THE JOURNEY (2016)  94 minutes

As the story goes, after Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk dismantled Aparthied in South Africa, they traveled to Northern Ireland to see if they could help broker a peace agreement between the Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists. After one day of negotiations, Mandela turned to de Klerk and asked, “Were we this bad?”

By 2006, after years of stalled initiatives, the Protestant and Catholic leaders met in Scotland to hammer out a power sharing agreement. Then Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern were desperate to avoid yet another impasse, so they contrived a meeting between former IRA hardliner Martin McGuiness (Colm Meaney) and the ferociously doctrinaire Ian Paisley (Timothy Spall), two men who had never once spoken to each other. What was said in their arranged journey back to Ulster has not been disclosed, but this film surmises how their encounter played out––all the while under the frantic watch of the British Intelligence establishment.

BE ADVISED–– This film is rated PG-13 with archival images of sectarian violence, terse parochial language, and all manner of political scheming––whether Hibernian or Britannic.