Siobhán Fenton - The Good Friday Agreement

I n April 1998, the seemingly impossible happened. Northern Irelands political parties agreed on a peace treaty bringing an end to the bloody conflict that had engulfed the region for the past thirty years. Some 3,700 people had died in the bloodshed, which had become known by the grimly understated euphemism the Troubles.

I was five years old when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. My parents recall with great distress going out to vote in the referendum held in May that year on whether or not to approve the political parties signing it. They later remembered the intense anxiety and trepidation that followed the referendum as they waited to see if this thing, this new Good Friday Agreement experiment really was the end or merely another false start only to be followed by the bitter backlash of more bloodshed. After a botched and short-lived ceasefire just a few years before, we were all too aware of how false hope could add to the sense of despair and helplessness amid the otherwise continuous dreary horror that had come to characterise much of Northern Irish existence. Across the region, people waited anxiously to see if or how power-sharing would work, desperate that this would be the means through which peace would finally take hold and Northern Irelands nightmare would finally end after decades of unimaginable and inexcusable horror. There was a growing sense that Northern Ireland had long since reached its limits and there was only so much trauma left to take before we would all lose our minds collectively.

The Good Friday Agreement was a significant event, we all knew. But we did not know if it would usher in peace, or merely give enough progress to spark a major backlash of violence in the form of a huge atrocity or killing spree. My mother would switch on our thick 90s box television set every evening while she attempted to distract herself making dinner, yet always watching the news out of the corner of her eye for another mass murder, another massacre and another sign that the Good Friday Agreement had failed like all the measures before it.

Its a period that I was too young to understand at the time, something restricted to big people talk between adults from which us children were excluded. In many ways such a period of trepidation is simply unfathomable for my generation precisely because of those efforts our parents made towards peace, which mean we simply lack the horrific memories capable of framing such events adequately.

After the referendum passed and power-sharing was established, a whole nations hopes were pinned on the Stormont Parliament. As the rusty doors creaked open for the first time in decades, a weary population held its breath. As the first elected politicians walked through those doors and into the parliamentary chamber, there was a palpable sense that this was it Northern Ireland, long out of last chances and final warnings, had its last chance at normality.

Mercifully, the anxiety that surrounded the Good Friday Agreement experiment in 1998 soon turned out to be unfounded. While not without its hiccups and problems in its initial years, power-sharing at Stormont succeeded in finally beginning to heal our deeply divided society. After decades of bloodshed and division, it seemed Northern Ireland was finally on the path to peace. The Agreement was celebrated the world over and heads of state around the globe urged the parties to work together and ensure the region did not slip once again into the dark days that had gone before. The moment is still cited by many politicians and international relations experts around the world as an example of an iconic peace process to which other divided societies should aspire.

Yet, twenty years on, its a rosy image that few in contemporary Northern Ireland might recognise.

Once the worlds media packed up, the cameras stopped rolling and global heads of state flew home, Northern Ireland has ceased to be much discussed or understood. Indeed, one could get the impression that Northern Ireland has been suspended in time since the Good Friday Agreement was signed, the region and its people entirely frozen at the moment the parties put their pens to the document, like an odd fairy tale whereby a nation of one million people slipped into slumber like post-conflict sleeping beauties.

Northern Irelands story did not end in 1998. Arguably, it only entered a different phase of complexity. While the society is no longer engulfed in violent conflict, hopes that a normalised society would emerge have yet to be realised. Instead, Northern Ireland continues to be home to a deeply unsettled and divided region still split along the ProtestantCatholic axis. It is a society in which armed paramilitary gangs, although no longer the overt scourge they once were, continue to carry out punishment shootings, plant bombs and threaten security forces on an almost weekly basis. It is a society still struggling with questions over how or even if it should acknowledge its dark past. It is a society still grappling with whether or not to accept modern social changes and which continues to define LGBT people as lesser in law and to arrest women for having abortions.

To further complicate matters, it is also a society which now faces particular and entirely unexpected challenges on a national and an international stage due to the UK voting to leave the European Union in 2016, as Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that shares a land border with another EU country, in the form of the Republic of Ireland. Similarly, stability in the region was further destabilised when the Westminster government entered into a pact with one of Northern Irelands parties in 2017 after the general election failed to grant any of the English parties a majority government.

Particularly troublingly, most recently Northern Ireland has been left without any government at all following a power-sharing collapse in January 2017, when the main nationalist and unionist parties could no longer agree to share power and govern together.

This book does not seek to underplay or ignore the major role the Good Friday Agreement played in Northern Irelands peace process. However, it asserts that on the twentieth anniversary year of the Good Friday Agreement, we owe it to ourselves and each other to question what peace we have and on what it is based.

It seeks to do this for three reasons. Firstly, at a local level: because Northern Ireland deserves better. It is hoped that this can contribute to greater understanding of and reignite debate over the many aspects of life in Northern Ireland that have slipped into being the status quo but ought to be challenged and contested.

Secondly, at a national level: because the UKs own failure to understand or often even acknowledge Northern Irelands existence holds the nation as a whole back. This tendency has most recently been thrown into sharp relief as events such as Brexit, when it was only after the UK voted to leave the European Union that many people (both politicians and voters) realised they shared a land border with the EU in the form of Northern Ireland and this resulted in them scrambling to swot up on their unfamiliar cousin in time for Brexit negotiations often unsuccessfully so. Similarly, when the UK government entered a pact with Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist Party following the 2017 general election, it once again became clear that many voters and even political experts were unaware of Northern Ireland as online searches of What is the DUP jumped to vertiginous heights, becoming the eighth most googled question in the UK in 2017 (slotting in just below What is waterboarding and above What is Pinks real name). Simply put, it is in Great Britains best interests to have at least a basic awareness of this part of the UK, which for decades has been marginalised and misunderstood.