The compromise that mostly ended 30 years of carnage has endured and even won over some who opposed it. Yet there are deep divisions still
President Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and other global leaders will soon be in Belfast, marking the deal’s 25th anniversary on April 10th. There is much to celebrate. You can see the accord’s traces in the city’s very architecture: without the fear of bombs, there are glazed structures on nearly every street. You can taste them, too: where once a ring of steel kept out not only bombers but also diners, the Michelin guide recommends 18 restaurants. They have fostered friendship and even love.
It was enough for almost three-quarters of a population worn down by incessant atrocities. In referendums six weeks later 71% of voters in Northern Ireland and 94% in the Republic of Ireland voted for the agreement. The Democratic Unionist Party furiously opposed the deal. Now it is the main unionist group, thecites it in defence of its interests.
Some have forgiven the unforgivable. Jude Whyte, whose mother was murdered by a loyalist bomb in 1984, sees no benefit in jailing her killer. Others cannot. Standing at the spot by the family cottage where his father was shot by thein 1985, Sammy Heenan remembers the “haunting and dying screams” outside his bedroom window. He didn’t welcome the accord: “I was absolutely devastated and distraught.”
Peace has surely been good for the economy, if not as good as you may have hoped. Between 1998 and 2019 Northern Ireland’s. But despite closer economic integration on the island, the Republic of Ireland’s economy grew half as fast again .Even so, to pace the modern streets of Belfast’s Titanic quarter is to walk through the Northern Ireland that the agreement made possible. The site of the doomed liner’s construction had by 1998 become a post-industrial wasteland.
Even when functioning, devolved government has lurched between the plodding and the preposterous. The collapse before the latest one, which lasted three years, came in 2017 after the “cash for ash” scandal. Those in the know had piled into a green-energy scheme in which Stormont paid £1.60 for every £1-worth of fuel burned. An inquiry cleared anyone of corruption, but the incompetence revealed was shocking enough.
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