New book featuring series of interviews with former Foyle MP Mark Durkan to be launched

The John and Pat Hume Foundation, Royal Irish Academy and Graham Spencer are hosting a book launch of ‘The SDLP, Politics and Peace - The Mark Durkan Interviews’ by Graham Spencer Emeritus Professor of Social and Political Conflict, University of Portsmouth in Derry on Wednesday.

Professor Graham Spencer said: "This new volume of interviews with former SDLP leader Mark Durkan provides a compelling and informative account of how the peace process in Northern Ireland developed, how the Good Friday Agreement was reached and the many problems that beset power-sharing thereafter.

"Addressing issues such as informal, back channel contacts, the role and value of the Hume-Adams and SDLP-Sinn Fein dialogues, decommissioning, unionism, the dynamic of talks and negotiations and what the future of Ireland North and South will need to confront if the full benefits of stability and peace are to be made available to all, this testimony is a must-read for those seeking to understand the challenges of peace from someone involved at the heart of that search."

Mark Durkan said: "In a series of interviews, Graham Spencer asked me for recollections, perceptions or explanations of given developments in the course of the peace process. Addressing these, I tried to answer the question "..what were we thinking?" or "what was the thinking..?". Not least - but not only - in respect of offering insights into John Hume's resilient pathfinding role in grounding the layers of understanding.

"Graham's compilation of those answers helps to colour in the importance of different phases, faces and factors in our process beyond the narrower treatments of a lot of commentary or accounts.

"Rooted in academic interview, the result is not "my book" giving either my own overall narrative or more personal memoir. 

"It shares actual knowledge of some things I was "in the room" for and other things that I was "behind a pillar" on. 

"As edited, it points to the working relevance between different facets and retraces the working sequence between different episodes. I hope that it reads as some acknowledgement, from one involvee, of diverse contributions to achieving what was meant to be a shared and inclusive outcome."

The book launch takes place at 4.30pm on Wednesday, January 29 in the Guildhall's Whitaker Suite with Mark Durkan, Graham Spencer and chaired by Dr Shelley Deane, Researcher in the Dept of Law and Government at DCU.