Belfast Agreement @ 25: If 1998 deal survives it will have done so with little help from London, writes Owen Polley

The Good Friday deal is still commonly portrayed as a model for other countries that have suffered violence to follow. But, for many reasons, the profit and loss account of the 1998 agreement remains difficult to calculate. The last 25 years have been relatively peaceful and stable in Northern Ireland, which is not a trivial thing. At the same time, we are still plagued by the influence of paramilitary groups, retrospective support for IRA violence is high and a team of economists wrote last week that the economic ‘peace dividend’ here was ‘relatively small’.

Many unionists feel, with justification, that the agreement was implemented in a way that favoured nationalists. That’s partly because unionist parties were slow to promote their interpretations of the document, and use it to boost their case, while Irish separatists and the Dublin government quickly saw the potential of appealing to the ‘spirit’ and ‘context’ of the deal.

Last week, the News Letter looked at many of these arguments through a fascinating series of articles, drawing opinions from across the broadly pro-Union political spectrum. They touched on all kinds of historical and current debates; including where we’ve failed to capitalise on 1998, as well as the ways in which our society has improved. Right now, though, the glaring fact is that the devolved institutions established by the Belfast Agreement are not operating. Indeed, sometimes it seems that Stormont has lurched from crisis to crisis, with only short periods of stability, and achieved little.

There is a heated debate among the unionist parties about whether the DUP was justified in pulling down power-sharing this time. It is undeniable, though, that through the assembly and the executive, ministers were forced to implement decisions that undermined the Union and they could do little to stop that process. It’s claimed that the NI Protocol has either discredited or nullified parts of the Belfast Agreement in two important ways.

Firstly, the principle that important decisions can be taken only with the assent of both unionists and nationalists was set aside to implement the Irish Sea border. In fact, this change was explicitly written into the protocol and the legislation that enacted it at Westminster. In 2024, a simple majority in the assembly can be used to extend the arrangements for four more years.

In addition, the High Court rejected the argument that an executive vote was required to implement controversial aspects of the protocol that ‘cut across’ different ministers’ departments. This is one of the important ways that cross community consensus in our power-sharing system was maintained.

The second unionist argument is that the protocol trashed the ‘principle of consent’, which was supposed to protect our full place in the UK until a majority of people here decided otherwise through a referendum. Before his death, the Belfast Agreement’s unionist architect, Lord Trimble, wrote in the book The Idea of the Union that the Irish Sea border “demolishes (the agreement’s) central premise”. He said he felt “personally betrayed” by the protocol.

The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that the principle of consent applied strictly to NI’s legal status as part of the UK, rather than the substance of the Union. That judgment highlighted two things; the extent to which unionists failed to explain and promote their interpretation of the agreement, and the fact that, ultimately, it could not stop them from being edged further from the social, economic and political mainstream of British life.

You could argue that the new status quo, rather than the Belfast Agreement, is the source of unionists’ rising sense of disillusionment. That’s a fair point, but it’s worth emphasising that the Dublin government, northern nationalists, the EU and British europhiles constantly invoked the 1998 deal, to bolster their case that NI must be bound to the Republic and the single market, rather than the rest of the UK.

These arguments were without legal foundation, but ultimately they were successful. Unionists’ attempts to cite the Belfast Agreement’s actual provisions influenced their own government less than nationalist appeals to its spirit or context. When the historian and former Trimble adviser, Lord Bew, was still analysing the government’s conduct with a critical eye, he expressed incredulity at the way that it had, “allowed the Irish government to control the narrative around the Good Friday Agreement unchallenged”.

The idea that the 1998 deal still worked for unionists received a further blow, when the secretary of state hinted that Stormont could be reformed to get over the DUP’s objections to resurrecting power-sharing. When Sinn Fein refused to form an executive for three years, there was no suggestion that the government might change the agreement to get round its opposition.

The assembly and executive at Stormont will probably, sooner or later, be restored. The principle that unionists and nationalists should share power will also, more than likely, still be the basis of devolved government here. That means that the Belfast Agreement may yet survive, but that has little to do with the recent contributions of Dublin, the EU and, regrettably, our own government at Westminster.