Northern Ireland wants to move forward. But 25 years after the Good Friday accord celebrated by Clinton and Biden, many are mired in a painful past.
On a visit to Belfast, President Biden urged Northern Ireland to seize the economic opportunities of peace, saying the progress is ‘just beginning.’
“There’s no consensus, really, on what took place and what it all meant,” said Sandra Peake, who heads Northern Ireland’s largest support network for Troubles victims and survivors. “So it can be hard to see a common way forward.”More than anything, Fiona Kelly fears coming face to face with her father’s convicted killer, who lives in her same small town. Under a prisoner release mandated by the Good Friday accord, he was freed after two years.
“I realized that this massive section of the community was paying the price of everyone else’s peace,” said the 54-year-old artist, who lives outside Belfast. Davidson found his subjects by working with a trauma center called WAVE, which has provided material and mental-health support to thousands of people coping with the Troubles’ aftermath. He and its specialists found subjects of different faiths and from different walks of life, from inside and outside Northern Ireland.
Martin Mulholland well remembers the surreal sight: He was looking, impossibly, from his hotel concierge desk straight onto the main stage of Belfast’s Opera House. “Somehow you got used to it — it all seemed normal,” said Mulholland, whose 58 years have been bisected by the Troubles and the post-Good Friday era. “But of course it wasn’t, not in any way.”In Belfast’s central core, the rattle of gunfire and the heavy tread of British military vehicles has long been replaced by coffeehouse chatter, art-house buzz and the din of construction.
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