John Alderdice

Northern Ireland International Body on Arms Decommissioning 1995-1996

The International Body on Arms Decommissioning was appointed as part of the twin-track process. It was led by the people who would later become the Independent Chairmen of the 1996-1998 peace talks. They produced the Mitchell report, which set out, amongst other recommendations, a list of principles which all parties signed up to as the basis for the talks.

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John Alderdice

Quill platform ID: p8174.

Baron John Thomas Alderdice. Born 28 March 1955. Leader of the Alliance party from 1987-1998. He was a delegate for East Belfast at the Northern Ireland Forum for Political Dialogue. As party leader, he was an Alliance delegate to the 1996-1998 multi-party talks, and a member of the negotiating team. He was the Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, 1998-2004. Alderdice has been a member of the House of Lords since 1996 as a Liberal Democrat.

Member of Alliance—Northern Ireland International Body on Arms Decommissioning 1995-1996, Alliance—Northern Ireland Forum for Political Dialogue, Alliance—Northern Ireland All-Party Talks June 1996 - April 1998, Alliance—Northern Ireland Brooke/Mayhew Talks 1991-1992.

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Writing Peace: John Alderdice Collection

From the mid-1980s, John, now Lord, Alderdice, was intimately involved in the Irish peace process. His archive spans more than thirty years of negotiation and implementation, from his early days in the Alliance Party in the 1980s, through his leadership of the party during several phases of multi-party talks in the 1990s, to the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement during his time as the first Speaker of the new Northern Ireland Assembly. It also includes a small section on the Sunningdale Conference, inherited from previous party leaders, as a testimony to the origins of the 1998 Agreement. The section of Lord Alderdice's archive digitized as part of this project focuses primarily on his role in the Multi-Party Talks of the 1990s. A wider collection of his papers, documenting his contribution to liberal politics and conflict resolution in other countries, is held in the McClay Library at Queen’s University in Belfast. The Alderdice papers to which Quill originally had access were catalogued and arranged chronologically in three subsections, 1985-1992 (particularly focusing on 1991-1992), 1992-1995, and 1996-1998, representing the three main attempts to reach agreement in the 1990s. Papers handed over by Lord Alderdice after this initial cataloguing process had been completed are currently in a separate box and span the whole period. This collection was catalogued and digitized by Ruth Murray, Harriet Carter, Sofia Panourgias and Annabel Harris.

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