The Belfast Agreement achieved its aim, stopped the killing and created a better future

Most of all, I remember the hope.

On Good Friday, 1998, I watched the portable television set in the corner of our Co Derry kitchen announce there was peace.

A deal had been done; on the screen Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern delivered the good news, hands waved copies of the agreement and tired politicians – mainly men, but a few women – spoke of everything this place and its people had come through, what had been achieved, and all the hard work that lay ahead.

Still at school and studying for my A-level exams, I was more interested in bands and boys than politics and peace agreements, yet I needed no newsreader to tell me how important this moment was.

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I am of the generation summed up so brilliantly by the Channel 4 comedy Derry Girls, written by Lisa McGee. The Troubles was all around us, in the checkpoints, in the bomb scares and in the roll call of the dead on the nightly news, but – we thought – did not directly affect us. Life went on as normal – mostly.

In recent weeks and months, prompted by the approaching 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, I have found myself sharing memories – in some instances for the first time – with friends of that same generation.

Their memories of eating dinner to the sound of explosions as bombs went off in the town centre.

Their memories of feeling afraid to walk down the Cliftonville Road, part of Belfast’s “Murder Mile”, even in broad daylight.

My memory of waking in the morning to find out my family’s bookshop in Coleraine had been destroyed in an explosion.

I remember my mum coming into my bedroom to tell me and, at 11 years old, feeling not shock or surprise, but that this was inevitable, that it had been bound to happen, because that was what happened here. Shops got blown up.

At 17 I was too young to vote in the referendum on the agreement in May 1998 that marks the end of Derry Girls, but when I watch that final episode, I see the hope I remember.

It wasn’t just that there would be an end to violence. It was that my generation had a chance, one that the previous generation had not had; the chance of a future that would be different from what had gone before, where children did not grow up so accustomed to bombs they thought it normal, and one in which we would have the opportunities conflict had denied to so many.

Broadly speaking, this has come to pass. Any assessment of the Belfast Agreement must take as its starting point the absence of violence, and though there are many exceptions – including the Omagh bomb later that year, the killing of two police officers and two prison officers, the murder of Lyra McKee in 2019 and the attempted murder of policeman John Caldwell in February, all by dissident republicans – which act as dark reminders of the Troubles, this is no longer our daily reality.

That bible of the Troubles, Lost Lives – a chronicle of those killed written by five journalists: David McKittrick, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton, David McVea and Seamus Kelters – recorded 57 Troubles deaths in 1998; in the 12 months to March 2023, according to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), there was one death, as the police terminology goes, “due to the security situation”.

There are people alive today who would not be without the agreement. At the most fundamental level, it achieved its aim. It stopped the killing.

Rereading the text of the agreement now, 25 years on, the sense of hope is palpable. Its first paragraphs speak of how the agreement “offers a truly historic opportunity for a new beginning” and “a fresh start, in which we firmly dedicate ourselves to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance and mutual trust, and to the protection and vindication of human rights for all”.

A transformed society

The agreement was about stopping the killing, but it was also about building something new. For the first time you could be British or Irish or both in Northern Ireland; nationalist as well as unionist could make a home here where their identity would be respected, and where they and their children could have a future.

The agreement’s particular magic was to settle the constitutional question, depending on how you looked at it; for unionists, Ireland had given up Articles 2 and 3 and there was the reassurance that Northern Ireland’s position as part of the UK would not be changed without a referendum; for nationalists, the British government had made clear they wouldn’t stand in the way of a democratic route to a united Ireland.

Though at the time it felt slow and tortuous, much changed quickly, not least the physical look of Northern Ireland as it transformed from a militarised society into a peacetime one.

Policing was reformed – the RUC was replaced by the PSNI – paramilitary weapons were eventually decommissioned, and the British army’s active deployment in Northern Ireland, which had begun in 1969, came to an end in 2007.

A devolved Assembly was set up at Stormont in which unionists and nationalists would govern by sharing power with each other, as set out in the agreement; alongside this, strands two and three provided for cross-Border co-operation, in the form of the North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC), and east-west relations, as part of the British-Irish Council (BIC).

This was the theory. In practice, the political institutions have failed to function for 40 per cent of that time – with all the consequences sustained lack of government brings – and the operation of the NSMC and BIC has been similarly intermittent.

There was so much hope, yet it feels now as if it was allowed to slip through our collective fingers. It is a poor testament that this weekend the North will mark the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Belfast Agreement without an Assembly or Executive.

For all the hope of 1998, that peace dividend has not been felt evenly, and many feel they have been left behind

This most recent crisis has been down to the DUP, which continues to block the formation of the power-sharing government as part of its protest against the Northern Ireland protocol; the previous collapse, in 2017, was triggered when the then deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, resigned his post.

This can happen because the rules allow it, because the structures of the agreement mean nationalists cannot govern without unionists, and vice versa, hence the argument now from Alliance and the SDLP for reform of the agreement to remove the power of veto from a single party. This move could break the political impasse by allowing the institutions to be reconstituted without the DUP.

There was good reason – the protection of minorities – for this arrangement, and this remains valid today, but what is also clear is that this is not the Northern Ireland of 25 years ago, not least because society itself has changed.

In 1998 the agreement was written on the basis that there were two communities, that people were either unionist or nationalist – which, in the crude sectarian assumptions of Northern Ireland, is often equated to Protestant or Catholic.

Reform of the agreement

The 2021 census showed not only that for the first time in the North’s history, Catholics outnumbered Protestants – though neither denomination has a majority – but that approximately 17 per cent consider themselves to have no religion at all.

It is also – slowly – becoming more diverse; 3.4 per cent of people in Northern Ireland were recorded in the census as belonging to an ethnic minority group, four times the figure in 2001 and, for the first time , sexual orientation was recorded, with 2.1 per cent identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or other.

In last year’s election parties – predominantly Alliance – which instead designate themselves as “other” polled 16.5 per cent of the first-preference vote.

Reform of the agreement – an argument put forward by that party – therefore seems reasonable to reflect this new reality, that in today’s Northern Ireland, an increasing number of people either do not fit the traditional markers of identity or choose not to define themselves in such terms.

Yet, for all that, religious segregation and sectarianism remain embedded in Northern society.

About 7 per cent of pupils are educated in integrated schools and the vast majority of social housing is divided along religious lines. More than 100 so-called peace walls – barriers dividing one community from the other, often in areas of social deprivation – still exist.

In a 2019 report on sectarianism in Northern Ireland, Prof Duncan Morrow of Ulster University reached the stark conclusion that “we now have to ask if the capability exists to provide solutions to these problems or whether we must simply hope that with the passage of time they will somehow just go away”.

Twenty-five years on from the agreement, this could be applied to any number of intractable problems in Northern Ireland; it is the question with which we must all grapple, not least our political leaders. To put it another way, the agreement achieved peace but it has not led to reconciliation. For all the hope of 1998, that peace dividend has not been felt evenly, and many feel they have been left behind.

Economically, earnings remain lower than the rest of the UK, while areas of endemic poverty – and their susceptibility to paramilitary violence – stubbornly persist. It remains as true as it was 25 years ago that the majority of those who leave Northern Ireland to go to university never come back.

In recent years new problems have been added, not least the crisis in the North’s health service – as demonstrated by spiralling waiting lists – and the scars left by what is now termed the “legacy” of the Troubles, a concept unheard of in 1998, and repeated failures to address it properly.

The lesson of the Belfast Agreement – and surely the lesson for the next 25 years – is that, if we want to change things, compromise is all we have

Above all, there is Brexit, that cataclysmic shock which, in Northern Ireland, reawakened old divisions by creating a new fault line between unionist and nationalist over EU membership and, subsequently, over the Northern Ireland protocol.

Under its unforeseen influence, intercommunity tensions have worsened and positions become more polarised. Unionism feels its identity threatened, not just by what it perceives as the protocol’s undermining of its constitutional position within the UK, but by the prospect of a Border poll and Irish unity.

Brexit reawakened the previously settled question of the Border; the conversation around constitutional change is now happening as it has never done before, in a broad, sustained way that will continue.

Within unionism, that sense of crisis has been exacerbated by the loss of its position of political privilege in the North. This culminated in last year’s Assembly election in which Sinn Féin replaced the DUP as the largest party and – though she cannot take office because of the stalemate – a nationalist, Michelle O’Neill, as First Minister for the first time in the North’s history.

Spirit of compromise

All this has challenged that constitutional magic achieved by the agreement, as does the prolonged political limbo that makes it harder to argue the political institutions are working. Ultimately, it will only increase the arguments of those who call for an alternative, be it the ending of partition or the return of direct rule, though – the result of the agreement – this would have to include an Irish dimension.

In 1998 the hope of the agreement came from compromise, from politicians who had the vision to see a better future and the conviction to see it through.

Today we feel a long way from that spirit of compromise, from the sort of vision that could agree a fresh start on the basis of “reconciliation, tolerance and mutual trust”. Yet the lesson of the agreement – and surely the lesson for the next 25 years – is that, if we want to change things, compromise is all we have.

[ ‘Northern Ireland has moved on’ - Fintan O’Toole on the Good Friday Agreement at 25 ]

[ The Good Friday generation believe it’s time to move on ]

And, for all the imperfections of our peace, it is still peace. We have come a long way since 1998.

Last year I stood at a police cordon in north Belfast after the then minister for foreign affairs, Simon Coveney, had been rushed from the podium due to a hoax bomb alert. He had been delivering a speech on behalf of, of all organisations, the John and Pat Hume Foundation.

Those of my generation and older were largely unfazed; while there was widespread disgust at the pointlessness of the act, there were also reminiscences of the necessity, learned during the Troubles, of getting your car away before the cordon went up so it wouldn’t be stuck inside it all day or, worse still, be blown up in a controlled explosion.

But those who were younger were different. They were shocked, worried, fearful, because they had no experience of this. For them, being rushed from a hall because there might be a bomb outside was not normal but abnormal – which is as it should be.

When I talk to friends about how things have changed, we all say how different it is. In 1998 this was our hope; now, 25 years on, children do not know what a bomb at the end of their street sounds like, or how to remove shards of glass from the pages of a book after an explosion.

They can walk down the Cliftonville Road unafraid.