In this new edition of The Long Road to Peace in Northern Ireland, former contributors have been given the opportunity to add postscripts, two new essays have been commissioned, and the appendices enlarged. I have added sections of the Opsahl Commission report and Sir George Quigley's Review of the Parades Commission (2002), which address the issues of religion, cultural identity and sectarianism, and have dedicated this edition to Torkel Opsahl and Eric Gallagher, fellow commissioner on the Opsahl Commission. Eric Gallagher was one of the four Protestant clergymen who met the IRA at Feakle in County Clare in 1974. He spent a lifetime trying to overcome the sectarianism that continues to make peace so precarious.

Despite the return of devolved government to Northern Ireland and signs of former extremes working together harmoniously, the mood is more sombre in these additions than five years ago, reflecting a recognition that the inflated expectations of what the Good Friday Agreement could deliver were unrealistic. Peter Shirlow, while recognizing the real achievements of the peace process – not least the 74 per cent decline in the murder rate – highlights the urgency of seriously tackling increasing polarization and sectarianism in Belfast (only 17.7 per cent now living in mixed areas). The Agreement over-emphasized high politics and ‘merely managed polarization’, while the whole ‘edifice’ of sectarianism was ignored. George Quigley too – drawing on his review of the Parades Commission in 2002 – reaches a similar conclusion: the Agreement ‘raised the bar high, requiring enforced fraternity at the top while there was a serious lack of fraternity at the base’.