In chapter 15, Going off the gold standard? (July 14 - August 21) attention shifts to Great Britain and the weakness of sterling. As pressure on sterling increases, Norman fall sick with ’stress’ and he has to take leave of absence from the bank in late July, only to return after Britain has left gold on September 21, 1931. With Norman out of the picture, his deputy Ernest Harvey takes over as the Banque de France and the New York Fed arrange a $200 million credit to the Bank of England. Tensions arise between Harvey on the one hand and Clément Moret (Banque de France) and Harrison on the other, about the use of the credit. The weakening of sterling continues and in late August, Harry Siepmann writes an ominous note discussing the consequences of Great Britain leaving gold.

The IRA called a ceasefire from June to July 1972 primarily because it was keen to negotiate from a position of strength. Equally, various IRA leaders recognised the need for a negotiated political settlement. The IRA demonstrated their desire to engage in dialogue with the British government in early March 1972, when leading IRA members held secret talks with Leader of the Opposition Harold Wilson. This chapter also suggests that the British government were partly responsible for the collapse of the 1972 ceasefire. The British government never outlined the boundaries of a potential political settlement to the IRA. Neither did they try to politicise the republican movement by legalising Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland. The IRA contributed to the ceasefire’s failure too. Despite sizeable support levels in working-class nationalist areas, they had no political mandate from which to encourage the British government to provide concessions towards the republican position.

Chapter 10 suggests that the Irish government and the SDLP talked to Sinn Féin from the late 1980s for two primary reasons: Sinn Féin’s sizeable minority of nationalist support in Northern Ireland, and the IRA’s persistence. Continuing IRA activity, Sinn Féin’s electoral mandate in Northern Ireland, and the pan-nationalist talks also encouraged a shift in British government strategy towards trying to bring republicans into a political settlement in the 1990s. The IRA’s aim of encouraging the British government to return to talks had succeeded by the 1990s. Nonetheless, this chapter suggests that the electoral stagnation of Sinn Féin alongside the stalemate that the conflict had reached by the 1990s convinced the republican leadership to make political concessions in talks. But the prospect of further increasing Sinn Féin’s electoral mandate and achieving concessions for Irish nationalists via the pan-nationalist alliance also influenced Irish republicans to end the armed campaign. This chapter also explores how various grass-roots republicans agreed with the peace process strategy, and why Denis Donaldson and other Sinn Féin informers were not pivotal to the peace process strategy being formed and accepted within republicanism. I emphasise the importance of political factors, rather than the intelligence war, in leading to peace.