The Good Friday Agreement

Twenty years ago the agreement reached in Belfast marked the end of Northern Ireland’s Troubles

How did the agreement come about?

It was the culmination of a peace process that had lasted for most of the 1990s. Peace talks arose out of a stalemate: the British security forces had accepted that they would not be able to defeat the IRA, and the IRA had reached the conclusion that it would not be able to create a united Ireland by force. Perhaps the most important stepping stone was the Downing Street Declaration of 1993, in which the British prime minister John Major and Albert Reynolds, taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, both accepted that it should be Northern Ireland, not London or Dublin, that decided its own future, and offered peace talks to any groups that renounced violence. An IRA ceasefire ensued on 31 August 1994; loyalist paramilitaries soon followed suit.

How did the negotiations proceed?

Slowly. Talks officially began in Belfast in June 1996 between the British and Irish governments, and Northern Ireland’s political parties, chaired by the former US senator George Mitchell. Sinn Féin had been excluded after the IRA exploded a bomb in London’s Docklands in February 1996, but was later included again. The largest unionist party, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), led by David Trimble, refused to talk directly to Sinn Féin, the IRA’S political wing; Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) walked out in protest at the latter’s involvement. Frustrated, Mitchell set a deadline: midnight on Thursday 9 April 1998, before the Easter holidays. But on 7 April, the UUP rejected a deal. This prompted the British PM, Tony Blair, and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, to fly in: Blair declared that he felt “the hand of history upon our shoulders”. Yet talks continued through Thursday night and into Good Friday, 10 April (see box). At 5.26pm, Mitchell declared that agreement had been reached.

What was actually agreed?

The Good Friday Agreement was, in the words of the historian Roy Foster, a “powerful endorsement of reality” by all the parties concerned. They jointly accepted that Northern Ireland was part of the UK, and would remain so until a majority in both the North and the Republic chose otherwise. Ireland gave up its claim – embedded in its constitution – to the six counties of the North. For its part, Britain accepted that if Northern Ireland chose to join the Republic, it had a “binding obligation” to implement that choice. Politicians on both sides of the North’s sectarian divide committed to working together in a power-sharing government, affirming that they would use “exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving differences”.

How was power-sharing to work?

Northern Ireland was given a devolved government with wide powers, drawn from a 108-strong elected legislative assembly. The power-sharing model was based on the principle of “parallel consent”: all major decisions needed to be backed by both unionists and nationalists. To this end, all members of the assembly were to designate themselves as “nationalist”, “unionist” or “other”; the first minister had to be from one side and the deputy first minister the other. Senior positions in the executive were to be shared between the two communities.

What else was decided?

The agreement made Northern Ireland somewhat “bi-national”. Its citizens could take British or Irish nationality, or both. Cross-border institutions promoted cooperation in areas such as trade, fisheries and agriculture. More controversially, both Britain and Ireland undertook to release paramilitary prisoners early, as long as their groups were committed to the ceasefire. Participants were required “to use any influence they may have” to achieve the decommissioning of terrorist arms within two years – a provision felt to be weak by many unionists. The British government also agreed to reduce its military presence and to remove border security installations “as early as possible”, and to set up an independent commission into the future of the police in Northern Ireland, which had long been dominated by Protestants.

What did the Good Friday Agreement achieve?

Referendums were held jointly in Northern Ireland and the Republic on 22 May, and the agreement was approved by clear margins of 71% and 94% respectively (although in the North, 96% of Catholics and only 52% of Protestants approved; the DUP campaigned against it). David Trimble and John Hume, leader of the SDLP, the largest nationalist party, won the Nobel Peace Prize. The agreement marked a decisive end to the Troubles, which had killed more than 3,600 people; the abhorrence that greeted later violence, such as the Omagh bombing in August 1998 by the Real IRA splinter group, only spurred on the peace process. The IRA ceasefire remained in place from 1997 and decommissioning, though a knotty issue, was completed by 2005.

In what ways has the agreement been unsuccessful?

It has had some unintended consequences. The two Northern Irish parties that did most to bring it about have suffered most as a result of it: the UUP was displaced by the DUP as the largest unionist party amid anger about the release of terrorists and the pace of decommissioning, while among nationalist voters, the SDLP has also been outstripped by its more extreme rival, Sinn Féin. Parallel consent has also enshrined sectarianism in every aspect of the political process, with the result that power-sharing has proved highly dysfunctional. The assembly has been suspended four times since 1998 and the executive has collapsed on numerous occasions. The last executive fell apart in January 2017, and the DUP and Sinn Féin have since proved unable to reach a new deal. The Good Friday Agreement brought peace, but not stable government, to Northern Ireland.