Lack of Troubles-related murders in 2023 shows benefits of Good Friday Agreement says UUP man - while opponent of the deal asks why it took 25 years to achieve

Although there had been three killings in 1966, and disorder in the years that followed, 1967 and ‘68 brought no fatalities.

As such, the Troubles is often taken to have begun in 1969 when the deadly violence really began to rise with 16 killings – peaking in 1972 at almost 500.

However, the lack of paramilitary killings in 2023 was not for want of trying; among the crimes committed by republicans during the year was the New IRA murder bid against DCI John Caldwell, who survived despite being shot repeatedly.

Sir Reg Empey, one of David Trimble’s key aides at the time the 1998 Belfast Agreement was signed, said of the lack of murders: “My first reaction is thank God. And hopefully it will continue in this way.

"It's quite a significant feature, and a welcome one. But it would be foolish to make the mistake of assuming all is well when it's clearly not.

"I just hope it doesn't generate a sense of complacency - we need to bear down on this problem, rather than throttling back, because we want to ensure it doesn't start again.”

Is it a vindication of the 1998 deal?

"If you look at the gory details of the statistics and take the 25 years before the agreement and the 25 years after it, it's like chalk and cheese: it really is a completely different picture.

"It's far from perfect because if you're simply measuring deaths that's one thing, but of course a lot of the subculture surrounding the paramilitaries hasn't gone away, and has morphed into crime and racketeering and drugs.

"Complacency would be wrong. But nobody could deny the fact that from the point the agreement was entered into there's been a steady improvement.

"Any agreement that you do negotiate under those circumstances has its flaws, and the Belfast Agreement is no exception.

"But if you look at the statistics, the difference is stark.”

Jim Allister, a former DUP man who quit the party and formed the TUV in 2007 in protest at the DUP sharing power with Sinn Fein.

On the lack of Troubles murders in 2023, he told the News Letter: “It's striking the fact it took 25 years post what was supposed to be a peace agreement.”

He added: “Of course, if you were a terrorist killing for the purpose of an all-Ireland, and then are gifted a place at the top of government [and could] use that process to advance your cause and could still be controlled by the same army council that directed the killings, then as a terrorist you might well find that attractive.

"There should be no reward for stopping doing what you never should have been doing in the first place.

"That seems to me to be the underlying fallacy in all of this: that suddenly we are to heap praise and thanksgiving on those who stopped killing, when they should never have been killing in the first place.”

The 1998 deal “was an agreement under which, we now know from the Supreme Court, you can salami slice the Union out of existence without anyone's consent as is happening under the Protocol – that doesn't seem to be anything we should be showing a lot of pride in.”