Born outside of Northern Ireland and only three years older than the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, I cannot claim first-hand knowledge of the difference it has made. But that I and those younger than me have not known a Northern Ireland at civil war must count for something. That we now look to Northern Ireland’s constitutional future freed from at least some of the weight of history means our dreams can rise higher as a result. This is a testament to the Agreement’s success. It has bestowed on our generation a hard-won innocence.
In the spirit of that innocence, we can reflect that above its terms and clauses, what is truly worthy of celebration, of veneration, even, is 25 years on, the Agreement has solidified a shared will for peace in Northern Ireland. Despite the problems which continue to dog Northern Irish politics, it is difficult if not impossible to envisage a return to the days of the conflict. Those who threaten its imminent return, as a result of Brexit or anything else, should give the Agreement more credit – it has taken us back from the abyss.
But on its 25th anniversary, we might still mark and reflect on what the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is, and what it is not.
And to start, I might say that it is, and has been since its inception, a shibboleth. Uncritical support for the Agreement has too-often been seen as a stand-in for support for the peace process. It has consequently stood for many as a marker of respectability. Praise of the Agreement acts as a signifier that one’s political views and intentions lie within the bounds of play.
Ostensibly there is nothing wrong with this. That we should be brought together around shared commitments to the principles of peace and consent is, I concede, a prerequisite for any form of progress.
The concern arises now, though, that when strands of the Agreement come to fray, such criticism as is due might place us outside the realms of that respectable discussion. If a minority feels aspects of the Agreement no longer work for them, in raising this they might serve to ostracise themselves. This is a process which has played out again more recently with regard to the Windsor Framework. It is a process which we must push back against.
A shibboleth is, by its nature, designed to exclude, and those who use the Agreement to place political opponents outside the realms of respectability do it a disservice. This is less keenly felt in Northern Ireland itself, but in Britain our ignorance means we are often too quick and too loud in labelling those who would seek to reform the Agreement as threatening the peace process. This is an ignorance which condemns equally most of the political parties of Northern Ireland and most of its population. So, let us mispronounce shibboleth that we might be honest in our reflections and less ignorant in our pronouncements.
What else is the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement?
Well, the Agreement is the basis of the political structures now stalled in Northern Ireland. And it would be remiss when praising power-sharing 25 years on not to point out that power has not been shared when Stormont has been suspended – almost 40 percent of the time. This is not a new criticism, and nor is it one left to the periphery of Northern Irish politics. Indeed, perhaps the most consistent critics of this “ugly scaffolding”, as it is often called, are the Alliance Party. It’s leader Naomi Long has been particularly visible throughout this 25th anniversary, making the case that the minority veto currently being used by the Democratic Unionist Party is in need of reform.
This is likely correct, and a social attitudes survey published by ARK yesterday highlights that while 69 percent of the population of Northern Ireland still support the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, 55 percent believe it should be reformed in some way.
The realities of a suspended Stormont and government by civil service are inescapable and suspension has doubtless proved a blight to the health service and other areas. But nor can the structures put in place by the Agreement be reduced to this state of blight. The construction of the Protestant majority in 1921 means that for the last century Northern Ireland has only acted as a truly representative democracy when the structures put in place by the Agreement have functioned. While there must be reform, we should not slip into dewy-eyed imaginings. The structures of consociationalism were put in place to address a problem which still exists.
This brings us to another of the common criticisms: that far from ameliorating the sectarian divisions of Northern Ireland, the Agreement has instead served to formalise and entrench these. To define as unionist or nationalist is to empower oneself under the terms of Strand One of the Agreement, yet to remove those same minority protections is surely no solution. Already many unionists fear that in the coming years they will become a minority denied the protections which were afforded to their nationalist counterparts in the first 25 years of the Agreement. There are ways around this problem, but we must not be foolhardy and deny it exists.
In a similar vein, that Sinn Fein and the DUP have risen to power above the SDLP and the UUP is now invoked as evidence that the Agreement has provoked polarisation or even extremism in Northern Ireland. These are criticisms common to consociationalism the world over.[1] But so too has such a move been common across the non-consociational world since the turn of the twenty first century. It is the worst kind of counterfactual history to imagine that Northern Ireland’s politics would be less divided or polarised without consociationalism, flying in the face of political developments in America, the rest of the United Kingdom and Europe.
None of which is to say that the problems which corrode Northern Ireland’s institutions at present are not serious. Much can and must change over the next 25 years. But rather it is to point out that many of the features for which Northern Irish politics is now rightly criticised are common to other nations, consociational or not.
The stuttering advance of devolved government in Northern Ireland risks grinding to a permanent halt without reform, but this is not simply the fault of the terms of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Those aspects where the structures of the Agreement are to blame must in turn be recognised as features common in the engineering of consociational polities. While solutions of various kinds have been mooted, few have yet to overcome on paper the challenges which the Agreement was designed to overcome in practice. The bar is set high.
What else is the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement?
Aside from those structures and issues already covered above, the Agreement is remarkable for its impact outside of Northern Ireland.
Strand Two of the Agreement creates the North/South Ministerial Council in an effort to ensure ‘consultation, co-operation and action’ on the island of Ireland. A much overlooked and constitutionally innovative aspect of the Agreement, earlier this week, a blog from Dr Lisa Claire Whitten recounted the story of the Council and North/South cooperation since 1998. While it does not bear to repeat those same arguments again here, the parting refrain, that ‘the present obstacles to the continuation of cooperation are significant’ but not necessarily insurmountable, should give us pause.
Likewise, Dr Stuart Wallace has suggested that despite the historic inclusion of the European Convention on Human Rights into Northern Ireland law through the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, continued progress cannot be taken for granted. With all manner of threats from Westminster including the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill, often those who speak loudest in praise of the 1998 Agreement are those actively involved in undermining it. There has scarcely been a press conference from this government addressing Northern Ireland which has not lauded the Agreement while seeking to circumvent some aspect of it.
Likewise, a retreat in the influence of the Strand Three institutions since 1998 highlights that while much progress has been made in the 25 years since the Agreement was signed, that progress has not been linear, and nor is it guaranteed to continue. Others have argued that both the British-Irish Council and the British Irish Intergovernmental Conferences can still provide inspiration for a renewal of the Agreement, where a broad coalition might be brought together to reform and reinvigorate British-Irish relations and help bridge the divides at Stormont.
So, the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is still standing after 25 years, but we should not take its existence nor its efficacy for granted. For the steps forward which have been made, we must be mindful of what has wilted away in that time also.
Not all decay is bad, though. Alongside the rust on Northern Ireland’s institutions, the rust on the arsenal which fuelled conflict has taken hold. While the journey has not been smooth since decommissioning began, and there are still plenty of arms to bear, the transformation in the 25 years since the Agreement is stark. Decommissioning took up only six points of the Agreement, but without it, it is inconceivable that progress would have been made.
Last, what the Agreement is, is malleable. I write here not of the terms and clauses which we have considered up to this point, but rather of the spirit of the Agreement itself. Perhaps the most notably absent signatory of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was the Democracy Unionist Party. Their concerns were wide ranging but included the release of prisoners. As Professor Jon Tonge has explained, this scepticism has by no means disappeared. But despite this, when the DUP came to enter government at Stormont, it too came to sign the St Andrews Agreement. While separate to the 1998 iteration, few would seek to deny the causal relationship between the two. I suggest it isn’t ridiculous to say that the spirit of Belfast/Good Friday is evident in the St Andrews Agreement. But talk of spirits and the elimination of corporeal boundaries leads us inevitably to consider what the 1998 Agreement is not, and with that we might conclude our reflections.
What the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is not.
Simply put, the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is not the answer to the question which has hung over the north of Ireland since the sixteenth century. It is not the answer to similar questions the world over. To increase the burden placed upon it and demand it act as panacea to problems inherent to majoritarian democracy, to religious strife and ethnic conflict all at once is too much. Instead, we might better think of the Agreement as the true start of the peace process, a mechanism which provides us space to find that ultimate answer.
The oft quoted first point of the declaration of support of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement states: “We, the participants in the multi-party negotiations, believe that the agreement negotiated offers a truly historic opportunity for a new beginning.”
I am hardly the first to make the point, but even at 25 years, we should reflect that the Agreement was only ever the beginning. It provided the scaffolding, ugly or elegant, to make manifest a desire for peace which extended beyond combatants to all parties in Northern Ireland. We should not forget the role that atrocities, and in particular the subsequent Omagh bombing, played in forging the material for that scaffold. But while that shared will exists, the essence of the Agreement will remain.
While I am sure that it will be reformed, remoulded around the new Northern Ireland, I think also that it will endure through that reshaping. The idea that progress must be made in partnership has bent a great deal over the last 25 years, but it is yet to break. Much like the Agreement itself, people are resilient.
There is an optimism in that prediction, and perhaps an innocence or naivety immune to the unfortunate realities of the present in Northern Ireland. I would respond by saying that it is an innocence which was forged in the Agreement made 25 years ago. It is its lasting and perhaps best legacy. It is a legacy which should not be easily dismissed.
Dexter Govan.
Dexter Govan is Director of Research at the Constitution Society. He holds a doctorate in Irish and British history from the University of Edinburgh.
This blog is the fifth of five written for the Constitution Society to mark the 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.
[1] See for example: B. M. Seaver, ‘The regional sources of power-sharing failure: the case of Lebanon’, Political Science Quarterly CXV, 2 (Summer, 2000), pp 247-271 or Ulrich Schneckener, ‘Making power-sharing work: lessons from successes and failures in ethnic conflict regulation’, in Journal of Peace Research XXXIX, 2 (March, 2002), pp 203-228.