It would be too contrived in a novel for a character to be writing about the Belfast Agreement while the sound of his children’s laughter breaks the silence in the other room.
However, that is precisely what is happening right now in this little home in Dún na nGall.
At Noon today, we hugged Number One Daughter as she headed down the Rocky Road.
Until next week we will have Baby Doctor and the Big Fella.
That duo are a Vaudeville act any day of the week, and I can hear them.
The little one was an infant when the Belfast Agreement was signed, and her brother was five.
They have grown up in this Border County with no lived experience of a militarised frontier.
At the time of the negotiations, I was working at An Phoblacht, and I could sense every day that this was the first rough draft of history stuff.
These events I lived through as a Republican were at least as significant as the ones that my grandparents had during the Tan War and the Treaty Debates.
A few years before the Belfast Agreement was signed, the late Father Des Wilson sat with me after a London Irish event in, if my memory serves me, Lambeth.
He reminded me of his working theory that great political deals have to last 50 years.
I asked him why.
He said to me that after half a century had elapsed, the signatories would all have passed away, as would the senior state functionaries.
Five decades would also take out the career of the next generation of senior civil servants.
He stated that the Partition settlement had broken down because the unionist political class couldn’t agree to the rather meagre demands of the Civil Rights Movement.
He pointed out that Stormont had been prorogued bang on fifty years in 1972.
He believed the absence of a new deal was fuelling the armed conflict.
Since the Belfast Agreement was signed, there has been relative peace, and civil society in the Six Counties has been, in many ways, transformed.
Of course, there is still much more to do.
In the last quarter of a century, many of the old unionist certainties have atrophied to the point that all is changed, changed utterly.
The Volkstaat in the Northeast of this island, carved out of the nine counties of Ulster, was established to ensure a demographic majority in perpetuity is no more.
At the time of the negotiations, I recall many possible scenarios being gamed out on my side.
There was certainly no shortage of clear-headed strategic thinkers in the room.
However, I cannot recall anyone, anyone at all, asking what would happen if the UK were to leave the European Union.
The English nationalist uprising that created Brexit has put a trade border in the Irish Sea.
When it came to it, the political class in Westminster didn’t think that the people of Northern Ireland were sufficiently British to be too concerned about.
It was ever thus.
Part of the genius of the agreement itself was that it devolved down to the individual identity issue.
Article 1 (vi), commonly referred to as the birthright provisions, states that both governments,
“recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland.”
This worked particularly well in a post-Maastricht Treaty dispensation
The Belfast Agreement, brokered and guaranteed by the USA, was also very much a child of the European Union.
That is why Brexit has been such a disrupter on this island.
As in the time of the Easter Rising, our exiled children in America and gallant allies in Europe were on the right of history.
The Belfast Agreement meant that many things in the Six Counties would have to change.
From the time of Partition, Northern Ireland had been established as a British mono-culture.
Consequently, the nationalist minority was ipso facto othered.
The Belfast Agreement put into law what we called the “equality agenda”. Another helpful term from those days was “parity of esteem”.
Now, the latter might seem pretty innocuous, but it had the potential to rock the foundations of the Orange State.
I recall walking out of the An Phoblacht office days after the agreement was signed and walking up to Parnell Square North to get the Donegal bus.
It required me to pass the Garden of Remembrance, and today again, I remembered.
I instinctively knew that with the deal signed, this was simultaneously the end of the armed struggle and the beginning of something new.
As I waited for my bus and sat in the Garden of Remembrance, I had a couple of faces and voices in my head, close friends who hadn’t made it through the conflict.
Perhaps my own grandfather had the same questions after the Tan War.
Had it been worth it?
Well, we didn’t ask to be colonised by our ambitiously toxic neighbour.
Moreover, when the Tans left Westport, my grandfather didn’t follow them!
Bobby Sands said that our revenge would be the laughter of our children.
I can hear them today.
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Friend sent me a text saying they were watching a documentary about Michael Collins so I was inspired to start surfing the web and came across one about the “The Black and Tans”. I got as far as Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Bryce Ferguson Smyth’s instruction on encountering Irish civilians which included the lines
“… even if they look suspicious just shoot them. You will get it right sometimes. The more you shoot the more I will like you”.
When a horror movie gets too gross I tend to bale. So onto a documentary allowing former members of the Tans and the IRA to give their account of it all and to the most sickening thing of all.
One of the former stating along the lines of, ” We weren’t frightened as long as we had our rifles and could shoot back”
If you have ever seen the movie “The Quiet man” you will know that Irish woman can be a handful and I have it on good authority that some of those children they attacked could have been as old as seven.
Brave men indeed.
My father was a history buff and was always on about them breaking down doors and randomly rifle butting the occupants so I was slightly inured to it all, I wish I still was.
Time for reparations.
The reduction in violence is surely to be welcomed but the essential cause of that violence remains , viz ; the British occupation of the Six Counties .
Excellent article.
I think the elected representatives have much to be proud of, but let’s not forget also the people who voted to support the Good Friday Agreement in the subsequent referendum. I remember being genuinely torn on which way to vote. The Agreement set out a hopeful way forward, Looking back, it seems like a no-brainer to have supported it, but I think alongside the hope, everyone could find things that were unpalatable. I’m glad I let my optimism shine through.
Seeing those signatures on a page (what a collection!) makes me wonder just how pivotal a role was played by David Irvine. Republicanism has always embraced political vision. Loyalism had never quite done the same. Throughout the talks, all the focus had been on the IRA and how to bring them into a peace process, but the Loyalist groups were a much bigger challenge – they operated without much direction or coordination, and did not really have a uniting voice. Irvine emerged to take on that role, speaking with authority and positivity even when mainstream unionism was pulling in a negative direction. He did not really have positional authority within the various Loyalist groups, yet he was ultimately able to deliver their support for the process.
By the bye, I think there will be much scope for historians to puzzle out how the DUP managed to come from opposition to the Agreement to a position of leading the unionist voice within the new structures. I remember chatting to David Irvine shortly after the first elections to the new Assembly and he opined that the DUP were staring into the abyss – they thought the talks would collapse and they had staked everything on that outcome – and now they had to deal with having called it wrong.
Twenty five years on. We lived though interesting times.
Perhaps it’s due to an emotionally invested event happening in a few hours today but I felt quite emotional reading this article. Even more so reading this comment. Thank you both.
Great post sir…Thank you…
Superb piece of writing. Thanks Phil.
You didn’t half top and tail that one!
Excellent write, Phil.