Twenty-five years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that brought 30 years of violent conflict to an end, Northern Ireland is beset with paradox: at once robust and frail, forward-looking and trapped in the past, vibrant and stagnant, where the detritus of the conflict, mined by competing elites for partisan polarizing purposes, can cause the political axis to tilt in one direction or the other. The word most associated with the peace is that it is fragile.
Life has changed immeasurably for the better. Belfast has been transformed beyond recognition. The crime rate in Northern Ireland has fallen. Tourists flock to see the Titanic Belfast museum. The Giant’s Causeway, the Dark Hedges, the Cushendun Caves, and the other locations where “Game of Thrones” was filmed put the country’s beautiful landscapes, sea-to-sky horizons, and undulating hills on a global tourist map.
More than one-fifth of Belfast’s workforce is employed in the technology sector. Northern Ireland is the best place to live and start a business in the UK, according to a 2021 PwC study. The OECD ranks Northern Ireland as among the top-performing regions internationally on several socioeconomic indicators. In the political arena, there is a growing propensity among a significant section of voters not to define themselves in nationalist/unionist, Catholic/Protestant terms. The Alliance Party, which represents the broad center, is now the third largest party.
Parallel with this young, outward-looking Northern Ireland there exists a Northern Ireland that is still deeply divided, unable to unshackle itself from the chains of its past; still haltingly stepping into an uncertain future; still sharpening oppositional narratives of what the conflict was about and who to blame for the bloodshed and death. This Northern Ireland experiences ongoing levels of paramilitary activity, albeit mostly criminal in nature; chronic unemployment in the most deprived areas; and community coercion and “gatekeeping.” Here the past is still prologue to the present, and the remnants of collective trauma can trigger spirals of regression. A flag flown on the wrong day or not at all can provoke a riot.
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This division between the Catholic nationalist community and the Protestant unionist community has become sharper since the Brexit referendum in 2016 and the resulting increased noise around the imminence of a border on Irish unity.
Nationalists embraced the Northern Ireland Protocol — the Irish sea border that demarcates the post-Brexit trading arrangement between the UK and the European Union. The Irish government had successfully argued that the alternative — a land border across Ireland — would provoke dissident republicans and ensure a resumption of violence because it would harden the partition of Ireland, contrary to the inherent intent of the Good Friday Agreement. Unionists took note: The threat of violence pays off.
Unionists see the Irish sea border as fundamentally eroding their constitutional status as part of the United Kingdom and voraciously call for it to be abandoned. To register their outrage, they collapsed the power-sharing Stormont government in February 2022. Northern Ireland has been without a government since, and the prospects for one in the near future are problematic.
The phenomenal rise of Sinn Fein, long linked to the IRA, from the fringes of support 25 years ago to becoming the largest party in both parts of Ireland is leading nationalists to believe that a united Ireland is around the corner. Although there is no objective evidence that a unity referendum is anywhere close, Sinn Fein’s success sends shivers of apprehension down the political spine of unionists/loyalists who continue to view every political development through the prism of “perceived threat” to their constitutional position.
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The Protestant community, once ascendant, is on the decline; the Catholic community, once under its thumb, is now ascendant. One community is anxious and uncertain about the future, the other is confident and forward-looking.
But the deeply entrenched structural poverty and deprivation continues to provide the oxygen for paramilitary groups to squeeze their communities to stay in lockstep. They are, according to the International Reporting Commission that monitors their activities, “a clear and present danger.” Areas of East and West Belfast and Derry/Londonderry are among the most deprived in the UK, with little prospect of a more prosperous future, fueling alienation that in turn feeds sectarianism. Sectarianism and the hatred it spawns remain largely unaddressed, not because of insufficient effort by multiple public-sector agencies, NGOs, ample resources, and heroic work on the part of individual community leaders and workers, but because the gestalt of sectarianism is so encompassing and the serial socioeconomic structural deficits so impervious to change.
Unaddressed, too, is the legacy of the past. Until a way is found to do so, Northern Ireland will remain twisting in the winds of intergenerational trauma, unable to forgive itself for the sins of the past.
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Moreover, critical elements of the Good Friday Agreement are no longer working. For almost eight of the 25 years of the agreement, the Stormont government has not functioned due to its suspension. The mandatory power-sharing requirement that the largest party from the unionist and nationalist communities must jointly agree to govern and that either can collapse the government ignores the changed political realities on the ground.
Catholics are now the largest population plurality. The Alliance Party, which by definition cannot be part of forming the government, continues to make remarkable electoral strides. In one of his last statements on Northern Ireland as prime minister, Micheal Martin declared that the compulsory power-sharing enshrined in the agreement was “no longer fit for purpose.” Only when this arrangement is abolished and replaced with a formula for voluntary coalitions will the political space emerge, a normalization that will allow Northern Ireland to start addressing some of the achingly obvious divisions that presently preclude a more enveloping reconciliation.
Padraig O’Malley is Moakley Chair Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His latest book is “Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland.”
