The Constitution Unit today publishes a new report examining diverse perspectives on the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Through interviews, focus groups, and documentary analysis, it reveals different understandings, preferences, hopes, and fears, in Northern Ireland and beyond. As efforts continue to restore Northern Ireland’s power-sharing institutions, authors Alan Renwick and Conor J. Kelly argue that only by listening to these many viewpoints can progress be made.

Recent months have seen numerous celebrations marking the 25^th anniversary of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement. After decades of violence, the Agreement brought peace and relative political stability to Northern Ireland. Emerging after years of effort by both the British and Irish governments, and actors in Northern Ireland, it was approved by large majorities in referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It is a unique and carefully constructed document, and it remains the cornerstone of consensual politics in Northern Ireland today.

Yet the Agreement also faces serious challenges. Some aspects have not functioned as imagined in 1998, or indeed been implemented at all. The main ‘Strand 1’ institutions established through the Agreement – the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive – have repeatedly collapsed or been suspended. They last functioned in early 2022, and negotiations to restore them are ongoing as we write. Tensions generated by Brexit and the Protocol have created a period of fractious politics that has been deeply destructive of trust. As Alan Whysall has repeatedly warned on this blog, the situation is grave.

One key lesson of the 1998 Agreement is that progress is best made in Northern Ireland through broad consensus. Building consensus, in turn, requires understanding of the diverse range of perspectives that different actors bring to the table. Yet such understanding is sometimes lacking. As scholars based in London, we are acutely aware that few politicians in Great Britain today have invested much time in understanding Northern Ireland’s politics deeply. The same can also be said to a large degree in Dublin. Within Northern Ireland, meanwhile, as is true in any polarised context, there is some tendency for all sides to ‘other’ those with different perspectives, rather than to seek to understand why others think as they do.

Our new report therefore seeks, very simply, to set out evidence on how the 1998 Agreement is seen, both by politicians and other elite actors, and by the general public in Northern Ireland. We hope that doing so will assist those currently working to restore the institutions and rejuvenate the Agreement.

We present three sets of evidence. First, we examine what party manifestos in Northern Ireland have said about the Agreement since 1998, covering 13 manifestos each from the five main parties over the past 25 years. It is striking how much change has occurred in that period. There were sharp differences between the parties over the Agreement in the early years after 1998. Indeed, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) had opposed the Agreement in that year’s referendum. These differences eased after the St Andrews Agreement of 2006/7, which enabled the first extended period of stable devolved government, between 2007 and 2017. In these years, the Agreement became the settled will across the parties for how Northern Ireland would be governed. Being increasingly taken for granted, it was discussed much less than before. Since then, however, amidst Brexit and renewed institutional instability, contentious debates surrounding the Agreement have returned to the manifestos. The consensus that the Agreement is ‘the only game in town’ for Northern Ireland’s future still holds, but it has been shaken, and there are widespread, if often undefined, calls for reform.

The second set of evidence comes from 20 interviews conducted over the past two years with politicians, officials, and other experts from across the UK and Ireland. In part, these interviews confirm the patterns seen in the manifestos. Notably, they highlight again the consensus among elite actors that the Agreement will continue to provide the only viable framework for politics in Northern Ireland over the foreseeable future. But anonymous interviews allow participants to speak more freely than can political parties in their manifestos, so they also yield deeper insights too. They show, for example, that, though the Agreement’s second and third strands – covering North/South cooperation on the island of Ireland and East/West cooperation across these islands – have received little attention in manifestos, they are widely seen as important to the functioning of the Agreement.

The interviews also reveal several significant anxieties. Many interviewees expressed worries that, while the Agreement has brought tremendous improvements in terms of greater peace and enhanced prosperity, some parts of society have largely missed out on those gains. Concerns about parts of the loyalist community were particularly widespread. Some interviewees, despite seeing a need for reform, worried that any attempt to amend one part of the Agreement could cause others to unravel as well. Most broadly, there was general disquiet with lack of engagement in Northern Ireland by both the British and Irish governments in recent years. Such engagement was seen as essential to resolving the current set of political difficulties; but levels of knowledge and interest in London and Dublin are not what they were during the peace process.

As researchers, we found the focus groups with members of the public in Northern Ireland particularly fascinating. The report quotes extensively from what participants said, and reading these gives great insights into people’s priorities, hopes, and fears. As is true in all democracies – and as our ongoing Democracy in the UK after Brexit project has explored for the UK as a whole – most people do not think much about political institutions, and they therefore have few thoughts on how the details of the Agreement’s various strands might be reformed. But people do care about how politics is conducted. In all eight of our focus groups – which spanned across Northern Ireland’s nationalist, republican, unionist, loyalist, and non-aligned communities – participants expressed deep anger that, during the suspension of the institutions, Northern Ireland’s politicians continued to be paid while, as participants saw it, not doing their jobs. This fed a deep sense that politicians were a class apart who served their own interests. Most people focused primarily on day-to-day issues – the cost of living and quality of public services – not constitutional issues, and they wanted politicians to get on with delivering on matters such as healthcare and education.

Most focus group participants supported the Agreement and the principle of power-sharing. They saw it, above all, as having brought peace and made life much safer and easier. Many talked of how it was possible to move around cities and towns and visit shops today without worrying about security. In two of the groups, however, very different perspectives were voiced. One of these groups included harder-line unionists, who were overwhelmingly hostile to the Agreement. They returned again and again throughout the discussion to the idea that the Agreement was about the release of paramilitary prisoners – which they strongly resented. The other group comprised loyalists. They had supported the Agreement initially, but had become increasingly disillusioned. They expressed a deep sense of betrayal by the British government, which they thought had no understanding of their lives.

The report concludes by highlighting four key points, the first two of which are already apparent from our discussion above. First, notwithstanding recent difficulties, an elite consensus – which we share – holds that the Agreement is ‘the only game in town’ for Northern Ireland’s future. Second, however, while most members of the wider public in Northern Ireland accept that consensus view, some do not. Ensuring that the benefits of peace are shared by everyone still needs work. The starting point for that needs to be good, stable governance, and more attention to the social and economic deprivation that many people in Northern Ireland continue to live with.

Third, while the Agreement provides the framework, there is general agreement that change is needed: that the status quo is not sustainable. People want government in Northern Ireland to work better, and most want to consign sectarian politics to the past. These are important aspirations.

Finally, however, there is also fear of change: fear that things will get worse rather than better, that the ‘other side’ will gain while one’s own side loses. Such fear reflects a lack of trust – between politicians of different parties, between voters and their elected representatives (particularly within unionism and loyalism), between Dublin and London, between politicians and voters in Northern Ireland and the two governments, and, perhaps most importantly, between the different communities in Northern Ireland. Change is needed, but change needs trust. In order to make progress in the coming years, political leadership from London, Dublin, and the major political parties will have a vital role in rebuilding trust. That will require them, above all, to listen, and to work by the Agreement’s ethos of respecting difference, sharing power, and seeking consensual ways forward.

If that endeavour succeeds, there is an opportunity for Northern Ireland to return to the trajectory of incremental progress that we saw during the peace process, in the early years of the Agreement, and again between 2007 and 2016. If it fails, this risks further undermining what remains a world-leading example of how to bring peace to a divided society.

Perspectives on the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement: Examining Diverse Views, 1998–2023, by Alan Renwick and Conor J. Kelly, is now available on the Constitution Unit website.

About the authors

Alan Renwick is Professor of Democratic Politics at UCL and Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit.

Conor J. Kelly is an ESRC-funded PhD student at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Research Assistant at the Constitution Unit. He is a Visiting Researcher at the WZB (Berlin Social Science Center) for the summer of 2023.

Featured image: View of Derry/Londonderry, with the Peace Bridge and Guildhall, by ronniejcmc. Stock photo ID: 1434980132.