Northern Ireland’s ‘Good Friday agreement’ ten years on
THE RECENT tenth anniversary of the signing of the
Good Friday agreement was marked by a series of high profile events and
much mutual back-slapping. The politicians who negotiated the agreement
were lauded by the media and, once again, the ‘solution’ to Northern
Ireland’s problems was touted as a blueprint for similar intractable
problems around the world.
The reality is that the agreement is not a solution
or even the basis for a solution. It is an agreement to carve up power,
not to share it. The parties on each side of the sectarian divide differ
on every matter of substance, so far as sectarian issues are concerned,
though, of course, the parties agree in the main on economic and social
policies.
To illustrate the deep divisions which undermine all
attempts to bring about a lasting solution, it is worth looking back at
the years before and after the signing of the agreement. It took four
years from the first IRA ceasefire in 1994 before the agreement was
signed. Between 1994 and 1998 the violence continued, albeit at a lower
rate than before the ceasefire. New ‘peace-lines’ (high concrete and
metal walls dividing Catholic and Protestant working-class communities)
were built as sectarian conflict exploded over the routing of Protestant
Orange Order marches, in particular the Drumcree parade.
The signing of the agreement changed nothing – again
the violence continued. The worst single event was the Omagh bombing, in
August 1998, in which 29 people died. Conflict over parades and clashes
at interfaces were the backdrop to daily life. The problems the
agreement avoided or attempted to paper over came back to haunt the main
parties and it took nine years from the signing before a ‘stable’
executive was formed in May 2007.
Alongside continuing violence and deepening
sectarian division, the living standards of working people have not
improved in the last ten years. Despite all the talk of an economic
‘peace dividend’ in 1998 there are still fewer adults (as a percentage
of the total number) employed in Northern Ireland than anywhere in
England, Scotland or Wales.
Soon after the tenth anniversary of the agreement,
Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, and Northern Ireland Assembly first
minister, Peter Robinson, announced 5,000 finance jobs for Belfast. This
announcement was like many others in the last ten years. There have been
repeated announcements which have never led to any real jobs, or which
lead to fewer jobs than originally announced. The vast majority of new
jobs have, in any case, been poorly paid and tens of thousands of
manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the same period. With the US now
in recession, and much of the rest of the world likely to follow, there
will be no economic dividend in the next period.
For now there has been a decrease in sectarian
conflict. Isolated attacks, including several near murderous attacks
recently, continue but there has been no outbreak of widespread conflict
since the violence that erupted after the Whiterock parade in Belfast,
in October 2005.
A period of relative peace, even a prolonged peace,
does not mean that division on the ground has gone away. The current
situation will not continue indefinitely. Renewed conflict is possible
at any time. And if there is relative peace it is not because the
agreement has ‘worked’ but because the vast majority of working-class
people are opposed to any return to conflict.
The working class and young people cannot rely on
the Assembly to deliver lasting peace, a decrease in sectarian division
or improved living standards, but must instead rely on their own
strength. The working class created the peace process in the first place
through its mass opposition to the paramilitary campaigns and its
demands for a better future. This opposition was expressed through a
series of mass demonstrations and strikes in the late 1980s and early
1990s. In the first period, these strikes were mostly initiated by
members of Militant, the forerunner of the Socialist Party. At a certain
point, the leaders of the trade union movement came in behind the
demonstrations and strikes.
When the ceasefires came, the working class lacked a
mass independent party of its own and was not represented at the talks
table. A mass working-class party is still lacking and the leadership of
the trade unions has abdicated all responsibility for the lives and the
futures of working-class people in Northern Ireland, choosing instead to
cosy-up to the Assembly parties. The working class deserves trade union
leaders who are prepared to fight. Creating such a leadership requires
the ejection of most of the current leaders from their positions.
Working-class people need their own party: a mass
party which attracts support by posing an alternative to the right-wing
policies of the executive and which seeks to overcome sectarian division
not cement it.
Ciaran Mulholland, Socialist Party (CWI Ireland)
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