Good Friday Agreement
The Good Friday Agreement was signed on 10 April 1998 and ended thirty years of conflict that had killed about 3,500 people. The Troubles had begun in the late 1960s with a civil rights campaign against discrimination in housing, employment and electoral boundaries in a Northern Ireland governed continuously by one party since 1921, and had become a war between the IRA, loyalist paramilitaries and the British state. The negotiations that ended it ran for two years under George Mitchell and were made possible by the IRA ceasefire of 1994 and by both governments accepting that they could not win. The settlement rests on three strands: a power-sharing assembly at Stormont in which the largest unionist and nationalist parties must govern together, a north-south council with the Republic, and a British-Irish council. Its central device is the principle of consent. Northern Ireland remains in the United Kingdom while a majority there wishes it, and Britain undertakes to legislate for unification if a majority votes for it, which allowed both communities to accept the settlement without abandoning their objective. The Republic amended its constitution to drop the territorial claim, prisoners were released within two years, the police were reformed and renamed, and decommissioning was left deliberately vague. It was approved by 71 per cent in the north and 94 per cent in the south. The assembly has collapsed and been restored repeatedly since, and the border question was reopened by Brexit in 2016. The agreement is studied elsewhere as a model and its transferable part is the smallest one. It did not settle the constitutional question at all; it converted it from something to fight over into something to vote on at an unspecified future date, and everything else followed from both sides accepting that.
- Year: 1998 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
