The Good Friday Agreement

Abstract

The Northern Ireland peace process has faced a daunting summer, in which political breakdown has coincided with civil unrest. Hard-line elements from each side have pressured unionists and nationalists to abandon the Good Friday Agreement, which inter alia provides for a devolved power-sharing government in Northern Ireland and cross-border agencies jointly run by the Northern Ireland assembly and the Irish parliament. The Agreement could perish over the logjams concerning both terrorist disarmament, or 'decommissioning', and police reform. There remains a substantial chance that the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) will decide that decommissioning sufficient to unionists would constitute intolerable republican heresy. In that event, restoring effective devolution under the Good Friday Agreement would be unlikely. The most immediate question is whether the level of violence in Northern Ireland can remain low enough during an open-ended period of effective direct rule to preserve the possibility of an eventual return to devolution under a negotiated arrangement other than the Agreement.