Nationalists are being allowed to take ownership of Good Friday Agreement

How many times have politicians here invoked the Good Friday Agreement whilst demanding they get something at odds with it?
By The Newsroom
Published 10th Sep 2020, 17:00 BST
The 1998 agreement got the Irish government to recognise partition yet we are told there can be no land borderThe 1998 agreement got the Irish government to recognise partition yet we are told there can be no land border
The 1998 agreement got the Irish government to recognise partition yet we are told there can be no land border

How many times have politicians here invoked the Good Friday Agreement whilst demanding they get something at odds with it?

How many times during the Brexit process have we heard that the Good Friday Agreement prohibits a border on the island of Ireland?

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This is said despite the obvious fact that the agreement got the government of the Republic to recognise partition as legitimate?

Letter to the editorLetter to the editor
Letter to the editor

This is far from the only anti-agreement stance coming from nationalists who claim to be for it.

Complete dismissal of three strands, confusing citizenship with identity, complaints when licences are revoked and now apparently state aid rules will reignite sectarian conflict.

The mainstream media have failed to challenge this narrative.

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Have those who proposed this narrative defended it with quotations from the agreed text?

No, but with vague notions of John Hume and the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement.

Nationalism has reframed, reimagined and even renamed the very agreement that we have based our relationship on and they are getting away with it.

Has anyone asked how they can talk about mutual respect whilst gaslighting unionists about what they agreed too?

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We cannot allow nationalists to unilateral decide on a new direction and barrage us into going down a route we didn’t consent to.

We need to hold our co-travellers to that path they agreed with us in 1998.

To do this we need to put aside our old differences on whether we accept the agreement or not; the people of Northern Ireland have already decided that.

We must learn it inside and out, and when issues of identity, citizenship, sovereignty or trade pop up, we remind each other what was really agreed between all parties.

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We must tell them that respect for only part of the agreement will undermine it as a whole, our agreed way forward and John Hume’s vision of mutual respect.

If we do not and we continue to allow nationalism to own our agreement, then we will see worse things than a border in the Irish Sea.

Joshua Lowry,

Bessbrook

Related topics:John HumeNorthern IrelandBrexitIrish Sea