The Good Friday Agreement: A flawed and incomplete process

This short extract is from chapter 4 (The Good Friday Agreement: A flawed and incomplete process) from the upcoming e-book by Vicky Cosstick entitled Don’t Mention the War: Exploring Aspects of the Legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles. This e-book will be launched in Belfast on Monday 4 February – you can register to attend via the Eventbrite page here. 

This is the fourth serialisation from the e-book. The first excerpt sets out the issues to be explored: There are in NI two distinct realities, two parallel universes. The second excerpts focuses on The impact of the Troubles on women’s experience and equality. The third is entitled The reality and consequences of trauma in Northern Ireland.

Vicky’s work encompasses research and essays about the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland on the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, working with artist Rita Duffy and supported by Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust funding.

The e-book can be ordered in advance of publication from Amazon here and will be published on 4 February. Other articles from Vicky Cosstick on Northern Slant can be found here.

Northern Slant welcomes perspectives from authors of different backgrounds and political persuasions – the opinions shared in this publication belong entirely to the author and not Northern Slant.

 

There were two fundamental structural flaws in the design of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. These flaws were doomed to ensure that the GFA “engine” would run out of steam with the passing of time. Both were caused by an unfortunate combination of denial and expediency, and it is hard to know what might at the time have driven a different approach. The consequences of these flaws reverberate to this day and have been intensified and made Northern Ireland and its fragile peace process vulnerable to the threat posed by Brexit.

The first fundamental flaw is that the GFA enshrined the notion of “two communities” or “traditions”, first in the language of the Agreement and then in the architecture for the institutions of devolved government. It thus ensured that the political structures would model, echo and amplify the divisions of society and history in Northern Ireland. As we know, since 1998 the political middle ground of the SDLP and the UUP, such as it was, has gradually dwindled, being replaced by an increasingly polarised tug of war between Sinn Féin and the DUP. Unionism is not to be equated with the DUP – but unionists now have little viable political alternative. Nationalism is not to be equated with Sinn Féin, but nationalists have little other political alternative. It has become less, not more likely, and perhaps impossible, that the political leadership would have anything to gain from breaking down barriers to a single “united community”. This unhappy situation is rooted in the Agreement, which gave permission for sectarianism and segregation to flourish – by passive aggressive means.

Secondly, the Good Friday Agreement failed to acknowledge the severity of the conflict that had engulfed this region and caused irreparable damage to many of its people and, crucially the role of the British state as a protagonist in the conflict. The British government has always, and continues to this day, to present itself as a “neutral broker” standing above and beyond the conflict in Northern Ireland – that fiction is integral to the Agreement. At the Agreement20 academic conference held in Manchester on 6-7 April 2018, Dr Stephen Hopkins of the University of Leicester said that the idea that Britain was an honest broker/outsider “suited Westminster but was ultimately damaging to the peace process.”

 

The third protagonist: British state forces

There is, and has been for a while, overwhelming evidence that from the earliest days of the conflict, Britain was not neutral and it was prepared to use whatever force was required to maintain law and order.

In Chapter 3 I described the “trauma process” by which reconciliation can only be achieved if and when all protagonists in a conflict – in this case loyalists, republicans and the British state – take responsibility for their own actions. Specifically, reconciliation in Northern Ireland will only be possible if the British government takes responsibility for the systemic role it played in the conflict  –  by rushing too quickly into a military response rather than investing in a political solution; by fuelling the conflict with the disastrous strategy of internment and other means of blatant targeting of the Catholic population, and by participation in the “dirty war”.

One source points out that there is not a British government “mind”; the British government is a multi-faceted institution and there have been and are a range of attitudes to Northern Ireland. Maurice Punch gives credit to Prime Minister David Cameron for his lengthy and articulate apologies to Parliament for the Bloody Sunday killings and the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane. He describes this as a “highly symbolic gesture in terms of reconciliation and healing of wounds.”

We must therefore ask to what extent such gestures and potential progress have now been inhibited and undermined by the DUP/Conservative Party pact at Westminster. With Theresa May’s recent insistences on using the full title of the “Conservative and Unionist Party” any pretence at the government’s neutrality is abandoned.

 

Peace and process

Process includes history and precedes the specific agreement process itself; it accompanies and continues afterwards. In the case of the GFA, it included the remarkable success of the referendums which followed it in both the North and South of Ireland, recently recalled in The Story of Yes, a three-part documentary film from Below the Radar TV.

The GFA was followed, with various degrees of success and failure, by the Patten report on policing (1999), the St Andrews Agreement (2006), the Eames Bradley Consultative Group on the Past (2009) and the plan to re-develop the former Maze prison site (2010). It has included the Saville Enquiry into Bloody Sunday (2010) and the statements by David Cameron on Bloody Sunday and on the murder of Pat Finucane (2012).

The process continued with the Haass O Sullivan talks (2013), and the Stormont House “Fresh Start” Agreement (2015), and with a series of significant gestures: the Queen’s visit to the Irish Republic (2011); Irish President Michael D. Higgins’s reciprocal visit to London (2014), Prince Charles’s several recent visits to Ireland “North and South”; and the handshakes between the Queen and Martin McGuinness (2012), and between Prince Charles and McGuinness in Belfast, and Gerry Adams on the occasion of his visit to the west of Ireland to commemorate the assassination of his uncle Lord Mountbatten. Process includes verbal and non-verbal gestures and symbols. It includes the quality and calibre of leadership. It includes what is unsaid as well as what is said.

In hindsight, it can be seen that unionists have resisted that process at key points – by spectacularly crashing the Eames-Bradley consultation on the past; by former First Minister and leader of the DUP Peter Robinson’s withdrawal of support for the re-development of the Maze site; and by the loyalist protest of December 2012 against Belfast City Council’s decision to fly the Union Jack flag on only certain days of the year, in line with other UK government buildings, and the Twaddell loyalist camp, set up to protest restrictions on the Orange Order’s marching past Catholic Ardoyne, which lasted from July 2013 to October 2016. Most recently, DUP leader Arlene Foster was forced by her party in February 2018 to pull out of talks to restore the Assembly over Irish language and other equal rights issues.

A year prior to the 20th anniversary of the Agreement, following the collapse of Stormont, George Mitchell acknowledged it might be time to review the structures of the GFA: “We recognised at that time that by itself the Agreement did not assure peace or prosperity or reconciliation. It made them possible. I said at the time it would take many years and many difficult decisions by courageous leaders in Northern Ireland to attain those goals.” (The Irish News, 16 February 2017). He went on: “It is a normal part of the development of every society that over time institutions should be renewed, processes should be reviewed.” At the British Council’s Peace and Beyond conference, Mitchell reflected: “The most important thing, and the hardest, is to change peoples’ hearts and minds” – and that change of course was inevitably to be dependent on the process that followed the GFA.

In recognising the flaws of the GFA, we are also recognising that, pragmatically, it was the best that could have been achieved at the time. However, given that its authors knew that it had limitations, it should really have included a mechanism and a process for overseeing its complete implementation. “With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that one major weakness of the GFA has been the absence of a process for monitoring its implementation” (Ashe & Roulston 2017). That mechanism would need to have been an external, international group. Instead, it has lurched from crisis to crisis.

 

Brexit disturbs the fragile balance of peace

The Agreement has faced no greater challenges than those caused by Brexit.

Because of Brexit and the DUP/Tory pact, relationships between London and Dublin are worse than at any time for decades. In May 2018, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said that “Dublin and London are now very much at odds on how to resurrect negotiations.” The Irish border has become the “front line” of the conflict between the British and EU member states and it is the Irish government who are holding that front line on behalf of the whole EU. There were, in April 2018, a number of calls in the light of Brexit to revive the British Irish intergovernmental conference, which had not met since 2007, and it did meet in July 2018. The peace process, said Baroness O’Neill in her keynote speech at the Peace and Beyond conference, requires renewed effort because of Brexit.

Brexit has given the DUP the opportunity to roll back the Good Friday Agreement, which in 1998 it did not sign. The British and Irish governments are co-guarantors of the GFA and therefore jointly responsible for supporting and protecting its institutions, including the Assembly and Executive. The DUP, who see the Irish government as “foreign”, will resist any relationship-building between London and Dublin, and in particular are resisting any formal or informal initiatives by the Irish government to reignite talks to re-establish the Assembly and Executive. On 1 August 2018, Arlene Foster accused the Taoiseach of interfering in Northern Ireland affairs, when he said that British and Irish governments would try to reconvene talks in the autumn (The Irish News, 1 August 2018). Brexit has damaged the direction of travel, the dynamic of the ongoing GFA process, because it has distorted the place of the DUP within the fragile political eco-system of Northern Ireland.

Brexit forces questions to be raised about the implications of the Irish citizenship now held by significant numbers of Northern Ireland’s citizens, and the right to hold Irish citizenship granted to them by the GFA. They are now citizens of Ireland and the EU, but will they still have access to its privileges and rights? What are the implications of some citizens of Northern Ireland having access to rights afforded by the EU when others do not?

 

Power-sharing or partnership?

The Good Friday Agreement was undoubtedly a success at the highest political level. The recognition by the Irish government of British sovereignty in Northern Ireland, acknowledgement of the two jurisdictions, the creation of the British Irish Council and the right for Northern Ireland citizens to be British and/or Irish. It smudged the border, allowing the removal of the military hardware and opened up the possibility for cross-border cooperation in many areas, including tourism, energy, waterways, fisheries, health provision, agriculture and crime and security.

Much has been made of the “constructive ambiguity” of the GFA which, according to Stephen Hopkins, had “diminishing returns.” Brexit aside, the Good Friday Agreement had a number of inherent weaknesses and, without some coherent overall approach to developing and reinforcing it, was bound to run out of steam. The language of reconciliation, tolerance, partnership, equality and mutual respect, gave and gives us a warm cuddly feeling, but the Agreement failed to grasp the nettles of the post-conflict reality which belied those values.

The GFA had, according to Duncan Morrow, an “absence of a partnership axis within a final political commitment to reconciliation.” I think what he means is that the Agreement contained the language of reconciliation but no practical commitment by the politicians to work together, to take the necessary painstaking steps to delivering it. “Power-sharing” has never been interpreted as “partnership”.

There is, said Morrow, a “cycle of wolves”, a self-perpetuating, underlying pattern of fear and mistrust between unionists and nationalists (Morrow 1999). Arlene Foster’s continual references to the IRA attack on her father and the school bus she was on as a child – understandably traumatising but not uncommon in the Northern Irish experience – have an added symbolic significance because of her role as leader of the DUP and former First Minister. Nothing indicates better the institutionalisation of that fear and mistrust than her frequent repetition of those undigested anecdotes.

The two main parties are seen to only attend to sectarian interests and issues. The DUP has no commitment to equality between Protestants and Catholics; it was founded on the principle of a denial of equal rights to the Catholic then-minority and a defence of its own assumed right to power and domination. The DUP has no commitment, due to its Christian fundamentalism, to women’s equality or LGBT rights, and remains opposed and hostile to an Irish language bill. Protestantism maintained its power by abusing the rights of Catholics to votes, employment and housing. No-one trusts Sinn Féin either enough to switch their vote to them. As one source said, Sinn Féin have been running West Belfast for the last thirty years, and it still has the highest levels of poverty in the UK. The Alliance and SDLP do not offer credible alternatives.

We must remember also that it was due to Brexit that the 2017 General Election was called, the result of which forced Prime Minister May into the confidence-and-supply arrangement with the DUP, who supported Brexit and did not support the Good Friday Agreement. Thus we see again that Brexit and the fortunes of the Irish peace process are utterly intertwined. Regardless of Brexit, the GFA process would be running into difficulties, without significant outside help. Brexit and the DUP/Tory pact have exposed and exacerbated its problems. Brexit and the DUP/Tory pact have not caused a crisis in the GFA; they have made a nest in its weaknesses.