Why was the Good Friday Agreement so hard to implement?: lessons from ‘Groundhog Day’, 1998–2002

Abstract

When I was a young civil servant in the Home Office in the 1970s, I served as secretary to a committee chaired by Lord Franks, arguably the most distinguished British public servant of the postwar generation. When I came to draft the committee's report, his instructions were for me to write to be understood by an interested general reader, of reasonable intelligence, ‘who was paying attention’. I am not sure how many general readers there will be for a book of reflections by former servants of the British Government in Northern Ireland, but I have tried to follow that prescription here. This is not a memoir of my time in Northern Ireland. I do not believe that civil servants should write memoirs, and, even if I did, most of the decent anecdotes have already been told by Jonathan Powell and other chroniclers of the period. What it is, is an attempt, after a gap of more than ten years – most of it spent in other busy jobs in Whitehall – to order my own thoughts about what was actually going on in the turbulent period between the conclusion of the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement (which, to avoid needless controversy, will from here on be referred to as ‘the Agreement’) on 10 April 1998 and the collapse of the institutions, for the third time, on 14 October 2002. Although not a politician myself, my perspective on these events is political and practical rather than historical or theoretical. As a civil servant, I was always at the pragmatic end of the spectrum, interested principally in what works (and what does not) and how outcomes can be delivered in the real world. The approach I have adopted is to start with some basic facts about the Agreement, which I believe are essential to an understanding of what was going on, and then offer a highly compressed account of the main efforts to break the deadlock over decommissioning and devolution.