Northern Ireland peacemakers urge end to political impasse

BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND >> An American architect of Northern Ireland's historic 1998 peace accord on Monday urged its feuding politicians to revive the mothballed Belfast government, as a current political crisis clouded celebration of the peacemaking milestone.

Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell told a conference to mark a quarter century since the Good Friday Agreement that Northern Ireland's leaders must “act with courage and vision as their predecessors did 25 years ago,” when bitter enemies forged an unlikely peace.

Mitchell, the U.S. special envoy who chaired two arduous years of negotiations that led to the accord, joined ex-President Bill Clinton and political leaders from the U.K., Ireland and Northern Ireland at Queen's University Belfast to mark 25 years since the agreement largely ended three decades of sectarian bloodshed — a moment, Mitchell said, “when history opened itself to hope.”

“The people of Northern Ireland continue to wrestle with their doubts, their differences, their disagreements,” said Mitchell, who is now 89 and being treated for leukemia. But, he added: “The people of Northern Ireland don't want to return to violence — not now and not ever.”

“The war is over,” agreed Gerry Adams, former leader of Sinn Fein, the party linked during the conflict to the Irish Republican Army, which killed around 1,800 people. “The conflict's finished.”

The Good Friday Agreement has been held up around the world as proof that bitter enemies can make peace. It committed armed groups to stop fighting and set up a Northern Ireland legislature and government with power shared between unionist and nationalist parties.

Northern Ireland has changed dramatically since then. A young peacetime generation is increasingly shedding the rival identities — British unionist and Irish nationalist — that erupted into three decades of bloodshed that killed 3,600 people. But at the same time, Northern Ireland is locked in a political crisis that threatens to rattle the peace secured by the Good Friday Agreement. And violence hasn't disappeared completely. In February, IRA dissidents opposed to the peace process shot and wounded a senior police officer.

“You've got a transformed society in which (the labels) unionist, nationalist for many young people doesn't mean anything,” said Katy Hayward, professor of political sociology at Queen's University Belfast, the conference venue. “But on the other hand, society is in a state of quite severe disrepair. We haven't had a functioning Assembly for four out of the last six years, and our public services are crumbling around our ears.”

Increasing numbers of people wonder whether the accord that created peace is still capable of sustaining it. Northern Ireland's 1.9 million people have been without a functioning government since the main unionist party walked out more than a year ago to protest post-Brexit trade rules that — like so much in Northern Ireland — roiled notions of history and identity.

Participants at the conference — gently or pointedly — urged the Democratic Unionist Party to return to the power-sharing government.