Characters

"Our revenge will be the laughter of our children."

A young Belfast man radicalised by sectarian intimidation of his family, Bobby Sands joined the Provisional IRA as a teenager and spent much of his short adult life in prison. In 1981, as leader of the republican prisoners in the Maze, he led a hunger strike demanding political status, refusing food while, in an extraordinary twist, being elected a Member of the British Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. His election focused the eyes of the world on the prison protest, but Margaret Thatcher would not concede, and Sands died after 66 days without food, aged 27. His death, followed by that of nine more strikers, brought tens of thousands into the streets, generated global sympathy for the republican cause, and — by proving the electoral appeal of the movement — helped launch Sinn Féin as a political force. He remains the most famous martyr of Irish republicanism.

"The war is over. The IRA is gone."

The dominant figure of modern Irish republicanism, Gerry Adams rose from the Catholic ghettos of Belfast to lead Sinn Féin, the political wing of the republican movement, for over three decades. Interned without trial in the early Troubles and long alleged (though he always denied it) to have been a senior IRA commander, he became the chief architect of the movement's shift from the bomb toward the ballot box. Working secretly with the moderate nationalist John Hume, Adams steered the republican movement into ceasefires and the peace process, negotiating the Good Friday Agreement and persuading a militant movement to accept a compromise settlement and, eventually, to decommission its weapons. A deeply divisive figure — hero to republicans, terrorist sympathiser to unionists — he is nonetheless widely credited as indispensable to ending the war.

"My war is over. My job as a political leader is to prevent that war ever happening again."

A butcher's apprentice from the Bogside, Martin McGuinness rose to become a senior IRA commander in Derry — he admitted to having been second-in-command of the local IRA at the time of Bloody Sunday — before evolving, alongside Gerry Adams, into a leading strategist of the peace process. His hard-man credentials gave him the authority within the movement to sell compromise to the militants. In one of the most remarkable transformations of the era, the former IRA commander became Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland in the power-sharing government, working in partnership with his old enemies — most famously forging a warm and unlikely rapport with the firebrand unionist Ian Paisley, the pair dubbed the 'Chuckle Brothers.' He even shook hands with Queen Elizabeth II. His journey from gunman to statesman embodied the arc of the peace.

"An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind — I want to break that cycle."

A former teacher from Derry and a founder of the moderate, non-violent Social Democratic and Labour Party, John Hume was the intellectual architect of the peace process and the most consistent advocate of achieving Irish unity by consent rather than the gun. He championed civil rights in the 1960s, condemned violence on all sides for thirty years, and doggedly pursued dialogue when it was deeply unpopular. His most courageous and controversial act was to open secret talks with Gerry Adams in the late 1980s, seeking to draw the republican movement away from violence — talks that laid the groundwork for the IRA ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement. Vilified by many at the time for talking to 'terrorists,' he was later vindicated and shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize with David Trimble. He is remembered as the man who did more than any other to end the Troubles.

"Never, never, never, never!"

A thunderous fundamentalist preacher and the fiercest voice of hardline unionism, Ian Paisley founded both his own Free Presbyterian Church and the Democratic Unionist Party, and for decades was the implacable 'Dr. No' of Northern Irish politics — denouncing the IRA, the Catholic Church, and every attempt at compromise with equal fury, his cry of 'No Surrender!' the anthem of loyalist defiance. His refusal to bend made him, for most of the Troubles, an obstacle to every settlement. Yet in one of the era's most astonishing turns, the aged Paisley finally agreed in 2007 to enter a power-sharing government as First Minister — with his old enemy Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin as his deputy. The two former antagonists developed a genuinely warm partnership, and the arch-irreconcilable ended his career as a maker, rather than a wrecker, of peace.

"We are not asking you to love each other — only to work together."

A law lecturer and mainstream unionist leader, David Trimble took the political risk that made the Good Friday Agreement possible from the unionist side. Once associated with hardline positions, he came to accept that a negotiated settlement with power-sharing was the only path to a stable peace, and he led the Ulster Unionist Party — then the largest unionist party — into the agreement over the bitter opposition of Paisley and many in his own ranks. He became Northern Ireland's first First Minister and shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume, the two men embodying the moderate centre — one unionist, one nationalist — on which the peace was built. Trimble paid a heavy political price as hardliners on both sides gained ground, but his willingness to compromise at the decisive moment was indispensable to ending the Troubles.

"Crime is crime is crime; it is not political."

Britain's prime minister for much of the war's most intense phase, Margaret Thatcher took an uncompromising line against Irish republicanism. She refused to grant the hunger strikers of 1981 political status, letting Bobby Sands and nine others die rather than concede — a stance that broke the strike but handed the republican movement a propaganda triumph and a generation of martyrs. She herself narrowly survived an IRA assassination attempt in 1984, when a bomb devastated the Brighton hotel hosting her party conference, killing five. Publicly implacable, she nonetheless signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, giving Dublin a consultative role in the North — a pragmatic step that enraged unionists but helped lay groundwork for later negotiations. Her hard line defined the confrontational middle years of the Troubles.

"A day like today is not a day for soundbites — but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders."

Elected in 1997, the young and energetic Prime Minister Tony Blair made a settlement in Northern Ireland an early priority and threw his personal and political capital into the final push for peace. Working closely with the Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, the American chair George Mitchell, and the Northern Irish parties, Blair drove the marathon negotiations that produced the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. His willingness to engage directly with all sides, his relentless personal diplomacy in the final days at Stormont, and his readiness to make politically risky concessions — on prisoner releases and paramilitary participation in government — were widely credited as decisive in getting the agreement over the line. Overseeing the implementation of the peace, including the fraught issues of decommissioning and policing reform, became one of the signal achievements of his premiership.

"We had 700 days of failure and one day of success."

A former US Senate Majority Leader appointed as America's special envoy to Northern Ireland by President Bill Clinton, George Mitchell brought patient, impartial statesmanship to the role of independent chairman of the multi-party peace talks. His famous 'Mitchell Principles' committed the parties to exclusively peaceful and democratic means, providing the framework within which former enemies could negotiate. Over two gruelling years he chaired the talks with extraordinary forbearance, absorbing walkouts, insults, and repeated breakdowns, and it was his calm insistence — setting a final deadline in the spring of 1998 — that drove the exhausted parties to the Good Friday Agreement. His neutral American authority, trusted by nationalists and unionists alike, was essential to a settlement that decades of purely British and Irish efforts had failed to reach.