25 Bad students learning the wrong lessons? Roger MacGinty PREMATURE HISTORY? S itting at the LSE IDEAS ‘Lessons of Northern Ireland’ event, it was fanciful to think of ‘who was bugging who’ during the peace process. Around the table at the seminar we had Jonathan Powell (Tony Blair’s chief of staff for the Northern Ireland talks), Martin Mansergh (the Irish Taoiseach’s special representative on the Northern Ireland talks), Tim Dalton (from the Irish Ministry of Justice who collated Irish government intelligence files), David Trimble (the former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and a leading player in the peace process), and Barbara de Bruin (a member of Sinn Féin’s negotiating team). Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that Jonathan Powell, or Tim Dalton, were privy to the transcripts of telephone calls and other surreptitiously recorded conversations of the people with whom they now shared a seminar room? My educated guess would be that Jonathan, Tim and many others know a lot more than they are prepared, or allowed, to tell us. This gets to the heart of the matter of the lessons to be learned from a peace process: what information is available to allow us to draw lessons? Some information is in the public domain, and other information is not. But even the information that is in the public domain may not be as helpful as we imagine. There is a difference between having access to information and identifying those parts of that information that might be useful to others. There has been no shortage of politicians, policymakers and academics (myself included) travelling the world to explain the ‘lessons’ from the Northern Ireland peace process. But it is worth asking if we are in a position to identify ‘lessons’ from the Northern Ireland peace process? A number of barriers mean that politicians, policymakers, journalists, and academics may not be able to learn from Northern Ireland’s peace process in any meaningful way. Instead, there is a danger that many of the lessons that are shared are superficial and glib. Perhaps the most prominent of these barriers relates to the instant history that accompanied the Northern Ireland peace process. There has been no shortage of memoirs, insider accounts, television documentaries, and learned wisdom from telegenic historians. This is not a criticism of the politicians, policymakers, journalists, and academics who have given us insights to the Northern Ireland peace process. Many of the insider accounts make gripping reading and are invaluable sources of information. The problem is that a largely accepted version of the peace process was laid down very early, more or less in real time. This narrative has become hegemonic. Indeed, key players in the peace process (individuals and institutions) invest considerable energy in maintaining this accepted narrative, and their crucial role in it. Thus, those who made the peace process, have become gatekeepers to a particular narrative of the peace process.