Book launch: Deniable Contact by Niall Ó Dochartaigh (Oxford University Press, 2021)

Overview

Launched by Prof. Ian McBride (Foster Professor of Irish History, Oxford)  

To attend, please register via: https://nuigalway-ie.zoom.us/j/96749370440?pwd=RUtQZjhBUFRXVmJ0TWxCWEVOWTdHZz09

Join us for a conversation between Niall Ó Dochartaigh and Ian McBride to mark the publication of Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. 

Deniable Contact provides the first full-length study of the secret negotiations and back-channels that were used in repeated efforts to end the Northern Ireland conflict. The analysis is founded on a rich store of historical evidence, including the private papers of key Irish republican leaders, recently released papers from national archives in Dublin and London, and the papers of Brendan Duddy, the intermediary who acted as the primary contact between the IRA and the British government on several occasions over a span of two decades, including papers that have not yet been made publicly available. This documentary evidence, combined with original interviews with politicians, mediators, civil servants, and republicans, allows a vivid picture to emerge of the complex maneuvering at this intersection. 
 

Niall Ó Dochartaigh is Personal Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland Galway. He is the author of Deniable Contact: Back-channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland (2021) and Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the birth of the Irish Troubles (1997; 2005). He is co-editor of Political Violence in Context (2015) and Dynamics of Political Change in Ireland: Making and Breaking a Divided Island (2017).  

Ian McBride 

Ian McBride is the Foster Professor of Irish History at Hertford College, University of Oxford. His books include The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (1997) and Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (1998), both short-listed for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize; and Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (2009). He is co-editor, with Richard Bourke, of The Princeton History of Modern Ireland (2016).