Political Purgatory: The Battle to Save Stormont and the Play for a New Ireland

The story begins in 2017, with Martin McGuinness’s dramatic resignation as deputy First Minister, and chronicles all the behind-the-scenes wrangling that finally resulted in the restoration of the Executive in January 2020, with the ‘New
Decade New Approach’ agreement. Then, that new fight with a fearsome and unknowable foe: the Coronavirus pandemic.

Political Purgatory sets the three years from collapse to Covid-19 – and the breaking and making of Stormont – into a wider frame of building peace on top of conflict, and it turns the next corner into the centenary of Northern Ireland and
that louder call for unity, since Brexit, like a piece of heavy machinery on fragile ground, has left cracks across the Union.

Spanning several decades, some of the biggest names on the inside of politics and policing, including Gerry Adams, Peter Robinson, and Simon Coveney, help veteran journalist Brian Rowan turn the pages in what President Clinton has
called the ‘long war for peace’.