Chapter 10 suggests that the Irish government and the SDLP talked to Sinn Féin from the late 1980s for two primary reasons: Sinn Féin’s sizeable minority of nationalist support in Northern Ireland, and the IRA’s persistence. Continuing IRA activity, Sinn Féin’s electoral mandate in Northern Ireland, and the pan-nationalist talks also encouraged a shift in British government strategy towards trying to bring republicans into a political settlement in the 1990s. The IRA’s aim of encouraging the British government to return to talks had succeeded by the 1990s. Nonetheless, this chapter suggests that the electoral stagnation of Sinn Féin alongside the stalemate that the conflict had reached by the 1990s convinced the republican leadership to make political concessions in talks. But the prospect of further increasing Sinn Féin’s electoral mandate and achieving concessions for Irish nationalists via the pan-nationalist alliance also influenced Irish republicans to end the armed campaign. This chapter also explores how various grass-roots republicans agreed with the peace process strategy, and why Denis Donaldson and other Sinn Féin informers were not pivotal to the peace process strategy being formed and accepted within republicanism. I emphasise the importance of political factors, rather than the intelligence war, in leading to peace.

The introduction outlines how despite Stakeknife and Donaldson infiltrating the IRA, this book argues that the intelligence war did not force the IRA into the peace process. The secretive and elusive nature of rural IRA units, republican units in England and the IRA leadership, alongside the additional security provided by the cell structure in Belfast and Derry City, meant that the IRA was not pushed into terminal decline by British intelligence. I explain how the peace process resulted from a political and military stalemate that existed for all sides. I also outline how the IRA's prolonged ceasefires in 1972, 1975, 1994 and 1997 did not result from the intelligence war.