Good Friday Terms 'Have Evaporated' - Report

The moral basis for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has evaporated and the absence of trust in politics has resulted in an absence of progress, according to a new report.

The third Peace Monitoring Report for Northern Ireland has been released by the Community Relations Council.

It said the PSNI are "being used as human shock absorbers for failure elsewhere".

But it recognised that the impulse for reconciliation "remains strong" and L'Derry's year a City of Culture presented "a different understanding of culture compared to a culture war that is being talked in to existence".

The report said long-term needs around educational underachievement within communities with high free school meal entitlement, especially Protestant communities, may create longer term social, economic and political issues if not addressed.

The Peace Monitoring Report was written independently by Dr Paul Nolan and funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

Mr Nolan said: "The last year or so has made it abundantly clear that healing and reconciliation is needed more than ever.

"Twenty years on from the ceasefires Northern Ireland remains a very deeply divided society and those divisions have played out on the ground in recent times in a dangerous and destabilising way.

"Recently in Washington Dr Richard Haass warned that violence could re-emerge as a characteristic of daily life. Yet, no overall agreement has been reached on the outstanding issues."

But Dr Nolan continued: "These facts however do not tell the complete picture. In some ways huge progress has been made. Levels of violence are at their lowest levels for forty years. And the progress is not just to do with the absence of violence.

"Throughout 2013 during its year as City of Culture Derry-Londonderry presented a vision of what a post-conflict society might look like.

"These two realities of hope and division co-exist in Northern Ireland and run alongside each other in ways that can be difficult to understand. How do we know which one is stronger? Is Northern Ireland fated to backslide, or is there a positive momentum that can keep moving it forwards?

"That is the question and challenge that we hope the report provides for political and civil leaders to address."

(IT/JP)