Séamas O’Reilly: ‘It was hard to look at Derry and feel like the agreement’s full potential was being realised’

I was in school when the Belfast Agreement was signed. Well, not literally. I was off, because it was the Easter holidays. I was a schoolboy, however, midway through my first year of secondary education at St Columb’s in Derry. The time since has seen my homeland enjoy a period of relative peace, and for all the many and storied problems with our political situation since that date, it has been largely free of the constant violence which pervaded Northern Ireland for the three decades beforehand.

My memories of the day itself are hazy. We probably went to a church service, did the stations of the cross, and almost certainly had fish for dinner, since my father lived in constant fear that merely having 11 children wasn’t a good enough signifier of us being Catholics. He was also, however, a deeply committed advocate of peaceful co-operation and cross-community outreach, and was undeniably eager for the success of the tense negotiations we’d heard about on the news which he listened to every minute he wasn’t working. For 30 years, high hopes and dashed prospects had washed over him in waves, so it would be wrong to suggest he believed that success was probable, but the coverage leading up to Good Friday had energised, even within cynics, even within children, a sense that something more real, more permanent was in process.

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I was mostly aware of what was going on because of the non-stop discussion of it on BBC Radio Foyle and the nightly news, not to mention the ads which played at regular intervals on TV. One, in particular, became so deeply seared into the cultural fabric of that time and place, it’s arguably my strongest memory from the period. Released by the Northern Ireland Office in 1995, it depicted two boys taking in a day of harmonious rapport on a beach, underscored by Van Morrison’s complacent, diet-soul classic, Days Like This. The lyrics gestured vaguely to things being good without straying into anything more politically identifiable, since the Belfast-born singer eschewed any mention of politics until he was forced to develop such opinions by the tyranny of Covid lockdowns. This vagueness, aided by Morrison’s trademark lightsabre diction, fit the overall theme, since the ad was itself bewilderingly unspecific. The sun was shining, the craic was 90, and both of its featured actors were having a nebulously lovely time, wordlessly frolicking atop sand dunes on the North Antrim coast. This despite – and I hope you’re sitting down for this – one of them being Catholic and the other Protestant.

I couldn’t help wondering if every other child in Northern Ireland had pockets filled with ethnically identifying discs of tin, and I’d been missing out

It would be easy to mock the mawkishness of this video, so I’ll continue. Perhaps you’re wondering how a dialogue-free ad implied that these two characters were even Catholic and Protestant to begin with. Without the crutch of speech, it was instead conveyed through the inscrutable mechanic of token exchange; one offering a pendant featuring King Billy, the other some sort of medal from a hurling match. Even as a child, this baffled. I appreciate the bind in which the filmmakers found themselves, since it would have been unwieldy for the promo’s two protagonists to illustrate this invisible distinction by withdrawing from their respective pockets, say, a bowler hat and an Infant of Prague, but I couldn’t help wondering if every other child in Northern Ireland had pockets filled with ethnically identifying discs of tin, and I’d been missing out. “Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?” read the copy at the ad’s end, all but insisting that the endpoint of all human happiness was a day without rain, and the chance to trade sandy badges with a pal. Despite never experiencing either delight in my childhood, I can’t deny that the message struck a chord.

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This detail-denuded cheeriness, saccharine as it was, embodied a certain kind of optimism which might make what came next seem more inevitable than it had any right to be. I was, in any case, the wrong age to appreciate what was going on at the time. In the days after the agreement was signed, the adults around me seemed happy, but few thought it would be “The End” it subsequently became. When I returned to school after Easter, my history teacher said he gave it six months. Had he been watching his calendar later on, he might have noted that his deadline was marked, almost to the day, by the awarding of Nobel Peace Prizes to David Trimble and John Hume, the latter his old classmate, and fellow history teacher, at that very school.

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As months became years, became decades, the reality of peace became insurmountable. My generation was probably not as blown over as our elders by the uneasy normality we now enjoyed. The momentous nature of this shift was soon clear to my dad’s generation. He was 21 when the Troubles began, and 50 when that era ended. By April 1998 he had spent a quarter of a century as a father, and had only ever raised his 11 children in a country where violent conflict was routine. Even the eldest in my family had a starker understanding of this gap, since they were already adults living in Bristol, Glasgow and Nottingham by the time the agreement was signed. For all that I take that peace for granted, I still have to remind myself that the last time they lived in Northern Ireland, daily killings were a matter of course.

Getting to and from school required us to run a gauntlet of gruff soldiers – always English, often moustached – who barked at my father to get out and open his boot

I wasn’t as oblivious as I might be implying. We grew up on the Border, with the word “on” here being literal, since the fence around my dad’s house was itself the terminus of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the beginning of the Republic. Once, in childhood, my father handed me a tin of varnish and tasked me with sprucing up said fence. I did such a bad job that – to the envy of every dad reading this – he accurately proclaimed that I’d made a mess that spanned two countries.

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On its face, the absurdity of this demarcation was obvious, even to children. Our nearest pub was a 40-minute walk along a single road that weaved in and out of both countries several times. Our house was in Derry, while our immediate neighbours lived in Donegal. At night we could just about hear them turning in their beds, but if we wanted to send them a letter, it would require three days and take in the sights of Belfast, and possibly even Edinburgh, before it reached them. At the top of our garden stood a ringed fence, behind which sat a small, prefabricated building facing the main road. This was the UK customs hut that the IRA blew up when I was three, and did so with sufficient force that a full wall – with sink attached – landed, still smouldering, in our field.

Such evidence of things being not quite usual was hard to ignore, as were the twice-daily trips through the fortified Border checkpoint two miles to the east, at Nixon’s corner. Getting to and from school required us to run a gauntlet of gruff soldiers – always English, often moustached – who barked at my father to get out and open his boot. Since this was in operation every single day of my primary education, I must have done this 3,000 times on school runs alone. It was, therefore, a matter of sheer luck and happenstance that world history changed shortly after my secondary education began.

Like all 12-year-old boys, I very much considered myself Earth’s main character, so I appreciated the neatness of this division. Peace arrived just as I was stepping on the path to manliness, handily separating it from the chaotic violence which served as background to my childhood; the steady click-track of tit-for-tat killings and bombing campaigns; fatalities trilling from the radio like football scores over breakfast; barely understood full-colour images of marching bands; marching orders uttered by soldiers at checkpoints and bomb-scare-benighted bus journeys. All this became the stuff of youth, receding into the same wash of memory as days spent trapping caterpillars in jam jars, or practising lines for nativity plays. Then came adolescence, where army sangars were dismantled and towers pulled down, and we began trusting our neighbours to stop trying to blow us up, in the same way my dad now trusted me to get the bus by myself, or paint a fence without breaking international law.

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I’m old enough now to appreciate just how momentous this was, and how privileged I am to have had a categorically different youth and adulthood from that of my dad, or my older siblings. To discover, younger than they ever got to, that change for the better was possible. Moreover, to marvel at the achievement from a logistical level, requiring bold acts and sacrificial gestures scarcely seen in world politics. In just 64 pages, the agreement laid out plans for armed ceasefire, weapons decommissioning, demilitarisation, and the early release of more than 400 prisoners, all of which were achieved with the broad support of a nervous public.

But, if I’m honest, the grand narrative of its achievements was sometimes so stark as to be almost stifling. As I became more politically interested in my teens, I sometimes felt that the primacy of this gifted peace stymied deeper critiques of its aftermath, not least when I railed, with teenage zeal, against the poverty and disenfranchisement which pervaded Northern Ireland, Derry most especially. Promised investments did not come to pass, youth unemployment remained endemic and government was weak – when it functioned at all. When I mentioned any of these things back then, for entirely understandable reasons, parents and teachers would remind me of what had gone before. Normality, it seemed, was finite, and asking too loudly for further change, or even the full implementation of the peace dividends promised, was presumptuous, if not blasphemy.

We should be mindful of complacency, both in terms of the Agreement’s yet-unfulfilled promises, or its very existence in the hands of those who seek to undermine it entirely

It was hard for me to look at Derry – which, as recently as 2019, accountancy firm PwC named the least economically developed city in the UK – and feel like the full potential of the agreement was being realised. Ceasefires held, weapons were decommissioned, and devolution promised greater powers for Northern Ireland to rule itself. But the Northern Ireland Assembly was, in its very make-up, avowedly set up to reflect and reinforce the political entrenchments of two uneasy partners in a fledgling government; formed of people so diametrically opposed to each other as to be unworkable and then, since the DUP’s ascendancy, led for some 15 years by a party who volubly opposed the Belfast Agreement in the first place.

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As a result, suspensions have become so persistent that Stormont has been without a functioning government for about 40 per cent of its life span. The current suspension lingers from Northern Ireland’s last election which, more than 400 days ago, granted a majority to Sinn Féin. Since the DUP has simply refused to entertain this, the lights are being kept on from Westminster again. Nowadays, I feel there are fewer people content to consider this satisfactory on the grounds that it’s better than what went before. Not least since the agreement itself has spent six years as a bargaining chip between the EU and a succession of Tory governments who’ve shown themselves deeply unserious about international law, including laws they’ve fought for, written and passed themselves.

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Twenty-five years on from the agreement, we can and should praise its fundamental achievements. It is right, and necessary, to celebrate the incontrovertible good it has done for Northern Ireland, and the compromise and sacrifice required at every step of its creation. We should be mindful of complacency, both in terms of the agreement’s yet-unfulfilled promises, or its very existence in the hands of those who seek to undermine it entirely. We must instead allow its example to help us attack the current malaise with as much optimism as we dare. As a child, I learned that change for the better was possible. I still believe it is.

Séamas O’Reilly is a writer and author of the childhood memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?