The paradox of the peace process in Northern Ireland has been the emergence of the “extremist” parties on either side—Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)—as the dominant electoral forces in Ulster politics. Christopher Farrington provides a detailed account of the responses of Unionists to the peace process, which goes a long way to explaining why it is that “peace” has been accompanied by a hardening of Unionist identities in support of the party of Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson. A major part of his explanation is that the Unionists, who currently represent more than half the population of the six counties, have not felt a sense of ownership of the peace process. They have seen it as an imposition upon them, and the debate over how to respond has broadened divisions within Unionism, which in turn adds to their fear that they might be further weakened in relation to the other forces in Northern Irish politics, including nationalists and the British and Irish governments.

In his first chapter, Farrington explores the development of “new Unionism.” Mainly the outcome of academic work, many of these new ideas seek to relocate Ulster Unionism within recent thinking about Britishness, which allows for equal citizenship alongside cultural diversity. So for Arthur Aughey, Unionists should be accorded equality with other groups of Britons with diverse identities, such as black and Asian people who have recently been asserting their hyphenated Britishness. As Farrington shows in chapter 2, these contributions to the debate on what Unionism meant were revitalized by the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 (AIA). He calls the AIA “the greatest challenge to the Unionists since the Third Home Rule crisis” of 1912 to 1914 (48). Unionists were not consulted before the AIA, which allowed a foreign government (that of the Republic of Ireland) a say in Northern Ireland's affairs. While moderates, known in the past as liberal Unionists, believed full integration into the United Kingdom would provide safeguards, the DUP preferred a return to devolved government (withdrawn in the early 1970s) to defend the Union. In both cases, Unionists firmly opposed the AIA because it showed British government plans starkly diverging from Unionist interests. The Ulster Unionist Party, led by David Trimble, eventually came to the view that negotiations with the Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party (after that party had talked with Sinn Fein) were a means to secure the Unionist position inside a framework of devolved and shared power. The outcome, encouraged by the British government, was the Belfast Agreement of Good Friday 1998. The Agreement gained the support of just over 70 percent of voters in a referendum, not because it would lead to integration of communities but because it would provide a peaceful context in which to negotiate the security of the existing divided communities. Farrington explains, in chapter 3, how Unionists had been able to negotiate political space for Catholic minorities in local government (and how they had responded to being minorities to Catholic majorities in areas such as Derry). Nationalist parties had made the running in the peace process and seemed to gain most benefits, getting most of the generous grants that entered Northern Ireland from the European Union. In this context, ordinary Unionists felt powerless and support for the DUP provided an additional method of asserting their identity. A number of enabling factors aided DUP growth. Farrington suggests that Protestant evangelicalism, as espoused by Paisley, has not been an electoral asset to the DUP. So, when DUP councillors in Ballymena banned the Electric Light Orchestra from playing in 1993 for allegedly encouraging devilry, debauchery, and drunkenness, the DUP were defeated in the subsequent elections. However, the introduction of proportional representation allowed Unionists to choose which party to vote for. It now became possible to vote DUP without splitting the Unionist vote allowing nationalists in. Also, the Orange Order's break with the Ulster Unionist Party removed a valuable electoral resource from the official Unionists. In the final two chapters of the book, Farrington shows how the assertiveness of the DUP in the face of what seem to be nationalist successes has without doubt allowed the party to claim that it is more able to defend those who wish to maintain their Protestant identity as an essential constituent of their Unionism.

This is a strong book. It provides a detailed and necessary account of the development of Unionism since 1985. It shows the complex nature of Unionism and its component parties. It expresses clearly the dynamic nature of the political idea of Unionism that is often associated with atavism and conservatism. It examines the way in which political ideas and Unionist practice relate to each other, examining local politics to good effect. It contains a number of important interviews with leading Unionist figures and it goes a long way in explaining the paradox of coinciding peace and assertive Protestantatism. It occasionally loses itself in depth of analysis and a few more broad interpretative sections would have benefited the nonspecialist reader, but in mapping the changes in Unionist ideas during the peace process, Farrington has provided a valuable service to historians and political scientists alike.