MAY 22 1998. Along with the vast majority in Northern Ireland who turned out to vote I endorsed the Good Friday Agreement, by some margin my most significant moment in a polling booth.
An imperfect fudge and hard to stomach for many who saw respectability conferred on ‘apologists for terror’, the lives, however, of decent, ordinary people literally depended upon it.
As much Ireland’s biggest constitutional shake-up since partition in 1922 as it was about cross-community consent, it has been the North’s bedrock to address its fraught notions of legacy and identity. People are still murdered, paramilitarism hasn’t disappeared but the GFA holds. For now.
Britain’s relationship with Europe may change that, a concern influencing how many voted in June.
European Union membership had in many senses eroded the potency of Ireland's border, while the impact of EU cash in modernising Ireland and assisting the post-conflict North were very tangible from the late 1980s.
Post-Brexit vote, Ireland is nervy over the potential for hard European frontiers at Newry or Strabane, about the psychological impact on a fragile peace and notion of normality and, to quote one leading community relations expert, the prospect of “a coach and horses being driven through the painstaking compromises of the GFA”.
Belfast-born, I won’t be on any ‘foreign workers’ list but as dual nationality is an entitlement to anyone from Northern Ireland, bizarrely, many of my fellow citizens may well be. Meanwhile, the Irish Government has said migration checks at ferry ports is preferable to a hard border. The upshot? Passport controls for UK citizens travelling between Larne and Cairnryan. Division not bridge-building is the new narrative.
And here’s the sting. If there’s a sense Northern Ireland could move backwards, again the Union’s weak link, it is ironically being assisted by some who claim Tony Blair’s legacy.
In the battle for the Labour Party’s soul, regular attacks on Jeremy Corbyn as a terrorist sympathiser due to Sinn Fein contacts stretching back 35 years (when they Tories were meeting them privately) risks undermining Blair’s greatest achievement.
Almost 20 years since he delivered the GFA, appearances by representatives of Sinn Fein, which of course jointly runs a UK jurisdiction, at Labour’s conference are compared with the Brighton bombing, often by influential Labour members and friendly commentators.
Blair brought Republicans in from the cold, a huge political risk which delivered what no other British Prime Minister could, a lasting framework for peace and stability.
In the tawdry student politics of the Corbyn Wars, Blair’s appreciation that the pariah status of Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, along with Loyalism’s leader, was a barrier to peace is ignored for the sake of an attack on an opponent.
Not only did Blair admire the men he once bristled at sharing a room with, they became friendly.
Corbyn’s Republican links won’t play well on the doorsteps. I get that. And no-one wants a Spanish-style Pact of Forgetting. But when adopting the language of the 1980s right wing press or the voyeuristic on social media using The Troubles as capital for their myopic ends, be mindful of the disservice to those for whom peace has come at a big price. Post the triggering of Article 50, what value an agreement seen as benefiting throwback bogeymen?
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