Good Friday Agreement at 25

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

The Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland has been in place 25 years. I can remember when it felt like The Troubles there couldn’t ever end. Can you?

I confess that The Troubles probably wouldn’t have meant much to me if I hadn’t spent any time in Northern Ireland, but I did. For a few years I went once or twice a year, working on automation systems at a factory. One of my closest business associates is someone from Belfast. As a young man, he left at the height of the violence. He wanted to do something with his life other than fighting and that meant he had to leave. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to live in Belfast when he was growing up. My work was near ‘Derry on the other side of the country, and the violence was down to a dull roar when I went.

It's always ‘Derry, not Londonderry, so as to have no London in it. By “dull roar,” I mean that on the last day of one of my visits, police found and defused five bombs, the IRA killed its own treasurer because it believed the police had learned who he was and they wanted to make sure he wouldn’t talk, and none of that was big news. The bombs got less than two column inches on the last page of the newspaper.

A few months before my first visit, the IRA gunned down the American manager of the factory I worked in. They did it in front of his house inside a supposedly secure American compound. Their point? He hadn’t done something to offend them. They simply wanted to show that they were willing to do anything for their cause, even at the risk of upsetting their main source of funds, which tended to flow from the USA.

Northern Ireland was full of the most serious fences I had ever seen. Before my second visit, soldiers began checking out cars approaching checkpoints by looking at the driver through the scope on their rifles. You could be anywhere and suddenly find yourself flat against a wall as a group of soldiers kitted up and wearing camoflage face paint jogged around a corner. The hotel I stayed in had been blown up a couple of times. If you happened to drive by when the IRA was planting a bomb under a parked car, they’d note your license plate, track you down and get rid of you as a potential witness. I didn’t want to notice anything when I was driving.

People were flawlessly hospitable, quietly frugal and perpetually careful.

“Aye, it gets tirin’ but ye get used to it,” was the standard refrain about how hard anything about life was.

When I got home from each visit, my shoulders dropped as soon as I landed in the USA. I stayed tense until I got back. The last of those visits was in 1991.

In 2007 I went back for a few days to do one last bit of work at the factory. Nothing looked familiar.

The very serious fences were gone. Any watchtowers still standing were empty. ‘Derry looked so much more prosperous and its people so much more relaxed, so much happier, it felt like an entirely different place. It was a wonderful feeling to drink in.

The Good Friday Agreement is now regarded as a template for resolving such entrenched conflicts. Every time the UK government or the DUP takes a swipe at undercutting it, I feel angry. Peace in Northern Ireland is still fragile and imperfect, but on the whole it is indeed peace where not long ago the country was permeated with bloodshed, hatred and fear. This peace is precious.

Happy birthday to the Good Friday Agreement. May it have many more.