1998 – Good Friday Agreement Gives Politics Its Rarest Headline: Adult Behaviour Observed

Blair, Ahern, Trimble, and Hume Manage Something That Two Governments Had Failed to Achieve for Thirty Years

Good Friday Agreement Gives Politics Its Rarest Headline: Adult Behaviour Observed

Blair, Ahern, Trimble, and Hume Manage Something That Two Governments Had Failed to Achieve for Thirty Years

On 10 April 1998 — Good Friday, as it happened, a date that the participants did not choose for its symbolism but whose symbolism they were not unhappy to inherit — the Belfast Agreement was signed at Stormont Castle by the parties to the multi-party negotiations that had been proceeding, with varying degrees of progress and several near-collapses, since the preceding September. The document that emerged from those negotiations was, by the standards of political achievement, remarkable: it found language, institutions, and arrangements that multiple parties with irreconcilable ultimate objectives could sign, which is a feat that most political processes fail to accomplish even when the stakes are considerably lower.

The stakes in Northern Ireland were not lower. They were, by the measure of thirty years of conflict, approximately 3,500 dead — the specific toll of the Troubles, from the late 1960s to the ceasefire of 1994, accumulated in bombings and shootings and assassinations and the specific categories of violence that sectarian conflict generates and that statistics cannot fully convey. The Agreement was not a solution to the underlying question — whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom or unite with the Republic — because the underlying question was not available for resolution through negotiation. It was, instead, a framework for managing the question without violence while waiting for demographics, economics, and time to produce whatever answer they were going to produce.

This was not a small thing. Managing a question without violence while waiting for time to produce an answer is precisely what political skill is for, and the Agreement’s achievement — bringing to a framework sufficiently durable that it has survived twenty-five years of stress, including the Brexit-related tensions that its architects had not modelled — is one of the more significant pieces of political architecture that late-twentieth-century Britain produced.

The Architecture of Compromise

The Agreement’s key elements were a power-sharing executive in which unionists and nationalists would govern together, a cross-border North-South Ministerial Council linking Northern Ireland institutions with those of the Republic, and a British-Irish Council linking the devolved institutions of the United Kingdom with the Irish government. The constitutional provisions included the Republic’s amendment of Articles 2 and 3 of its constitution — the territorial claim over Northern Ireland that had been a fundamental unionist grievance since 1937 — in exchange for the principle that Northern Ireland’s constitutional future would be determined by the consent of its people.

The decommissioning of paramilitary weapons — the IRA’s arms, which the Agreement required to be put beyond use but whose timetable was left deliberately vague — was the issue that nearly broke the negotiations at multiple points and that would continue to produce political crisis for years after the Agreement’s signing. The vagueness was deliberate: specific commitments that could not be delivered would collapse the Agreement, while a framework that acknowledged the necessity of decommissioning without specifying its timetable gave all parties enough cover to sign.

The prisoner release provisions — the accelerated release of paramilitary prisoners from both sides, to be completed within two years — were the Agreement’s most politically sensitive element for the victims of the Troubles and their families, who were being asked to accept that people convicted of serious crimes against them or their relatives would be released as part of a political settlement they had not been consulted about. The victims’ perspective — that the Agreement asked them to bear a cost that the political process had decided was necessary — was real and was not resolved by the Agreement’s other achievements, however genuine those achievements were.

Tony Blair and the All-Nighter That Mattered

Blair’s personal role in the final negotiations — the overnight sessions, the shuttle between parties that would not meet each other directly, the specific combination of energy and patience that the final push required — was acknowledged by most participants as significant. He brought to the process a political capital that a Prime Minister eleven months into office with a majority of 179 still possessed in quantities that later prime ministers might have found useful but could not access, and he deployed it with the specific willingness of a leader who had decided this was worth the risk.

The risk was real. A failed negotiation — an Agreement that collapsed at the final moment, or that was signed and then rejected in the referendums that would follow — would have been a significant early setback for a government that had made Northern Ireland a priority and whose credibility depended in part on delivering what its rhetoric promised. Blair had promised to govern for the many, not the few, and Northern Ireland — where the many had been living with the consequences of a political failure that spanned three decades — was a test of whether the promise extended to the specific many who lived on the island’s northern portion.

Bertie Ahern, the Irish Taoiseach, came to the negotiations having spent the previous day at his mother’s funeral — a detail that has entered the Agreement’s mythology as the human texture behind the political achievement, the reminder that the people making history are also living lives, and that the two do not always proceed on separate tracks.

David Trimble, John Hume, and the Risk of Signing

The two figures whose personal courage was most tested by the Agreement were David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party and John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Both had been working toward a negotiated settlement for years — Hume since the 1970s, through initiatives and contacts that his party and his critics had variously supported and condemned, and Trimble more recently, making a political calculation that the Agreement was the best available settlement for unionism rather than the ideal settlement, and that the gap between the best available and the ideal was a gap that the alternative — continued conflict — did not justify.

Trimble and Hume were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998, which was the international community’s recognition that what they had signed, and what they had persuaded their respective communities to accept, was of a significance that transcended the specific geography of Northern Ireland. The Nobel was, in Trimble’s case, awarded to a man whose political career would be damaged by the Agreement he had signed, as the Ulster Unionist Party lost seats and support to the Democratic Unionist Party whose leader Ian Paisley had rejected the Agreement. Trimble’s political cost for making peace was the loss of his party’s dominant position in unionist politics to a party that had opposed peace — a specific irony that the Nobel committee’s recognition did not resolve and that the subsequent history of Northern Ireland has not fully processed.

The Referendums and the Mandates

The Agreement was put to referendums in both Northern Ireland and the Republic on 22 May 1998. In Northern Ireland, 71.1 percent voted yes; in the Republic, 94.4 percent. The referendums provided the democratic mandate that the Agreement’s architects had insisted was necessary — no settlement imposed without consent would hold in the long run, and the consent of the populations on both sides of the border was the foundation without which the institutional architecture would be built on sand.

The 71.1 percent in Northern Ireland concealed a more complicated arithmetic — a substantial majority of nationalists and a narrower majority of unionists, the pro-Agreement majority depending on the near-unanimous nationalist vote to offset the more evenly divided unionist one. This arithmetic would matter in the subsequent years, as the unionist community processed the Agreement’s implications and reached different conclusions about whether it had been a good deal, with some concluding it had and some concluding it had not, and some concluding that the question of whether it was a good deal was less important than the question of whether it was the only deal available.

Northern Ireland After Good Friday: The Long Peace

The Agreement did not immediately produce the stable power-sharing executive it envisaged. The decommissioning argument — when the IRA would put its weapons beyond use, and whether Sinn Féin could participate in government while the IRA retained its arsenal — dominated the politics of the early 2000s and produced the suspension of the Assembly on four occasions. The executive that eventually emerged was not the moderate coalition of Trimble and Hume but the more polarised combination of Ian Paisley’s DUP and Sinn Féin, which entered government together in 2007 in an arrangement that its founders had thought impossible and that the Agreement’s framework had made, eventually, possible.

The Brexit referendum of 2016 and the subsequent Northern Ireland Protocol introduced stresses that the Agreement’s architects had not planned for — the reimposition of a regulatory border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and the question of whether the Agreement’s Irish dimension could survive the disruption of the UK-EU relationship that the Agreement had taken for granted. The stresses were real. The Agreement’s institutions survived them, battered but functional, which is perhaps the most accurate measure of its durability.

Good Friday 1998 was the day that politics did something it rarely manages: it produced an outcome better than the process that generated it deserved, through a combination of exhaustion, courage, calculation, and the specific political will of people who had decided that the available peace was more valuable than the unattainable resolution. The headline was correct. Adult behaviour had been observed. It was worth noting.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

The Good Friday Agreement was signed at Stormont Castle on 10 April 1998 by the parties to the multi-party negotiations, including the Ulster Unionist Party, the SDLP, Sinn Féin, and smaller parties. Tony Blair and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern were the key governmental participants. The Agreement established a power-sharing executive, a North-South Ministerial Council, and a British-Irish Council. Referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic on 22 May 1998 produced yes votes of 71.1 percent and 94.4 percent respectively. David Trimble and John Hume were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998. The Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended four times between 1998 and 2007 over decommissioning disputes. The DUP and Sinn Féin entered government together in 2007 under the St Andrews Agreement.

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED: 10 April 1998 (London, UK)

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]