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more imaginative co-operation on the part of those producing programmes in the two languages ofWales. PETER STEAD Swansea THE ANGLO-IRISH AGREEMENT: THE FIRST THREE YEARS. By Arwel Ellis Owen. University ofWales Press, 1994. Pp. x, 263. £ 14.95. Arwell Ellis Owen is a Welshman who has paid Northern Ireland the compliment, not only of living and working there (he was Head of Programmes with BBC Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1988), but also of writing up a first-hand account of his experiences. He conceived the notion of keeping a diary of events while waiting for a car to pick him up at Aldergrove Airport, which has proved a useful and productive result of the delay caused by the late arrival of his transport. He covers the first three years of what is certainly the most important development in British policy towards Northern Ireland since 1974, and perhaps since 1921. Arwel ElHs Owen is more of a chronicler than an analyst. But he never loses his grasp of the general direction of events, and he writes clearly and objectively about some of the most turbulent years since the Northern Ireland troubles began in 1968. Indeed, the exceptionally packed political events of these years need a close and careful narrative, covering as they do not only the conflict in Northern Ireland, but the tense, and often fragile, relationship between the British and Irish governments as they came to terms with the instrument that they had created. The narrative points in one clear direction: that the Anglo-Irish Agreement had a profound impact on the Ulster Unionists, in that it revealed the fundamental weakness of their Unionism when confronted with a determined British government, and an agreement that offered no easy target for attack. Some comparisons between the failure of the anti- Agreement campaign of 1985-6 and the hugely successful strike which ended the power-sharing executive of 1974 would have been useful, but the point that the anti-Agreement campaign was self-defeating is clear. The agreement, unlike the power-sharing executive, offered no easy target for attack: it was not so much a case of what was the Anglo-Irish Agreement, as where was it; there was no tangible manifestation of it, apart from the well protected secretariat at Maryfield, on the outskirts of Belfast. Arwel Ellis Owen's own experience with the BBC highlights the