Blazing vehicles set alight
We woke up every morning to a news report...
...that there was a bombing or a shooting
Petrol-bomb attacks on shops have been condemned...
...as senseless acts of violence
There was such an appetite...
...and such a want for people in Northern Ireland to say...
...there’s going to be no more
25 years ago, a historic deal brought peace to Northern Ireland...
...saving thousands of lives
Today, I hope that the burden of history can at long last start...
...to be lifted from our shoulders
I can still see the document in my head now, when we’re speaking
You could feel a weight collectively lifting from society
But a generation later, how well is the Good Friday Agreement still working?
A peace agreement is not a fairy story
You don’t get to live happily ever after
The security service, MI5, today raised the terror threat in Northern Ireland to severe
There is this glorification of violence, of the violence of the past
It’s younger people who have decided to take...
...on that trauma for themselves and decided that’s our war
What needs to be done to preserve the hard-won peace?
The best way to keep the peace is to make sure that people have a job...
...that they have something that they’re contributing...
...to that’s bigger than them
And does the price of peace have to be bad government?
There has been this lurching instability
Stormont is up, then it’s down
For a population that has grown up in peace...
...they want something better...
...and they are the people who are increasingly pushing for change
Belfast’s Titanic Quarter, a tech and tourism hub
Blockbuster fantasy “Game of Thrones” was shot here...
...and attractions like the Titanic Centre...
...welcome hundreds of thousands of people every year
None of this would have been possible without the Good Friday Agreement
It was a piece of high politics...
...but actually it has transformed Northern Irish society
It has meant that, for instance, the architecture is different in Belfast...
...there are lots of glass buildings...
...something which would have been madness during the Troubles...
...because bombs were going off
There’s more inward investment, there are better jobs
This has had a practical impact on people’s lives...
...in ways that lots of people in Northern Ireland don’t necessarily think about
So how did the Good Friday Agreement achieve this transformation?
Well, to understand that, you need to go back to 1921...
...when the border was drawn by the British
It gave most of Ireland independence...
...but meant six northern counties remained part of the UK
Most people here were Protestants who supported the union...
...and the system was designed to work in their favour
The police were 90% Protestant...
...as were most judges, and the government was majority rule...
...meaning unionists would always be in control
In the 1960s, inspired by the American civil-rights movement...
...some Catholics began demanding change
And the violence they met—from loyalists intent on keeping Northern Ireland...
...under unionist control, the police and the British Army...
...helped spark the 30 years of conflict known as the Troubles
For the entirety of its existence in Northern Ireland...
...the Catholics had never been allowed any power
So the point of the agreement...
...Good Friday agreement, was to have power-sharing...
...so the minority Catholics could participate in government
The agreement promised to reform the police...
...overhaul the justice system...
...and create a totally new form of government...
...which meant no community could dominate another
It was an unprecedented achievement
Jonathan Powell was the British government’s chief negotiator
We were negotiating for three days and nights without sleep, essentially
People were getting slightly hysterical
The truth was we could have lost it at any period
It took another nine years of negotiation...
...to get the institutions...
...up and running and get the agreement fully implemented
In the decade after 1998, paramilitaries decommissioned their weapons...
...and the deal protected the delicate issue of identity
People here could now choose to be British, Irish or both
And it was written into the agreement...
...that Northern Ireland’s place in the UK would only change...
...if the majority of people here wanted it to
The Troubles had been going on for so long...
...they appeared intractable...
...something that just was always going to be a problem and was insoluble
And the Good Friday Agreement transformed that
The impact was remarkable
At the height of the Troubles, over 200 people were being killed every year...
...but it is now closer to 20
The Good Friday, the Belfast Agreement, is a symbol of peace still around the world
Have we finished it? Absolutely not
But in terms of large-scale violence, in terms of those images...
...the fact there’s not people being murdered every day...
...then that’s a huge success
But there was one event...
...the architects of the agreement could not have predicted
Brexit
We’ve got our country back
When the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016...
...the status of Northern Ireland became fiercely contentious
No borders, no barriers, no Brexit
No borders
To avoid a hard border within Ireland...
...Prime Minister Boris Johnson proposed a trade border in the Irish Sea
This angered unionists who saw it as a barrier between...
...Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK
It did add to polarisation here...
...because a large part of the unionist community voted to leave...
...a large part of the nationalist community voted to remain
In Northern Ireland, 56% of people voted remain
It was a sense of a loss of identity that was being taken off people...
...and I suspect that...
...it will continue to be hard to disentangle that vote...
...from the future prospects of this place
No borders, no Boris, no Brexit
What Boris Johnson really individually managed to do...
...was get the issue of identity back into politics...
...which is extremely dangerous in Northern Ireland
This tenser atmosphere has made it harder to heal the grievances of the past...
...and some believe the nature of the Good Friday Agreement itself...
...means it’s impossible to move on
We’re just going up here...
...to my wee homestead in Legananny in rural County Down
Sammy Heenan was just 12 years old...
...when his father was killed by the Irish Republican Army...
...the IRA, in 1985
He was alone with him in their remote farmhouse at the time
A lone gunman who’d been hiding behind a wall...
...shot Mr Heenan once in the head
So I just followed the trail of blood round the side of the barn along here...
...and as I come round the corner, my father was lying dead, at this point
And I just stood over him and I just looked...
...and I started to sob and cry because I did not know what else to do
All I could do then was run down the street...
...and down half a mile down the road to a neighbour’s house...
...to raise the alarm
No one was ever tried for the murder of Sammy’s father...
...and under the terms of the agreement, if anyone were to be convicted...
...they would only serve two years
That was the earthquake for victims...
...and I feel that we have been suffering the aftershocks ever since
The agreement also meant that paramilitary prisoners were released...
The man coming through the turnstile at the Maze is Bernard McGinn...
...IRA sniper and bomb-maker
...even those serving life sentences for attacks during the Troubles...
For Sammy, this felt like an insult to his father’s memory
I think victims have felt let down and very much betrayed as a consequence
And he believes this has led some of the next generation to romanticise the conflict
We’re supposed be in an era of inclusivity and respect between our two traditions...
...but sadly today many young people have a very glorified narrative...
...around the troubles of our past
Sectarian violence remains a problem here
The UK recently upgraded the threat level in Northern Ireland...
...because of ongoing attacks, including the shooting of policeman John Caldwell
Wearing masks and armed with a gun...
...they fired several shots at him in front of his son
Sammy has been helping the children who were there that day
I totally empathised with them young people...
...when I spoke to them, because I could feel the pain and it brought me back...
...to when I was a 12-year-old boy
But this is very different from the violence of the 1980s
Violence that happens now does not have political support
The reason we had to negotiate with Sinn Fein...
...in the end was even at the height of the Troubles...
...they had genuine support
These fractional groups we’re dealing with now have no support
Less than a thousand people would even sympathise with what they’re doing
This is not a political issue...
...that’s a criminal issue that needs to be dealt with
Thanks to the Good Friday Agreement...
...many community groups have been established...
...to try to tackle the problem of sectarianism
This is PeacePlayers in north Belfast
It’s really hard to actually talk to someone from a different religion...
...because it’s kind of frowned upon to mix
I went to a Protestant school and coming here I was a wee bit scared of the integration
Society here remains deeply segregated
The children at this game go to separate Catholic and Protestant schools...
...like almost all kids in Northern Ireland
In fact, just 9% of post-primary pupils attend integrated schools...
...and 90% of social housing is also segregated
There’s still a lot of conflict between the areas
As a Catholic girl walking into places like the Shankill estate...
...is a really scary thing to do
There’s a lot of times where you just go into an area...
...and someone catches wind that...
...or they recognise you from the other side...
...and they’ll verbally or physically attack you...
...and it is a really scary thing
And there are other, more obvious emblems of division...
...like the peace walls that separate Catholic and Protestant communities
The barriers still exist, the divisions are still there
We still have peace lines in Belfast which...
...are dominating the skyline and keeping our traditions apart
The Good Friday Agreement created lots of opportunities...
...for lots of projects like PeacePlayers to be able to happen
But also I think there’s still a journey to be travelled
Hello, I’m Patrick Lane, I’m The Economist’s Deputy digital editor
If you want to read more of our Northern Ireland coverage...
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And now, back to the film
This isn’t just about peace walls, though
The bigger problem is that since the Good Friday Agreement...
...there hasn’t been stable government long enough...
...to give people paths out of violence
Sorcha Eastwood represents Lagan Valley...
...just outside Belfast, in the devolved Stormont assembly
One thing that I would like to see more of...
...is actually investment in our town
Jobs for our young people, apprenticeships and stuff like that
That all sounds really normal, but for some reason...
...we can’t manage to get it together to actually enable people...
...like me to deliver that for my constituents
Under the terms of power-sharing set up after 1998...
...unionists and nationalists must govern together
And if either side walks away the government collapses
It’s a bit like Donald Trump and Joe Biden being asked to govern together
It is a system of mutual vetoes, of almost mutually assured destruction
But the ultimate nuclear option here is for one of those big parties to walk away
Both sides have pulled the system down in the past
The Assembly has collapsed six times since 1998...
...leaving Northern Ireland without a government for almost ten years
This time, the Democratic Unionist Party...
...or DUP has walked out over post-Brexit negotiations
We are totally opposed to the protocol as it presently exists
We will neither accept it nor will we work it
Without an Assembly, we can’t do anything
And I can see the decisions stacking up day after day after day...
...and looking at it and going, this is not right
This political paralysis has hit public services
In 2020, 40% of people on National Health Service waiting lists in Northern Ireland...
...had been waiting over a year for an appointment...
...compared with just 0.1% of people in England
We have a situation where perversely people are no longer dying because of bullets...
...and bombs for the most part...
...but they are dying because good government is not happening
The way the Assembly works is also out of step with how people are voting
Centrist parties—not defined by being unionist or nationalist—are gaining ground
Sorcha’s party—Alliance—is now the third-largest in the Assembly
We weren’t, I don’t want to say...
...burdened, but we certainly were not coming at our politics...
...from a main driver of a constitutional end-game
But because Alliance is neither unionist nor nationalist...
...their votes don’t count
The rules that were drawn up in 1998 were there to protect unionism and nationalism...
...from bad behaviour, essentially, by one or the other
It didn’t really foresee the idea that there might be a third tribe
When it comes to a big vote in the Assembly on something like the budget...
...the key thing is getting a majority of unionists...
...a majority of nationalists—and others don’t count...
...and that’s a significant problem...
...now, where others are a significant force in Northern Irish politics
Alliance are now campaigning for reform of the system
We are simply asking that those very modest reforms to the Good Friday Agreement...
...could enable us to unlock so much peace and potential and prosperity...
...and fairness, utimately
The stakes for getting this right could not be higher
The generation born after the Troubles...
...are asking for more than just peace
We don’t have a government system that actually is set in stone and is working
For the future I don’t think I’m really staying in Northern Ireland
And if reform is done right, there is remarkable potential here
I’m long-term very optimistic
I think the Good Friday Agreement has essentially worked...
...and that’s not true of many peace agreements
I think Northern Ireland’s got huge possibilities economically...
...having this advantage of being in the European market...
...and the British market, educated labour force, relatively low housing prices
If we can sort out the political instability...
...the future of Northern Ireland is fantastic
The challenge now is how to harness the ambition of 1998...
...to create a more stable political system...
...one that will support the next 25 years of peace
I’m Sam McBride and I write about Northern Ireland for The Economist
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