Spirit of Good Friday deal is at the mercy of extremists
The 1998 Belfast Agreement can only be restored by remembering what made it work in the first place, says Eilis O’Hanlon
IT’S a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. What happened to the spirit of 1998 that forged the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland? That’s what everyone is asking as next week’s 20th anniversary of the signing of the historic peace agreement nears.
On Tuesday, dignitaries including Bertie Ahern, former US President Bill Clinton, Senator George Mitchell, and Downing Street negotiator Jonathan Powell, will gather at Queen’s University in Belfast to mark the exact date of the signing — April 10.
The anniversary ought to be a moment of celebration for an agreement which has become the blueprint for peace deals around the world, from Sudan to South Africa. Instead the mood is sombre. Stormont is suspended, and unlikely to be revived any time soon. Trust between unionists and nationalists is at its lowest ebb for years. Power sharing has been put into deep freeze.
Clinton’s hope is that the anniversary “gives us all the opportunity to recommit” to the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement. He always was one for a snappy soundbite.
The truth, though, is much simpler. The spirit of the GFA is alive and well. It hasn’t dimmed at all. The search parties are simply looking for it in the wrong places. Those who made peace in 1998 still have the will and desire to make historic accommodations.
The problem is that they’re not in charge any more. The process has been passed to wreckers and extremists.
The Belfast Agreement was the achievement, firstly, of two governments who were determined to make it work. Relations between Dublin and London have soured somewhat in recent months, largely because of Brexit. Foreign Minister Simon Coveney’s short-sighted determination to row in behind Sinn Fein can partly be put down to irritation with the UK’s indifference to the difficulties which Brexit will cause to Ireland, not just along the Border, but in terms of trade nation-wide. Ireland did not ask for or want Brexit, but is getting it all the same.
A certain sourness is inevitable, but the two governments would still be able to put another deal together if required to do so. The same goes for the SDLP and Ulster Unionists. The parties’ leaders back then, John Hume and David, now Lord, Trimble, jointly won the Nobel Prize for their efforts, and the latter went on to be Northern Ireland’s first First Minister, with the SDLP’s Seamus Mallon as deputy First Minister.
The relationship was not without its tensions, mainly around decommissioning and continued paramilitary activity by the Provisional IRA, delaying the establishment of a devolved government by nearly two years; and even afterwards there were stand-offs over Orange Order marches.
There were three suspensions before direct rule was reimposed in 2002, but had the SDLP and Ulster Unionists remained as the largest parties in the years since, Northern Ireland would undoubtedly be in a much better place.
Instead they were quickly swept aside after 1998 by Sinn Fein and the DUP, partly because of the nature of the power sharing institutions established by the GFA, which rewarded the solidification of electoral politics into sectarian blocs. The agreement was signed in 1998. In the first assembly election that same year, the contest was dominated by the SDLP and UUP, who together won 52 of the 108 seats. It only took until the 2001 Westminster election for the effect of polarisation to be seen. Both parties made huge gains at the expense of their rivals. By 2003, Sinn Fein had overtaken the SDLP.
The gap has only grown greater in every subsequent election. The DUP and UUP similarly swapped places.
It meant that, shortly after the signing of the Belfast Agreement, progress was left in the care of two parties, one of whom had to be on the verge of humiliating defeat before coming to the negotiating table, and the other of which had actually walked out of the talks in protest and subsequently campaigned against the Agreement when it was put to the people.
No need to bother Sherlock Holmes with this one. There’s no great mystery why there is no consensus now. It’s because peace has been put in the hands of those whose natural instinct pushes them to be intransigent. Left to their own devices in 1998, the Agreement would also have failed to get across the line.
The DUP and SF did eventually manage to get an Assembly up and running, under the so-called “Chuckle Brothers”, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, but it couldn’t last, containing as it did the seeds of its own destruction right at the heart of government. Give extremists a veto, and this is inevitably what will happen. Indeed, those who demonised David Trimble throughout the 1990s should ask themselves now whether that was such a great strategy.
The UUP leader was willing to put his name to the Agreement despite immediately losing six of his 10 MPs at Westminster. What did Ian Paisley ever do for peace except decide in old age that he would give up his hateful rabble-rousing as long as he got to be First Minister?
Paisley was lionised on his death. A weird revisionism made him out to be some cuddly figure of fun when he’d been a wholly destructive force most of his life. The last few years of mellowness in no way made up for it.
The only question worth asking on the 20th anniversary is not how to deepen the rot by continuing to pander to extremists, but how to strengthen the middle ground, which has been decimated in the two decades since.
Far from doing so, centrist parties including the SDLP, Ulster Unionists and Alliance, have been expressly excluded from recent talks. They wanted to be there. They forcefully expressed their right to be at the table. Those demands were ignored. Recreating the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement could start there, by recreating the conditions which actually led to a deal.
The talks in 1998 were multi-party, and involved not only the UUP, SDLP and Alliance, but also the Women’s Coalition, Progressive Unionist Party, Ulster Democratic Party, and Labour. This is the spirit which has been lost, replaced by an endless round of bilateral bickering between Sinn Fein and the DUP, into which the two governments are dragged as intermediaries.
And they still wonder why it hasn’t produced some magical outcome? Einstein’s famous aphorism that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result comes to mind.
The centre can only hold if it is empowered rather than marginalised. That was the real spirit of the Agreement.
It will be said many times in the coming week that the good people of Northern Ireland who voted overwhelmingly for a new beginning 20 years ago have been let down by the politicians, but it could equally be said that voters have let down decent politicians by shoving them aside in favour of more glamorous extremists who promise plenty but consistently, predictably deliver less. The good people of the North must take their share of the blame for that.
In last year’s Westminster election, the DUP and SF between them took all but one of the seats. The SDLP was left with no seats for the first time since its formation.
Together, SF and the DUP have now grabbed more than 65pc of the vote, up from 35pc back in 1998. It’s impossible to understand the stagnant despair which has entered the political process without staring those figures starkly in the face.
Both sides look aghast at each other’s electorates. Unionists can’t understand how nationalists can vote in such numbers for a party which still lauds terrorism. Nationalists can’t understand how unionists can vote for a party which is still a slave in many ways to triumphalist bigotry. Each grows steadily stronger in reaction to the other.
If we genuinely want to recreate the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement on its 20th anniversary, it must mean getting back to doing what worked then, not what has failed to work ever since.
‘The centre can only hold if empowered rather than marginalised’