Abstract
Twenty years beyond its signing, the Good Friday Agreement remains the cornerstone of ‘peace’ in Northern Ireland, even as it has faced political, social, and cultural challenges. Despite the lack of renewed violence in the region since 1998, the Good Friday Agreement left many issues unaddressed, hampered by the region’s reality as a ‘deeply divided society’ and ultimately a ‘negative peace’. This article seeks to address the reasons peace has failed to flourish in the region, claiming that a ‘peace process’ ultimately concerned with governmental structures and paramilitary ceasefire was inadequate to truly resolve the conflict, resulting in the endurance of tensions into the present. As a result, the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement is a social stalemate from which the region cannot progress. Northern Ireland remains polarised by many of the same differences visible at the start of the Troubles half a century ago, as old divisions play out in new ways. This has resulted in a ‘culture war’, further dividing the populace. Current political instability in both Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom continue to challenge the tentative peace in the region, raising doubts that such divisions can be reasonably overcome.
Highlights
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This article moves beyond this potential binary, arguing that while the Good Friday Agreement has been successful in achieving a significant milestone, this does not excuse it from critique
Despite the perceived worsening of divisions, Barritt and Carter observed these differences did not prevent individuals from living in close contact, seemingly happily, with those from the opposite tradition (Barritt & Carter, 1962: 2). Such patterns remain visible today, with 77% of those surveyed by the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey indicating that they would be happy to live in a mixedreligion neighbourhood, while a smaller percentage (62%) indicated their opinion that Catholics and Protestants did not lead parallel lives regarding issues like shops to frequent and medical practices with which to register (NILTS, 2016)
Summary
Twenty years beyond its signing, the Good Friday Agreement remains the cornerstone of ‘peace’ in Northern Ireland, even as it has faced political, social, and cultural challenges. ‘Negative peace’ refers to the condition of peace in which violence is managed or reduced, but the conflict has yet to be transformed (Galtung, 1967) This allows for the continuance of past structures and fails to address the root causes of conflict — facts that, this article argues, make ‘peace’ in Northern Ireland more illusory than realised today. This can be seen in the fact that the paramilitary ceasefire has endured and power-sharing has intermittently held, but civil society remains divided in many respects by the same patterns that initially fuelled the conflict. The ultimate legacy of the Good Friday Agreement, is that ‘peace’ in some form has held over the last two decades; this must not be discounted even in discussions of how it can be improved
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