IRA ceasefire

IT’S difficult to imagine where Northern Ireland would be were it not for David Trimble.

THE IRA's second ceasefire a quarter of a century ago would not have happened without the Labour's Westminster landslide less than three months before, according to Brian Feeney, historian and columnist with The Irish News.

GERRY Adams wrote to the rector of Clonard Monastery on the eve of the IRA's 1994 ceasefire saying the "potentially historic opportunity" would not have been possible about without Fr Alec Reid.

State papers, mainly from 1997, have been released by the Public Records Office today.

THE BACKGROUND against which the talks between SDLP leader John Hume and Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams first took place in the mid-to-late 1980s was violent and bleak.

A PROPOSAL by a leading Irish-American in 1996 that a new IRA ceasefire might be guaranteed by the Irish and US governments was questioned by the Northern Ireland Office.

25 years ago this week, the Provisional IRA announced a 'complete cessation of military operations'.

THIS week marks 25 years since the Provisional IRA called a ceasefire, a seminal moment in the history of our island.

THE first place I went to when the IRA called its first ceasefire, 25 years ago this coming Saturday, was to the Republican Plot in Milltown Cemetery.

THE Fine Gael-Labour coalition pressed the British for a more generous security response to the IRA and loyalist ceasefires in 1995, according to previously confidential files released today.