AGAINST powerful odds - not least the resumption of the IRA campaign, and the refusal of many leading figures to co-operate - Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick have produced a fascinating and absorbing account of "the secret story behind the Irish peace process".

Key events and stirring declarations like the above, long forgotten facts and fresh disclosures (including more than a dozen documents and previously unpublished prime ministerial correspondence) leap from the pages to challenge widely held assumptions and revive basic questions.

How did the peace process come about? Where was it intended to lead? How and why did it fail? Most fundamentally, perhaps in its appraisal of how far the republican movement has already travelled the book carries the implicit conclusion that, sooner or later, the search for peace will have to be resumed.

For devotees of the political sport there are, along the way, revealing glimpses of the tensions between leading lights like Albert Reynolds and John Hume. The British Prime Minister's determination to remove the "fingerprints" of Hume/Adams from what became the Downing Street Declaration is instructive, if hardly surprising.

The dialogue between the SDLP and Sinn Fein leaders was central to the creation of the ceasefire. Unionists reacted with outrage when it came to light in April 1993. But in these pages lies the compelling evidence that, if a peace prize ever lay at the end of the process, it might at least be shared with Father Alex Reid the little known Belfast priest who challenged the Irish nationalist establishment to bring Sinn Fein in from the cold.

Where it all began is uncertain. Nine years were to separate the Anglo Irish Agreement and the 1994 ceasefire. But the 1985 Treaty - signed by Margaret Thatcher in defiance of unionist opinion - appears to have been the turning point. The republicans gave a confused response.

They contended their violence had shifted the British position. That it had shifted was beyond dispute. From that moment on, convinced that Britain was now neutral, the SDLP set about persuading republicans their violence was self defeating - that unionist opinion in the North, rather than British self interest, was the obstacle to "an agreed Ireland".

Gerry Adams was clearly persuadable. Certainly we know that as early as 1986, he had concluded a military victory by the IRA was unattainable. Even as Gadafy's arms laid the basis for a new offensive in Britain and Europe, the Sinn Fein leader was developing what would become known as the "totally unarmed strategy".

Gerry Adams was persuadable

THERE was no hint of it that night in Dublin's Mansion House, as Ruairi O Bradaigh former Sinn Fein president and lifelong republican made his last speech to a Sinn Fein ardfheis. The delegates knew what to expect. The armed struggle and sitting in parliaments were mutually exclusive. End abstentionism and the balance would be tilted decisively in favour of political campaigns that wound up in establishment parliaments.

Mallie and McKittrick acknowledge that "much of what he was saying would turn out to be eerily prophetic". But the tide was against him that night. Compared to the young, self confident leadership seated on the platform behind him, O Bradaigh appeared "a loser". And Martin McGuinness was there to make sure he lost, making a key intervention - of the kind which have become familiar - in cementing support for the Adams strategy.

Their position, Mr McGuinness assured delegates, would never change: "The war must continue until freedom is achieved." Imploring the handful of dissidents to stay, he declared: "If you allow yourself to be led out of this hall today, the only place you are going is home. You will be walking away from the struggle. Don't go, my friends. We will lead you to the republic."

Astonishingly, as late as April 1993, it seems they thought to do 50. For many months, according to this account, John Hume and Martin Mansergh had been holding separate discussions with republicans aimed at removing ambiguities from their draft "joint declarations" of June 1992.

THE 1992 draft required Britain to accept "that the Irish people have the right collectively to self determination". And it would have London affirm its readiness "to introduce the measures to give legislative effect on their side to this right (within a specified period to be agreed) and allowing time for the building of consent, and the beginning of a process of national reconciliation".

Britain would further acknowledge the wish of the British people "to see the people of Ireland live together in unity and harmony".

The republicans were still facing both ways. For the 1992 draft also had the Taoiseach accepting "that the democratic right of self determination by the people of Ireland. . . must be achieved and exercised with the agreement and consent of the people of Northern Ireland".

In short, the republicans were looking for a time limit on the achievement of Irish unity, which could only negate the commitment to "consent". And they rejected Dublin's "understanding" that it would come about over a 15 to 40 year time span. Albert Reynolds knew it wouldn't fly. But he would put the draft to John Major because the message from the IRA was "it's the 1992 document or nothing".

What emerged some eight months later was nothing like the republican draft. On the contrary, the Downing Street Declaration entrenched more firmly than ever before the North's right to reject Irish unity.

The authors, like many others who have followed this story closely, plainly don't believe that the Sinn Fein leadership thought Irish unity lay at the end of the road. In a telling passage they note the historical irony in the original decision to develop Sinn Fein:

"Someone once said that when revolutionaries become involved in discussion and debate they cease to be revolutionaries. So it proved in Ireland: the republican leadership which built up Sinn. Fein had, probably unwittingly, laid the groundwork for the intensive years of internal debate.

What was initially designed as an instrument of subversion and sabotage eventually evolved into a mechanism of entry into politics, and instead of complementing the armed struggle eventually almost displaced it." Almost.

Unionist readers may scorn the very suggestion. And they can find here evidence to support their instinctive belief that the peace process was a power play - intended to deliver the final push at the open door of a neutral British government.

But Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick invite them also to reflect on the compromises Sinn Fein was obliged to make in building the nationalist consensus on the defeat the Downing Street Declaration inflicted on their declared goals on the fact that, for little obvious reward, the peace did hold for 18 months; and on the possibility, at least, that had the politics been played differently, it might survive yet.