Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday
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Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday

Lost futures and new horizons in the 'long peace'

Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward, Peter Shirlow

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eBook - ePub

Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday

Lost futures and new horizons in the 'long peace'

Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward, Peter Shirlow

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About This Book

The Good Friday Agreement is widely celebrated as a political success story, one that has brought peace to a region that was once synonymous around the globe with political violence. The truth, as ever, is rather more complicated than that.In many respects, the era of the peace process has seen Northern Irish society change almost beyond recognition. Those incidents of politically motivated violence that were once commonplace have become thankfully rare and a new generation has emerged whose identities and interests are rather more fluid and cosmopolitan than those of their predecessors. However, Northern Ireland continues to operate in the long shadow of its own turbulent past. Those who were victims of violence, as well as those who were its agents, have often been consigned to the margins of a society still struggling to cope with the traumas of the Troubles. Furthermore, the transition to 'peace' has revealed the existence of new, and not so new, forms of violence in Northern Irish society, directed towards women, ethnic minorities and the poor. Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday sets out to capture the complex, and often contradictory, realities that have emerged more than two decades on from the region's vaunted peace deal. Across nine original essays, the authors offer a critical and comprehensive reading of a society that often appears to have left its violent past behind but at the same time remains subject to its gravitational pull.

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Information

Publisher
Manchester University Press
Year
2021
ISBN
9781526139290
Topic
Politics & International Relations
Subtopic
Peace & Global Development
Index
Politics & International Relations

1

From the ‘long war’ to the ‘long peace’: Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement

Introduction
In the midst of the Troubles, it would certainly have been hard to imagine that one day Northern Ireland would become a globally renowned tourist destination. Back in those bleak times when it seemed that the conflict might never end, the Europa in the centre of Belfast would attain the unenviable accolade of being the most frequently bombed hotel in the entire world. A generation into the peace process, in contrast, some 2.2 million ‘hotel room nights’ are reserved by visitors to Northern Ireland every year.1 Drawn by traditional sights such as the Giant’s Causeway and attractions of more recent vintage such as the Titanic Visitors’ Centre and the locations that feature in the hugely popular television series Game of Thrones, the volume of tourists coming to Northern Ireland now surpasses the number of people living there.2 It is entirely possible that on the afternoon of 11 January 2020, some of those visiting the region might have returned to their hotel rooms after a hearty lunch to pass a little time flicking through the television channels and happened upon live coverage of a rare Saturday sitting of the Northern Ireland Assembly.3 The scenes in the Stormont chamber doubtless would have confirmed the positive stories that those momentarily detained tourists may well have read in their travel guides or in-flight magazines. On this occasion at least, the politicians of various hues present in the Assembly were on their very best behaviour, airing tributes to their party colleagues and sharing pleasantries across the floor. Even the habitually cantankerous independent unionist Jim Allister appeared to have read the script, engaging in a moment of good humour with Alex Maskey, the republican politician newly appointed as Speaker of the House. Any unwitting tourist straying upon the live broadcast from Stormont might have been forgiven for thinking that Northern Ireland really is just as they had been told beforehand: a society that has left its violent past behind and is now at peace with itself. The truth, as ever, is a little more complicated.
When the Good Friday Agreement (hereafter GFA) was ratified by simultaneous referenda either side of the Irish border in May 1998, there was a widespread, though far from universal, sense that Northern Ireland was now, finally, facing a peaceful, perhaps even prosperous, future. While no one expected that the political path ahead would be easy, there were few who could have anticipated just how difficult that course would transpire to be. As Eamonn O’Kane4 notes with admirable brevity, ‘one of the most notable features of the peace process has been how “messy” it has been’. For all the crucial successes that have flowed from the GFA, there have been a great many disappointments and disruptions as well. Most crucially perhaps, those institutions that were central to the political settlement were meant to bring stable and equitable government to Northern Ireland but have signally failed to do so. Recurrent disagreements between the region’s coalition partners have ensured that since their establishment in 1998, the Assembly and Executive have spent in total more than seven and a half years in cold storage.5 The most recent suspension of the Stormont institutions lasted a world record of more than three years and, as we shall see, only ended when mounting public anger at rapidly deteriorating public services forced the local parties into yet another new deal. Those seemingly amicable members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) who were getting on so well with one another during that rare Saturday sitting sketched above were in fact chastened politicians forced back into the chamber by the threat of further electoral reprisals from an ever more disenchanted general public.
The story of the Northern Irish peace process is, then, rather more complicated than it might appear from the distance maintained by speech writers in the hire of globetrotting politicians or features writers in the pay of the international media. In this chapter, we will seek to provide a more nuanced and balanced account of the frequently tortuous political path that Northern Ireland has followed over the last generation. It is hoped that the narrative that follows will have sufficient breadth to accommodate those who may know little about recent Northern Irish history and sufficient depth to engage those who feel they are already all too familiar with the many twists in that most byzantine of plots. While the story that follows is necessarily dense, it is intended that it will provide the reader with an accessible account of how Northern Ireland managed to move beyond its ‘long war’ but even now does not quite seem able to move beyond its ‘long peace’.
The limits of ‘constructive ambiguity’
While the GFA sought to deal with the ‘totality of relationships’ between the peoples of Ireland and Great Britain, its principal concern was, not unreasonably, to mend the historically troubled relations between the ‘two traditions’ often said to coexist in Northern Ireland.6 The peace deal made provision for institutions of government that would require unionists and nationalists to share power and responsibility with one another. At the heart of these ‘consociational’ structures was an executive which met finally for the first time on 2 December 1999, some eighteen months after the GFA was signed and provided, therefore, an early indication of the thrombosis that would often pass for governance in the region. Northern Ireland’s new government was headed by the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), with their electoral competitors the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn FĂ©in in supporting roles. While the Democratic Unionists were nominated to positions within the Executive, they refused to attend meetings. Party leader the Revd Ian Paisley had denounced the GFA as a ‘prelude to genocide’ and insisted that were his colleagues to assume their positions in government that would require them to sit down with ‘the men of blood’.7
The hostility of the Democratic Unionists would prove to be only one of several pressures that would face the new power-sharing arrangements. Although the principle of consociationalism found favour among all other shades of political opinion in Northern Ireland from the outset, it would nonetheless take almost a decade for the institutions envisaged in the GFA to begin operating in a manner that even appeared to be sustainable. The main initial obstacle to the formation of a stable power-sharing government illustrated the facility of the peace deal to mean often radically different things to different people.8 In order to square the circle of at times mutually exclusive ethno-national demands, those who framed the GFA engaged in a certain ‘constructive ambiguity’.9 This particular attribute – and, it would soon become clear, shortcoming – of the document was especially apparent in its provisions for the disposal of illegally held arms, or ‘decommissioning’.
While unionist politicians took the view that the GFA required republican (as well as loyalist) paramilitaries to dispose of their armouries, Sinn FĂ©in tended to counter, entirely accurately as it happens, that the text of the deal merely required them to ‘use any influence they may have’ to persuade the Provisional IRA to give up its arms. These radically divergent readings of one of the principal ambiguities at the heart of the peace settlement would haunt all of the initial attempts to establish cross-community government in Northern Ireland. On each occasion, the choreography of political failure would unfold in the same predictable manner: the UUP would agree to enter government on the proviso that republicans would in the near future decommission their weapons;10 Sinn FĂ©in would also agree to form a government but insist that the Provisional IRA was under no obligation to put its arms beyond use and that unionist demands that it do so were in fact prompted by a repugnance at the thought of sharing power with nationalists;11 finally, after a short interlude marked by intense squabbling, the Ulster Unionists, under pressure from the very vocal fundamentalist Ian Paisley, would note that republicans had failed to decommission and then refuse to continue in government, precipitating its collapse. In the initial phase of the peace process, this sequence of mutual recrimination and political stalemate would be repeated on no fewer than four separate occasions.12 By the time that allegations of republican intelligence gathering at Stormont13 accelerated the last of these parliamentary suspensions in October 2002, much of the initial enthusiasm for the peace process had dissipated and a palpable sense of political disillusionment had descended on Northern Ireland.14
The dismal failure of initial attempts to form sustainable power-sharing government in Northern Ireland would instigate a process of polarisation between the ‘two communities’ that would in time, ironically, facilitate the cause of political progress in the region. The refusal of unionists to remain in power with republicans in the absence of ‘decommissioning’ served to alienate members of the nationalist community who came increasingly to see Sinn FĂ©in as the party best equipped to defend their interests. At the same time, the refusal of the republican movement to dispose of their arms became a growing source of disquiet among unionists already sceptical about the peace process, and led them to see the DUP as the most effective bulwark against further concessions to nationalists.15 The symbiotic interplay between these radicalising forces would become ever more apparent in electoral terms. In the early days of the peace process, Sinn FĂ©in and the DUP were only the secondary political voices within their respective ethno-political communities. As each attempt to establish stable devolved government in Northern Ireland ran aground, however, these parties that had been previously dismissed as ‘extremists’ began to attract larger and more diverse bodies of support.16 By the time of the 2003 elections to an assembly that was no longer sitting, Sinn FĂ©in and the DUP had clearly established themselves as the principal political forces within their respective communities, and the years since have merely confirmed their electoral pre-eminence.17
Although the rise of these radically opposed parties often seemed to imperil the cause of political progress in Northern Ireland, it would in time prove to be its prerequisite. One of the problems that face ‘moderate’ political parties seeking to reach agreement in all divided societies is the prospect of being outflanked by more radical voices emanating from within their own communities. And that is precisely the fate that befell the UUP and SDLP in the course of the Northern Irish peace process. These parties were once the principal voices within the unionist and nationalist traditions, but they were eclipsed as the wrangles over ‘guns and government’ rumbled on and the ongoing erosion of their electorate has at times even raised the possibility of their political extinction. The pressures that sent the UUP and SDLP into long-term electoral decline were ones to which the parties that overtook them would remain largely immune. While both Sinn FĂ©in and the DUP continue to face criticism from dissenting voices within their own communities, those political forces adopting more fundamentalist positions have never been able to garner sufficient support to mount a meaningful challenge. The immunity of both parties to ‘ethnic outbidding’18 would ensure that it was this combination of ‘extremists’ that would strike the deal that would finally bring what, for a time at least, seemed like stable power-sharing government to Northern Ireland.
If Sinn FĂ©in and the DUP were to share power with one another that would require a resolution of the ‘decommissioning’ issue that had bedevilled previous Stormont administrations. On 28 July 2005, the Provisional IRA announced that it had disbanded and destroyed its weaponry.19 While the structures of the paramilitary organisation would remain in place and elements of its armoury would surface from time to time, a semblance of decommissioning was sufficient to remove the most fundamental obstacle in the path of Sinn FĂ©in and the DUP reaching an accommodation. In October 2006, the British and Irish governments convened talks in the Scottish town of St Andrews, aimed at the restoration of devolved government in the six counties. During the negotiations, Sinn FĂ©in made a commitment to support the recently (re)formed Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), while the DUP agreed that it was willing to share power with republicans. The St Andrews Agreement that emerged out of the talks paved the way for the Northern Ireland Assembly to begin operating again after a hiatus of five years. A fresh round of elections confirmed that Sinn FĂ©in and the DUP would dominate the incoming executive, and on 8 May 2007 the new coalition partners were unveiled before an audience of the global med...

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. List of figures
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday: an introduction
  9. 1 From the ‘long war’ to the ‘long peace’: Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement
  10. 2 Fragmented, staggered and inept: addressing the legacy of the Troubles
  11. 3 Conflict-related prisoners: the perpetual trap of criminalisation
  12. 4 Ghosts of our lives: spectres of the past in recent Northern Irish cinema and television
  13. 5 More than two communities: those who are both, neither, other, and next
  14. 6 Rethinking the post-conflict narrative: women and the promise of peace in the ‘new’ Northern Ireland
  15. 7 The political economy of peace in Northern Ireland: social class in an age of boom and bust
  16. 8 Changed utterly? Northern Ireland’s paralysis in a world of uncertainty
  17. Index
Citation styles for Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday

APA 6 Citation

Coulter, C., Gilmartin, N., Hayward, K., & Shirlow, P. (2021). Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday ([edition unavailable]). Manchester University Press. Retrieved from https://www.perlego.com/book/2739914/northern-ireland-a-generation-after-good-friday-lost-futures-and-new-horizons-in-the-long-peace-pdf (Original work published 2021)

Chicago Citation

Coulter, Colin, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward, and Peter Shirlow. (2021) 2021. Northern Ireland a Generation after Good Friday. [Edition unavailable]. Manchester University Press. https://www.perlego.com/book/2739914/northern-ireland-a-generation-after-good-friday-lost-futures-and-new-horizons-in-the-long-peace-pdf.

Harvard Citation

Coulter, C. et al. (2021) Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday. [edition unavailable]. Manchester University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2739914/northern-ireland-a-generation-after-good-friday-lost-futures-and-new-horizons-in-the-long-peace-pdf (Accessed: 15 October 2022).

MLA 7 Citation

Coulter, Colin et al. Northern Ireland a Generation after Good Friday. [edition unavailable]. Manchester University Press, 2021. Web. 15 Oct. 2022.