Architects of Irish Good Friday Agreement warn on anniversary that peace is fragile and may unravel
The architects of the Good Friday Agreement marked the peace deal’s 20th anniversary with stark warnings that peace in Northern Ireland is at risk of unravelling.
Speaking at University College Dublin on the eve of the anniversary, former US president Bill Clinton led a chorus of concern.
“It is so easy to underestimate the fragility of the situation you have come to take for granted,” he said.
“The whole thing will fall apart and you will go back into the hell that now people have forgotten from the Troubles. Or, two, you can stay in purgatory, where you got denied dreams and broken hopes and you’ll just rock along, caught on a sea of lost chances. If you do that, slowly you will lose democracy in the North.
“Or three, everybody can rear back, settle down and make a new beginning.”
The power-sharing government in Stormont collapsed in January last year, when the two governing parties, the DUP and Sinn Fein, withdrew in a row over the status of Irish as an official language in Northern Ireland.
The former UK prime minister Tony Blair, who played a major role in the peace process, said he believed a solution to the current impasse was possible.
“I can’t believe it’s not possible to find a way round it,” he said. “You’ve just got to keep working until you find a way through.”
But former deputy first minister and SDLP leader Seamus Mallon said that the row had left the agreement “debased and almost Balkanised”.
Signed in 1998, the deal, also known as the Belfast Agreement, spelt out the foundations of Northern Ireland’s devolved government.
The early effects of Brexit have tested the agreement with leaders from across the spectrum warning that the reimposition of a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic could put the agreement in jeopardy.
“My only point is not going over the top and saying ‘if we do Brexit we’re going to scrap the Good Friday Agreement and there’s going to be a return to conflict’,” Mr Blair said.
“I’m simply saying that it’s going to post a big challenge.”
Another key figure in the agreement, former Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern, said that people would pull down any hard border between the republic and the north, and that Brexit was a disaster for Ireland.
“There never will be a border. There is not going to be a physical border across Ireland because if you tried to put it there you wouldn’t have to wait for terrorism to take it down, people would just physically pull it down – the ordinary people,” he said.
Five former secretaries of state for Northern Ireland, Shaun Woodward, Peter Mandelson, Peter Hain, John Reid and Paul Murphy, also warned against a hard border in a letter to The Times.
“We are concerned that the reintroduction of a hard border could threaten the very existence of the agreement,” the letter said.
Mr Clinton, who travelled to Belfast to receive the freedom of the city yesterday, emphasised the importance of compromise in finding a solution to the political deadlock.