Belfast Agreement @25: The process realised that our biggest problem was disturbed relationships, not disagreements about the border - John Alderdice

In a speech in the House of Lords on the twentieth anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, the former Northern Ireland Office Minister, Chris Patten, now Lord Patten of Barnes, and Chancellor of the University of Oxford, described the Agreement, as “one of the biggest achievements in post-war British politics, without any question at all”. I travel a good deal and I find that people in some of the world’s most intractable conflicts still look to our experience for guidance in addressing the violence that plagues their communities. However, at home many people take peace for granted and some are critical of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) despite the sheer awfulness of the decades of violence that went before.

By 1998, I had been the leader of the Alliance Party for 11 years and was deeply aware of the patient, steadfast commitment, of a relatively small number of politicians, civil servants, and community leaders from across ‘the divide’ to negotiating an end to our conflict. In the later part of the process, we had been in talks on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, week after week, month after month, and indeed year after year, but even in the run-up to Easter 1998 there was no certainty of an agreement. I remember saying at the talks table that one of the things we shared was the criticism of the press and public outside that we were all playing a charade, with few believing that anything would come of the talks. While the media description was often markedly different from what was actually going on inside, the uncertainty that we would ever conclude an agreement was something that was shared, inside and outside Castle Buildings.

It could have continued endlessly, but late in 1997 the chairman of the talks, Senator George Mitchell, who had shown remarkable patience and a nuanced understanding of all our positions, advised us that the following Easter he would have to take his leave of us to spend more time with his young wife and son. We all knew that if George went, the chances of a good outcome were negligible. Who else would give us the time and commitment? How would we find someone like him in whom we could all have confidence? That human relationship with him, and the appreciation of his relationship with his family, somehow created a different dynamic and Good Friday 1998 became, not an imposed deadline, but the limit of our opportunity. The most significant breakthrough in our process had been the recognition that our problems were not primarily a disagreement about the border, nor even the conflicting allegiances, but a reflection of disturbed historic relationships between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists in the North, between the people of the island, North and South, and between Britain and Ireland. Our three-stranded process was constructed to address those three sets of relationships and resulted in three sets of political institutions – the Assembly, the North-South bodies, and the British Irish Inter-Governmental Conference.

Twenty-five years later the reins of political life are in the hands of a new generation who may not appreciate that the agreement represented two overlapping but separate processes. There was a peace process which was about bringing the killing to an end. That has been largely successful. Parents no longer fear that their children going out for a night of fun may be blown up in a pub bombing; cross community killings have largely ended; attacks on the police are massively reduced; the army are off the streets; and civil activity and social life has largely recovered.

The second element was the political process. The ending of the violence gave an opportunity for unionists, nationalists, and others to try by democratic means to persuade their fellow citizens that theirs was a better vision than the others on offer. It was always going to take time for politics to settle down, but Brexit unsteadied it. The GFA had been beginning to take the border out of daily politics and Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised that Brexit would make little change and that he would support the unionist position. He was dishonest and disingenuous on both counts and those unionists who took him at his word have been left high and dry. A divorce usually creates emotional turmoil, and the Europeans and Americans both demonstrated their angry dismay about Brexit, as did the majority of people in Northern Ireland who had voted against it. Some unionists had opposed both the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Good Friday Agreement and supported Brexit, but the sovereign British government makes its decisions from a London perspective. Boris Johnson and the short-lived and even more disastrous premiership of Liz Truss were disposed of, and Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has not only begun the difficult process of steadying the post-Brexit British economy, but has dramatically reset relationships with the European Union and the United States of America. It is no surprise that he received massive votes for his revised Northern Ireland Protocol arrangements in both Houses at Westminster with negligible support for the opposition from unionist parliamentarians.

I think it is not unfair to suggest that nationalists and progressives have made better use of the democratic political process in the last quarter of a century in increasing support for their visions of the future than those that might be called traditional unionists. The Britain to which those unionists gave allegiance has largely gone, and the people living there today feel no emotional attachment to Northern Ireland. Unionists can of course block devolution and with it Strands 1 and 2 of the Good Friday Agreement, but the disappearance of local involvement will leave Strand 3 and a form of de facto joint authority as the only show in town. Unionists would be wise to reflect that every time they have brought down a form of governance, the next iteration has been even less in their interests than what went before.

I hope that this month, as we all reflect on the challenges of implementing peace agreements, and the complexity of managing political processes, this generation of leaders will recover the inspiration and insights with which we addressed our disturbed historic relationships a quarter of a century ago, while appreciating the changing currents of today, and providing the prospect of a better future for our children and grandchildren in a world that has frightening resonances with 1914 and 1939.

• John, Lord Alderdice FRCPsych - Alliance Leader (1987 – 1998), Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly (1998 – 2004), a member of the Independent Monitoring Commission (2004 – 2011), a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords since 1996, Chairman of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords (2010 – 2014), a Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford since 2012 and from 2022 Executive Chairman of The Changing Character of War Centre at Pembroke College, University of Oxford and a Professor of Practice at the University of Wales Trinity St David