number of Catholic unionists, though falling, was far greater than the number of Protestant nationalists. The most recent poll found that the division of opinion as between the Union and Irish unity stands at 61 per cent to 22 per cent.
Everything, therefore, pointed to the acceptance of the consent principle as it is defined in the Agreement. Richard Bourke's fine study has given me much intellectual stimulation but it has not convinced me otherwise.
Dr Steven King is political adviser to the UUP leader, David Trimble MP
Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas. By Richard Bourke, Pimlico, 462pp. £10