Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Good Friday Agreement has been 20 years of anti-climax - but what was the alternative?

The Good Friday Agreement, pushed over the line 20 years ago this week and signed by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, should only ever have been seen as a step in a process, rather than as a settlement
The Good Friday Agreement, pushed over the line 20 years ago this week and signed by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, should only ever have been seen as a step in a process, rather than as a settlement The Good Friday Agreement, pushed over the line 20 years ago this week and signed by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, should only ever have been seen as a step in a process, rather than as a settlement

RIGHT up to the moment George Mitchell announced it, agreement seemed more unlikely than likely.

Good Friday twenty years ago surprised the people doing the negotiating, those who had tried to help them draft and re-draft, and those outside scrabbling for information.

Dampened hope marked the psychology of the day and the night that followed, the weeks and months to come.

Anyone who thought Good Friday would deliver reconciliation stayed quiet about it on the day.

Nobody in the 'original sick building' as one official called it, where Mo Mowlam walked wig-less between airless rooms with messages to and from Tony Blair, came out into snowy April to prophesy harmony between Catholics and Protestants.

In the end the most cheerful emotion was relief, mixed with mystification, doubt and anxiety.

Celebrating did not come easy, and not only because of the dead and injured of the Troubles.

Celebrating was beyond the unionists involved because they had not wanted negotiation, nor any agreement on offer.

Car cavalcades through west Belfast as at the 1994 ceasefire, horns beeping and flags waving, were propaganda on the move.

Republican theology insisted a party meeting still had to ratify the agreement. Unionists said that was evidence of republican insincerity.

But cheering speeches told supporters the agreement was a good thing, though those who helped produce it knew its weaknesses. What they knew was soon forgotten by the British and later the Irish government.

Good Friday should only ever have been seen as a step in a process. Instead the talk was of a settlement, a deal. That made unionists, and republicans to a lesser extent, even more paranoid.

April 2018 lacks a mature power-sharing Stormont, the source of much 'I told you so' and ill-disguised satisfaction.

Of course it is. If you believed, as many unionists did then and as any who think about it probably still do, that the Troubles were caused by murderous criminality and pre-1969 Northern Ireland was marred chiefly by nationalist refusal to give it allegiance, you were likely to see Good Friday as British treachery, bribery of the IRA to stop them bombing England, reward for terrorism.

Good Friday should only ever have been seen as a step in a process. Instead the talk was of a settlement, a deal. That made unionists, and republicans to a lesser extent, even more paranoid

Unionists for the most part never meant to work it, and as the IRA dragged out decommissioning and recognition of policing for years, republicans gave unionists ever more excuse to call their agreement insincere.

On the day, the unseasonal weather helped dampen the mood. A bumbling Reverend Ian Paisley trucking through the media camp the night before to register the DUP's unmoved opposition - with few followers, heckled by loyalist paramilitaries - left some wondering if David Trimble might take heart from the bigger man's glaring yearning to be part of the story.

But right up to the last minute the sense coming out of the exhausted talks was that Ulster Unionism was hopelessly split. Flinching at the word, Trimble insisted repeatedly that April 10 should not be called 'historic'.

Maybe the churn of emotion produced objection then and later to attaching the name 'Good Friday' to 'Agreement'. No more rational explanation has ever emerged.

Reporters and cameras chased Jeffrey Donaldson as the then Ulster Unionist 'refusenik' left the building ahead of Mitchell's announcement, but got no more comment than that he was off on his Easter holidays. He had made sure his fingerprints would not be found on any agreement.

Blair, Bertie Ahern and Bill Clinton played starry parts here, then lost their shine.

The SDLP went into talks on the last of John Hume's mental energy and has burned through four leaders since without finding a new sense of itself.

Sinn Féin's emergence as the strongest nationalist voice has been complicated by its southern development.

Having blocked then stalled, unionism's most recent phase is formless. The loyalist paramilitary 'politicians' - whom Trimble and other UUs wanted inside the talks for cover against accusations of sell-out from their community - are long gone. DUP support for Theresa May stands in for strategy.

Donaldson, now Sir Jeffrey and the party's chief whip, like the Reverend Ian's son is a speaker on the conflict resolution circuit.

There is further dark humour in his accusation that Dublin government manoeuvring on Brexit threatens the Agreement he himself tried so hard to block in the first place.

The twenty years not growing have been a long anti-climax. It is still better than what went before.

Only sound-biters on the sidelines claim to have expected more, but neither they nor anyone else offered a better alternative.