Book Review

One Good Day: Insider’s account of Good Friday Agreement talks the most reliable yet

Getting the historic peace accord in the North across the line was a victory that had to be constantly snatched from the jaws of defeat, explains the then senior Irish diplomat at Stormont

The eve of polling day in the North for the Good Friday Agreement in 1998: the author of My Journey to the Good Friday Agreement, David Donoghue say the GFA involved ‘a negotiation process of extraordinary complexity, multi-level and multi-faceted’. Picture: PA

David Donoghue has more than one reason to remember the events of Good Friday 1998. As a senior Irish diplomat at Stormont’s Castle Buildings in Belfast, he was overjoyed when the power-sharing agreement he and many others had worked for years to achieve finally became a reality. Before the cheering had stopped, however, he received credible information that loyalist terrorists were planning to kill him. Donoghue then phoned his wife and told her, “First the ...