By David McCullagh and Fiachra Ó Cionnaith
The previously confidential government files released this week to the National Archives cover a huge array of subjects, from the serious to the plain bizarre.
Take the strange tale of a plot to poison English drinking water supplies, unless the British withdrew from Northern Ireland within 48 hours. Or the concern within government at the prospect of 'Sir' Oliver J Flanagan.
Governments have to concern themselves with all sorts of things, from getting visas for travelling soccer fans to the implications of how paramilitaries are treated in prison.
The documents also contain lots of insights into what politicians are really like and what they say about each other behind closed doors.
For instance, Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble really, really didn't like Northern Secretary Mo Mowlam.
In March 1999, he was reported to have launched a "bitter tirade" against her in a meeting with British officials, who found his attitude "baffling", though they recognised "Trimble’s unlimited capacity to feel offended at what the Secretary of State says or does".
Mowlam was replaced in October 1999 by Tony Blair's close friend Peter Mandelson, who had been forced to resign as Business Secretary the previous year over a financial scandal.
Irish diplomats were wary, while he was "pragmatic", "very self-assured and self-confident", he was also likely to adopt "fixed and firm positions without being fully conscious of all the nuances and subtleties of Northern politics".
Which was a polite way of damming him.
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US senators Edward Kennedy and Chris Dodd were less polite, telling Irish officials that they "quickly found they could not bring themselves to trust anything Mandelson said to them".
A real problem for the entire process was the difficult relationship between the first and deputy first minsters, the UUP's David Trimble and Seamus Mallon of the SDLP.
By mid-1999, "neither wanted to be in the room with the other".
Mallon was reported to be "close to despair about Trimble", with whom he hadn't had a meeting in months.
He regarded his "partner" as "essentially impossible to do business with".
He was particularly critical of Trimble's failure to properly support his party's MEP Jim Nicholson in the European elections.
"If this is how he treats his own party, what can we expect from him in government?"
By contrast, the great strength of the process was the close working relationship between Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, who between them managed to keep the show on the road.
Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell waxed lyrical about Ahern in July 1999, telling Philip McDonagh of the Irish embassy that Ahern was "a star" for whom Tony Blair has enormous respect.
Next to president Clinton, the taoiseach is the overseas leader "closest to the PM".
McDonagh quickly assured him that the respect was mutual, and asked Powell how he would explain their closeness.
He replied that Blair saw Ahern as a "fellow left of centre, pragmatic" politician, willing to offer courageous leadership, and looking primarily for a settlement that worked.
Ulster Unionists, perhaps not surprisingly, didn't like Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.
Apart from anything else, they thought he "tended to lecture and speak down to them" and was "difficult to deal with".
Such was their frustration with Adams in early 1999 that UUP negotiator Reg Empey wondered to minister of state Liz O'Donnell whether they were talking to the right people.
Perhaps, he mused, they should take "the huge risk of making one more leap in the dark" and talk to "the key people", by which he meant the IRA.
In contrast to his difficulties with Adams, Empey said he was more at ease with Martin McGuinness, and felt he could work with him in a pragmatic way.
The Irish side encouraged McGuinness to follow up on this suggestion, and soon Sinn Féin were reporting that they were, for the first time, getting "respect" from unionism.
Five years later, when it became necessary for Sinn Féin to deal with the DUP, it was again McGuinness who played a key role, directly negotiating with Jeffrey Donaldson, then a recent convert to the DUP.
While Sinn Féin and the DUP talked, separately, to the two governments in Belfast in June 2004, McGuinness and Donaldson had a two-hour side meeting, under cover of attending a Methodist Conference meeting.
When he rejoined the talks, Irish officials recorded, McGuinness said little about their discussions, except that "Donaldson had shaken hands with him and the atmosphere was positive".
It was just as well there was someone in the DUP that would talk to Sinn Féin - at the same meeting, Gerry Adams complained that Jim Allister, the party's candidate to succeed Ian Paisley in the European elections which were then under way, was "acting like a raving lunatic".
When this remark was reported to DUP MP Nigel Dodds, he just laughed and said: "Well, we are in an election campaign."
[Based on documents in 2024/28/8, 2024/28/45, 2024/28/47, 2024/28/50, 2024/28/51 and 2024/71/106]
