Unfinished business in Northern Ireland
A gala dinner in Belfast on Wednesday hosted by Rishi Sunak marked the culmination of a “mammoth series of events” marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, says the BBC.
In a speech to close a threeday conference at Queen’s University earlier in the day, Sunak hailed the deal as “one of the most extraordinary achievements of our lifetimes”. Although there was no “explicit mention” of Stormont or the Democratic Unionist Party, the prime minister’s words about fulfilling the “true promise” of the agreement will be seen as an echo of the government’s “call for power-sharing to be re-established”, says Amy Gibbons in The Telegraph.
The agreement, may be “revered as Holy Scripture”, says Daniel Hannan on Conservative Home, but let’s “not pretend” that it was the “best we could have done”. Although Northern Ireland is unarguably “incomparably happier” than it was during the Troubles, it “does not follow that it was the only, or the best, mechanism for government”. It has been tweaked over the years, but we are still “left with the spectacle of two big parties propping each other up, like exhausted boxers in a clinch, each supposedly pummelling the other, but both quietly content with a system that keeps the perks flowing”.
We should take the week’s “carnival of triumphalism” with several spoons of salt, agrees Paul Goodman on the same site. The deal isn’t necessarily a model for defeating terror elsewhere, it hasn’t normalised politics (the “mechanics remain those of forced coalition, the politics that of tribal sectarianism”) and the executive hasn’t sat in recent years, “leaving a democratic deficit”. However, post-Brexit, “the combined effect of the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Agreement” is to leave Northern Ireland in a unique, and potentially prosperous, place.