The Good Friday Agreement at 21

For anyone who lived through the Northern War, it was a JFK moment.

I was thinking about that today as I hiked over my hill.

21 years ago today a comrade of mine from Derry had been staying over with me.

Herself was out at church with the brood because of the day that was in it.

He was on kettle duty and shouted me downstairs.

“It’s signed!”

I knew exactly what he was referring to as we had discussed the possibilities of a deal long into the night.

The Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was a huge victory for politics on this island.

The long term strategy of the Republican leadership to “take the gun out of Irish politics” took a huge step forward.

For people in Britain who have never been to Northern Ireland, they possibly do not grasp just how small it is in terms of land area and population.

Consequently, the impact of a conflict over three decades that killed more than 3,500 people with around 50,000 wounded was massive.

Very few families in the Six Counties were not touched in some way.

The long-term psychological trauma is probably impossible to gauge.

Writing this in Donegal I know that the Troubles was not only a Northern Ireland problem.

It had a huge negative impact on the border region of the Republic.

Indeed, almost everything in the entire 26 Counties had some Troubles ripple effect.

For example, the war skewed policing out of shape in the Republic.

The suppression of Republicans took precedence over everything and resources were moved to the Border away from drug ravaged housing estates in Dublin and Limerick.

One thing that became clear when the British Conservative Party ditched Margaret Thatcher in late 1990 was that the Northern War would only be ended by talking.

Since he had become Prime Minister in 1979 she had indulged the Generals to play their counterinsurgency games.

Clearly grieving for her close friend Airey Neave she wanted revenge.

Consequently, the next eleven years was about the British state trying to defeat the IRA militarily.

Yet the same year she took office Gerry Adams gave the Bodenstown address and said that the Republican Movement was ready to parley.

With her out of the picture in 1990, talks about the sequenced dance that would ultimately lead to formal negotiations and an international treaty could begin.

The choreography of the Peace Process was very important.

After Thatcher was whacked by the 1922 Committee several things started to fall into place.

The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 took Irish policy out of the State Department and into the Oval Office.

This meant that the influence of the British State was significantly weakened in Washington.

It was then possible, as the late Seamus Heaney wrote, to envisage a situation where “hope and history rhyme”.

The election of Tony Blair in 1997 was probably the last piece of the jigsaw.

For a while, the Peace Process stalled as Conservative Prime Minister John Major found himself in a minority administration because of a backbench rebellion over Europe.

This meant that he was forced to depend on Ulster Unionist MPs for support.

Sound familiar?

It is undeniable that the GFA was a Post-Maastricht creation.

The Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom were member states of the European Union and that allowed things to fall into alignment.

The tragedy of all of this now is that Brexit threatens this fragile collage of constructive ambiguity.

It is a recurring theme in Irish history that events in Britain and Continental Europe have unforeseen consequences on this little island.

Although that is perhaps too complex to write on the side of a big red bus.

The GFA cleverly dealt with the competing national identities that jostle for space in the confined space of the Six Counties by sub-contracting it to the individual.

Of course, if it is a matter of personal preference then that, in time, can change from person to person.

The GFA gave the people of Northern Ireland the right to “identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both”.

The last two words “or both” was the constructive ambiguity that got the deal over the line.

Moreover, that this dual nationality area was within the supranational framework of the European Union meant that it kinda worked.

Until now…

That night I called a colleague of mine in Belfast, we both worked at An Phoblacht.

Another Derry lad he had done the hard yards in the Kesh from teenager to manhood.

I wanted his take on it.

He was hugely supportive of the move from a Republican perspective.

We were on the same page and as it turned out our collective assessment was proved to be largely correct in the fullness of time.

As we speculated Sinn Féin has electorally eclipsed the SDLP and has also become a force in Dáil Éireann.

Bobby Sands had said it was necessary to “broaden the battlefield” and that meant that armed struggle was now an obstacle.

It is worth noting that the GFA was signed on the anniversary of the death of IRA Chief of Staff Liam Lynch during the Civil War.

He was shot by Free State forces in the Knockmealdown Mountains in Tipperary.

It effectively marked the end of the Civil War and the Free State settled down to a sort of normal politics, but an apartheid state north of Dundalk would incubate an uprising for the next half-century.

Of course, there should never have been a need for armed conflict on any part of this island in the 20th century.

However, the moral currency of a Risen People, whether it was Easter Week or the Battle of the Bogside, is always unassailable.

Ordinary folk don’t physically take on the state unless they’re in an impossible situation.

The last 21 years on this island has, for the most part, been peaceful.

My brood has not known conflict in their Ireland.

Here in Donegal, I drive across a de-militarized invisible Border anytime I need to without a second thought.

It would be a cruel irony if the Brexit chaps in the Home Counties were to unintendedly exhume deadly divisions here because they eroticised about blue passports.