More than 20 miles of walls and fences still separate the Unionist and Nationalist communities in Northern Ireland. Most are in Belfast. They are called, ironically, “peace lines” – yet they remain a grim reminder of the reality that lurks just below the surface. Sectarian strife is never far away – as the latest warnings of possible dissident IRA attacks illustrate.
The peace lines have actually increased, in height and number, since 1998, with about 60 now in place. The most prominent, emblazoned with graffiti, can be viewed from an open-top bus or by black cab on so-called “terrorist tours”, conducted around some of the more notorious parts of west and north Belfast. Visitors who come in their droves to what is now a largely thriving, vibrant city are often flabbergasted to discover that the people who live there are separated by walls and gates that are closed at night.
Whether Joe Biden will be taken to see these walls when the US president arrives to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement on Tuesday is unclear; but it might concentrate his mind on the precarious nature of the process, and why what may seem to be innocuous matters to people living overseas still resonate in the province.
The Anglo-Irish poet W B Yeats wrote in The Lake Isle of Innisfree that “peace comes dropping slow”. Nowhere is that more true than in Ireland, where the process leading to the Good Friday Agreement 25 years ago was long, frustrating and punctuated by violence.
I am Northern Irish; I was born in Belfast, and while I have lived most of my life in England, I’ve always seen Northern Ireland as my homeland. We would visit family in the summer; and so it was in August 1969, I was in Belfast in the early days of the Troubles, just as I would witness their ending almost 30 years and 3,500 deaths later.
On the day the British Army was sent into the province to protect Catholic families being burned out of their homes and restore order, I stood on the Ormeau Road with my grandfather watching the troop carriers heading towards the city centre. Going in the other direction over the River Lagan was a long line of buses being taken out of circulation to stop them being used as barricades.
Bringing together the representatives of two communities riven by sectarian enmity, distrustful of each other and spared a civil war only by the intervention of the British Army in that fateful summer of 1969 would prove to be a protracted and tortuous affair.
From 1972, the Provisional IRA had embarked on a campaign of mayhem aimed at driving the British from Northern Ireland – previously a self-governing province – by force, eschewing the democratic avenues open to them.
Given there was a majority in favour of remaining part of the UK this was never a fight the terror group could win. Equally, however, it had the wherewithal to continue causing death and misery – matched by the armed Loyalist groups intent on defending their own community. In particular, whenever the IRA targeted the mainland, it found a potential vulnerability in the British resolve to stand firm. While bloodshed in Ulster could be absorbed politically and economically, attacks in Britain were a different matter.
Some of the most important political initiatives were arguably a response to such incidents. The 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement, which gave Dublin a say for the first time in the governance of the province, followed the Brighton bomb the previous year. That explosion killed five people, targeted the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and showed the IRA was capable of striking at the heart of the British establishment. As a political correspondent at the time, I was in Brighton when the bomb went off – a bit too close for comfort.
In November of the following year, Margaret Thatcher and Garret Fitzgerald, the Irish prime minister, signed a treaty involving the Republic in the affairs of the province directly for the first time, albeit in an advisory capacity. Unionists were outraged and every MP resigned their seat to trigger by-elections across the province.
A protest rally at Belfast City Hall attracted hundreds of thousands of people, addressed by, among others, the Rev Ian Paisley, whose “never, never, never” response was the authentic Unionist repudiation of anything that smacked of outside involvement in Ulster’s affairs.
It remains a powerful psychological trope to this day – and can be seen once more in the unwillingness of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to accept the Northern Ireland protocol because of the continuing role played by the EU and its Court of Justice.
The IRA’s mainland bombing campaign expanded rapidly in the 1980s as its ability to make and deliver bombs grew. As we the Grand Hotel in Brighton, the Old Bailey, Harrods, Hyde Park and Regent’s Park were all targeted, causing death and devastation.
These were mainly singled out because of their association with the judiciary or the Army. When the IRA turned its sights on economic targets in London and other mainland cities the wider implications were stark.
The Baltic Exchange bomb of 1992, the day after the general election that returned John Major to power, was a pivotal moment. The one-ton device was concealed in a large white truck and its detonation caused the biggest explosion on mainland Britain since the Second World War.
The atrocity killed three people and injured 91 others. Damage to the Baltic Exchange and nearby buildings was extensive. The following year, another massive bomb in Bishopsgate destroyed historic churches and wrecked Liverpool St station.
This was in the heart of the City, and its potential to drive away the banks and institutions that were turning London into a world-leading financial centre was clear to anyone who witnessed the aftermath. Devastating bombings in Manchester and then again in London at Canary Wharf in 1996 sped up the search for a settlement and belied the oft-quoted maxim that terrorism doesn’t pay.
But it is possible to trace the genesis of the Good Friday Agreement to some of the worst few weeks in the province’s bloody history, in March 1988. They started 1,200 miles away in Gibraltar, where three suspected IRA bombers were shot dead by an SAS unit that had tracked them through Spain and feared they were preparing to attack the military base on the Rock.
A week or so later, funerals for the dead terrorists were held at Milltown Cemetery in Belfast where mourners were attacked by a Loyalist gunman, Michael Stone. A funeral procession for one of his victims a few days later, saw two Army corporals accidentally drive into the cortège, whereupon they were dragged from their car and murdered in a nearby park.
It was one of the most harrowing incidents of the Troubles and was witnessed by millions watching on television. A photograph of one of the dead soldiers showed him being administered the last rites by Fr Alec Reid, a priest who was acting as a secret go-between for John Hume, leader of the Nationalist SDLP and Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein president. At the time of the murder Reid was carrying a letter outlining suggestions from Adams for a political solution.
This would not have been a solution acceptable to Unionists or to the British government but it was, nevertheless, the first indication that the IRA through its political mouthpiece was open to talks. Behind the scenes an informal, if sporadic, back-channel had been operating between the British government and the IRA through Michael Oatley, an MI6 officer known to the Republicans as Mountain Climber.
Thatcher, who in 1981 had resisted the IRA hunger strikers seeking political status in prison, was not considered a likely facilitator of talks with the Provisionals; but in 1990, not long before leaving office, she gave her personal approval to secret talks between government officials and the IRA leadership.
Peter Brooke, then Northern Ireland secretary, delivered a speech containing the gnomic statement that the British government had no “selfish economic or strategic interest” in the province. This was seen as an important shift of British policy away from upholding Northern Ireland’s position in the United Kingdom to a position of neutrality, though it was really nothing of the sort.
John Major, who succeeded Thatcher just a few weeks after that speech, kept the process going. The Unionists were deeply suspicious of what was going on and it fed into their long-held view that they would always be betrayed by the British government, and especially a Conservative one.
The bombing of the City of London gave fresh urgency to the need for a solution and culminated in the publication in 1993 of the Downing Street declaration. This affirmed both the right of the people of Ireland to self-determination and the creation of a united Ireland only if a majority of its population was in favour.
The document enshrined the principle of consent for the people on the island of Ireland and pledged the governments to find a constitutional settlement in which all parties would participate if they abandoned violence. This three-stranded approach – a North-South, East-West and internal political dimension was the template for the Good Friday Agreement five years later. It persuaded the IRA to announce a ceasefire in Aug 1994 which the Loyalist paramilitaries emulated.
But it was not over. The ceasefire ended with bombs in Manchester and Canary Wharf in 1996 and then a hiatus while everyone waited for the inevitable change of government. Tony Blair’s arrival in Downing Street with a huge parliamentary majority gave renewed momentum to the process but, crucially, within a newly configured UK. Blair was committed to devolution in Scotland and Wales and insisted that Northern Ireland should be part of the same constitutional structure.
Sinn Fein had been waiting for the new government to take office before re-committing to the process, imagining Labour would be more amenable to their demands. There was a surge of energy when New Labour took office, but for a while a deal looked unlikely, despite all the efforts, including those of Washington.
But in unseasonably chilly weather in April 1998, over three fraught and exhausting days of negotiations in the unprepossessing Castle Buildings next to Stormont, the agreement was thrashed out.
Everyone had moved. The Unionists were still suspicious of what the price of peace would entail; the Nationalists saw the Dublin government renounce its historic claim to the six counties. But they were going to have to work together in government.
David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionists and a future Nobel Peace Prize winner, signed up because he wanted to draw a line under the endless cycle of defeats for Unionism which left them weaker each time. The agreement gave the Unionists an absolute guarantee, recognised in a treaty by London and Dublin, that Northern Ireland was an integral part of the UK until such time as the people of the province decided otherwise.
The IRA was weary of a potential conflict without end but remained unwilling to give up its guns, which took another process and a further eight years to achieve. Only then would the DUP and Ian Paisley sit at the table.
The upshot was that the two moderate parties were pushed aside and supplanted by the extremes, the DUP and Sinn Fein. The spectacle of Paisley and Martin McGuinness, the terrorist godfather, sitting together in such governmental harmony that they were nicknamed the “chuckle brothers” was truly remarkable. Even more so was when McGuinness attended a banquet at Windsor Castle hosted by Queen Elizabeth II.
How, then, does the agreement look 25 years on? Paisley and McGuinness are now dead and the devolved power-sharing government over which they presided is suspended. The DUP walked out in protest at the implications of the Northern Ireland protocol on its relations with the rest of the UK. They are accused of obduracy – and yet the East-West strand was an integral part of the Good Friday Argument that everyone in Dublin, Brussels and Washington say they want to preserve. The border down the Irish Sea was too easily created despite Boris Johnson’s insistence it would not be.
The protocol has been renegotiated into the Windsor Framework but the DUP doesn’t like it because it still gives the European Court a residual say over Northern Ireland’s trade affairs because it remains in the single market for goods.
How long can they keep up their opposition? Sinn Fein, now the biggest party in the province, collapsed the Stormont institutions for three years without anyone saying the future of the Good Friday Agreement was at stake. But the DUP has a problem – middle-class voters are switching to the non-aligned Alliance party while traditional unionists are squeezing from the other direction.
The DUP is expected to fare badly in next month’s elections and it suffered a defeat of historic proportions in the Commons recently when the Windsor Framework was endorsed by 515 to 29. Seasoned observers feel the party missed a chance to hail Rishi Sunak’s renegotiation as a triumph for Unionism and to reinstate the executive. The DUP is now likely to return sometime in the autumn looking only as if they have been forced into doing so.
There is also a democratic deficit that has yet to be resolved, which is how to accommodate a non-sectarian party like the Alliance in government and end the ability of one party to bring down the executive. Getting any movement on this when Stormont isn’t even sitting is impossible and there will need to be a lengthy period of steady government before the Good Friday Agreement can be revisited.
The former Northern Ireland Secretary, Brandon Lewis, wrote in this newspaper recently that the agreement was “a poor foundation for effective government.” If the Alliance Party’s vote share continues to grow, it will never have the right to nominate the First or Deputy First Minister under the rules. “Democracy cannot succeed when it is set in tram lines that can never cross,” he added.
Tony Blair may have signed the agreement along with Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach, but its midwives were many and often unsung. Sir John Major, above all, deserves credit for doggedly persisting with a process that offered little in the way of political advantage for the Tories. However, as the British prime minister, the threat of mainland attacks had to be ended; and a political settlement was the only feasible route. David Trimble and John Hume sacrificed much to bring the Good Friday Agreement about only to see their parties destroyed as a result.
Sinn Fein has done well out of it, becoming the largest party in Northern Ireland and in the Republic, fuelling the idea that a united Ireland is a realistic possibility. That would require a border poll, in which British political leaders would campaign in any referendum to keep Northern Ireland in the UK: Sir Keir Starmer has already made his commitment clear.
Whatever Sinn Fein would have us believe, that is a long way off. The main task of the political parties now is to revive Northern Irish devolution and demonstrate that they can still govern the province on a power-sharing basis.
The Good Friday Agreement has its undoubted flaws but in its fundamental endeavour – an end to years of bloodshed and mayhem – it secured what its architects sought: relative peace and stability in the province and a halt to terrorist bombings on the mainland.
For all that strife still bubbles, the walls still remain and inter-community suspicions may take generations to diminish, that was quite an achievement.
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A quarter of a century on, how lasting is the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement? - The Telegraph
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