The former British prime minister, Mr John Major, says he "constantly had to remind Dublin and Washington that there were two sides" to the conflict in Northern Ireland. "In their eagerness to strike deals with the Provisionals, both sometimes seemed to overlook the existence of the unionists," he writes in his autobiography published today.
Confirming his refusal to become "a persuader" for Irish unity, Mr Major says the idea was "unrealistic and undemocratic" and "undermined the crucial importance of the principle of consent".
In a section charting the long negotiation to what eventually became the Downing Street Declaration, Mr Major says of separate early drafts proposed by the Irish Government, and the SDLP leader, Mr John Hume: "It did not take us long to consider these texts. They were utterly one-sided, so heavily skewed towards the presumption of a united Ireland, that they had no merit as a basis for negotiation.
"They were little more than an invitation to the British government to sell out the majority in the North and the democratic principles we had always defended."
At one point during the 1993 negotiations, Mr Major says Mr Hume presented him with a rival draft to that produced two days earlier by the then taoiseach, Mr Albert Reynolds. Mr Hume, he says, "was annoyed with Reynolds, complaining that although he was prime minister of Ireland, he did not understand the complexities of the text and had given us an unsatisfactory draft".
Later on Mr Major refers to a joint Hume/Adams statement on September 25th that year, claiming they had made considerable progress, had forwarded a report to Dublin, and were suspending their dialogue pending wider consideration by London and Dublin.
"The ball was placed publicly in our court," says Mr Major, "yet the prospect of securing unionist agreement to anything emanating from Adams and Hume was nil. Dublin did not even send the report to London."
Key to eventual success was the announcement by Mr Major and Mr Reynolds that the initiative could only be taken by the two governments, and the dropping of Dublin proposals for an all-Ireland convention. The compromise proposal for what became the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, says Mr Major, "was seen by unionists as a harmless talking shop, not a threatening new institution".
The finished product had its origins in several sources and many hands. "It was stimulated by the interest in negotiations shown by Gerry Adams and Martin Mc Guinness, through their talks with Hume and then with Dublin's secret emissaries and through their messages to us [the British]. It owed much to the vision and language of John Hume."
Mr Major deals with the revelation of the British government's secret channel of communication to the Provisionals, and the embarrassment to Sir Patrick Mayhew when it was discovered that "in their haste to transcribe the documents, Northern Ireland Office officials had made a series of typographical errors".
This, coupled with the disclosure that one of the British intermediaries had "without authority" had a face-to-face meeting with Mr McGuinness, he says, "allowed the Provisionals to put out a rival version of the backchannel exchanges", extending to a denial that they had ever sent the message announcing that the conflict was over.
But Mr Major insists: "Subsequent events were to prove our version to be the true one. If we had deceived Adams and Mc Guinness in the way they alleged, if we had made and then retracted an offer of direct and unconditional talks on a united Ireland, and if their intentions had been other than those they signalled to us through the back channel, the 1994 cessation of violence would not have happened."