The fading spirit of the Good Friday Agreement
Twenty years on, fears of a new hard border in Ireland evoke its painful past, says Margaret Ward
Twenty years ago this weekend I drove through a British Army checkpoint above Newry with the sigh of relief I always breathed when I left Northern Ireland. But that afternoon I could dream that things would be different soon, that the soldier who checked my car boot would be recalled, that the ugly post would be taken down.
I was driving home from Belfast after producing RTE’s television coverage of the Good Friday Agreement. I had stood in the mud for days, eaten endless fish and chips, watched Ian Paisley march up the hill and back down again, and cried when the deal was done. Just over four months later I crossed back over, to lay TV cables in the rubble of the Omagh bombing. I learned you could never take anything for granted, least of all peace.
I had grown up crossing into Northern Ireland for sweets and petrol on visits to my grandmother in County Louth. As children we came back through Customs delighted with our “smuggled” Spangles, unobtainable in the South for some reason. We had crossed “the Border”, always capitalised on the page and in our minds. Fast forward a few years, and I remember looking into the eyes of a British soldier in the ditch, his face camouflaged with boot polish and his gun trained on our car, as scared of us as we were of him.
A short time ago my dad and I visited a 95-year-old relative, Kay McArdle, in Crossmaglen, once called “Bandit Country”. We took her across the border for lunch and back again without even noticing it. Twenty years after the agreement, the anniversary of which is on Tuesday, Crossmaglen has been transformed. Kay’s son Michael is an estate agent in the heart of the town. The family used to run the post office and a pub, which was bombed in the mid-Seventies: “It blew off the bar door. Several men were injured. I was only 16. You don’t forget that.”
Michael’s sister Marie taught in Newry – “You could be stopped five times by the Army to your way to work” – but by the time she left, the kids had no awareness of the conflict.
For my friend Liam Campbell, the agreement persuaded him to stay in Northern Ireland and raise his children there. He had worked as a Catholic priest in one of the toughest areas of Derry before leaving the priesthood and building a house in Tyrone with his wife in 1998.
“When we had our first baby, we went on holidays to the Highlands, and we saw the violence at the Orange Parade at Drumcree on the TV,” he says. “We seriously considered moving to Scotland. It was the agreement that helped us to make a go of it here.”
That baby, Sarah, is now 23 and has just graduated from Queen’s in Belfast. “I was three when it was signed, so I’ve never known any different,” she says. “I can’t believe it used to be like that
when my mum went to uni, when there were bombs all the time. Belfast to me was never a scary place.”
For Sarah’s father, the agreement was about far more than security. “It was a watershed. Afterwards, as a nationalist, you felt less like a second-class citizen. We were all going to work together.” Even today his voice catches a little. “There were tears. It had been pretty bad up to that.”
Sarah now works in the capital, along with several of her classmates. “We all integrated really well at Queen’s, and a
lot of people from Protestant and unionist backgrounds have come to Dublin, which probably wouldn’t have happened much before.”
The hills of Tyrone, home to sheep farms and wind turbines, didn’t get the worst of the violence, but it seeped into everyday life. Liam’s neighbour Leslie Craig, a Protestant, describes himself as a moderate unionist.
“I knew neighbours who were shot and bombed, and what I remember is the hopelessness of it all,” he says. “When would it end? Until the ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement there was no solution.”
Leslie’s son Matthew is 27 and can’t remember the Troubles at all. He has his hands full with real life. He’s just finished lambing, and he and wife Julie have a new baby, Anna. “The area is mainly Protestant, but there’s a chapel and a Gaelic pitch and people wouldn’t fall out,” he says. “Some might have a few prejudices in their heads, but when they’re with people their own age they all get along.”
Brexit is of more immediate concern. An agricultural mechanic, Matthew crosses the border, just eight miles away, every day. “The garage I work in is in the South,” he says. “For any business around here, Brexit, and particularly a hard border, will definitely affect them.”
Despite these concerns, the Good Friday generation seems confident about the future and can’t imagine that the agreement won’t survive. Their parents, who lived through the conflict, are less sanguine – pointing to the difficulties at Stormont, very aware of the particular way in which stars aligned, two decades ago.
“There’s a subtle push from extreme unionism to undermine the Good Friday Agreement. And Brexit is feeding into that,” says Liam Campbell. “Then from others there’s a creeping towards an all-Ireland agenda, which of course pushes unionists the other way.”
“There’s this complacency that it’ll all be all right,” says Leslie Craig. “But 20 years on we’re being let down by the politicians who are staying in their tribal niches instead of getting on with it. Not only are they not honouring the spirit of the agreement; they won’t even sit down and talk to each other.”
For many southerners, Northern Ireland has always been a place apart, but not in our family. My dad, who first brought me across the border, was in Dublin the day the Troubles spilt over and killed 33 people in 1974. Just this week I discovered he had been only 100 yards from a car bomb blast. Peace is very personal.
The last time I crossed the border, it had a small “b”. A whole generation has known nothing else. Let’s not go back to capital letters.
Margaret Ward is a former editor at RTE, Ireland’s public service broadcaster. She was RTE’s news producer for the Good Friday Agreement and the Omagh bombing.