Good Friday Agreement 'rethink' needed says analyst

With no early prospect of a return to power-sharing devolution expected in the wake of the Northern Ireland Assembly election, a timely paper by a Belfast policy analyst has called for a "rethink" in the context of the forthcoming review of the Good Friday Agreement.

The paper, `Northern Ireland: What’s Going Wrong?’, argues that, paradoxically, the 1998 agreement may have entrenched the divisions which are at the basis of the region’s conflict, thereby discouraging genuine reconciliation.

Published by the Institute of Governance, Public Policy and Social Research – an interdisciplinary centre of Queen’s University Belfast which brings together practitioners and researchers – the paper says that, while Northern Ireland has enjoyed a degree of peace since the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994, it is still a far from normal society.

The “parity of esteem” for nationalism and unionism which is central to the agreement has in effect conferred recognition and respectability upon sectarian political ideologies, the author, Robin Wilson, argued. In so doing, it may have inadvertently perpetuated mistrust and social tensions, and discouraged an atmosphere of compromise and political risk-taking.

Mr Wilson continued: "Whatever other advantages devolution brought to Northern Ireland under the terms of the Belfast Agreement of 1998, assuaging intercommunal tensions was not one of them. Indeed the continued sectarian polarisation of recent years has further corroded intercommunal trust, leading to repeated suspension of the institutions established in the wake of the Agreement.

“The paper argues that, far from offering a model to other ethnically divided societies as to how they might solve their problems, the Belfast Agreement looks backwards rather than forwards. An alternative, integrationist, approach is identified, based on a more contemporary understanding of identity as multiple, plastic and relational.”

Robin Wilson is a member of the board of the Institute of Governance and director of the think-tank Democratic Dialogue. Along with Professor Rick Wilford of the School of Politics and International Studies at Queen’s, he leads a team of researchers who have been monitoring the implementation of devolution in the region since 1999.

The agreement is due to be reviewed later this month, four years after coming into effect, and the paper outlines four modernising reforms which could be enacted to engender a more conciliatory atmosphere, to place power-sharing devolution on a stable footing, and to hold out the prospect of a normal society.

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