Opinion

Newton Emerson: Time to consider a holiday to mark the Good Friday Agreement

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

David Trimble and John Hume with Bono at Belfast's Waterfront Hall at concert in 1998 to promote a Yes vote in the Good Friday Agreement referendum
David Trimble and John Hume with Bono at Belfast's Waterfront Hall at concert in 1998 to promote a Yes vote in the Good Friday Agreement referendum David Trimble and John Hume with Bono at Belfast's Waterfront Hall at concert in 1998 to promote a Yes vote in the Good Friday Agreement referendum

The strange rebirth of Ulster Day highlights our missing holiday to mark the Good Friday Agreement.

This Monday was the 108th anniversary of the signing of the Ulster Covenant and Declaration, commemorated for decades by unionists as Ulster Day until the custom fell into abeyance.

In 2012, it became the first date marked in the ‘decade of centenaries’. There were exhibitions and conferences on both sides of the border and the Public Records Office put a searchable copy of the documents online.

This has created a minor new custom, observed this year by the leaders of the DUP and UUP among others, of looking up ancestors who signed - or did not sign - and reflecting on the occasion in social media postings.

The practice has so far been commendably sober. They were “tempestuous times”, as UUP leader Steve Aiken noted this Monday. Even a cursory look at the period makes that clear and you can feel strikingly connected to it by the sight of relatives’ handwritten names and addresses.

Of course, this is an overwhelmingly unionist interest. What should interest everyone else is the potential it shows for an annual reflection on the Good Friday Agreement. We might not be able to look up how everyone voted (not yet, anyway) but we have reached a point of being both strongly connected and safely distanced from this key moment in history.

The agreement has been described as the constitution of Northern Ireland, just as the covenant has been called its birth certificate. Many countries have an official ‘constitution day’, often with a worthy and educational character to distinguish it from the flag-waving of independence or national day celebrations. In the United States, for example, Constitution Day is observed on September 17 with all schools legally required to provide a relevant teaching programme.

Public holidays to mark a constitution are less common, although hardly unusual.

Spain holds one every December 6, with some people taking the opportunity for political statements, protests and educational tours, while others treat it as the start of Christmas.

We might consider Spain’s growing tradition of constitution day protests as counting against the idea here.

For those affronted by any implication that Northern Ireland is a country, or uneasy about it having any recognised distinctness, simultaneous holidays north and south should address their concern.

In 2003, Sinn Féin called on the British and Irish governments to synchronise public and bank holidays across the island, citing the all-Ireland “logic of the Good Friday Agreement”.

Amusingly, the party dropped the demand after the DUP asked if the Republic would get a day off on July 12.

New holidays are formally created in Northern Ireland by royal proclamation, which might also be a matter of republican sensitivity.

Marking the agreement with a public holiday has been proposed occasionally over the past two decades, although the last serious call for it was from the SDLP during 15th anniversary commemorations in 2013. That timing was no coincidence. Any earlier and devolution would still have looked too fragile, contentious or incomplete. Even in 2013, the DUP was still insisting it had ‘fixed’ the agreement with allegedly fundamental changes at St Andrews.

After 2013 came a three-year welfare reform crisis followed by a three-year Stormont collapse.

So it feels as if we are back in another moment when a holiday is a credible suggestion, not just because devolution has been restored but because Brexit has reaffirmed the agreement as the bedrock of our politics, while exposing serious differences and shortcomings in how it is understood.

Would we be having as many arguments over the letter and spirit of the 1998 text if we took a day every year to ponder it? Perhaps, but at least the arguments would be better informed. Such a day would inevitably grow to mark the wider peace process and the end of the Troubles, neither of which we should be tiptoeing around a quarter of a century on.

There must be a suspicion a holiday has been frustrated by the very fact the agreement was reached on Good Friday 1998, or April 10 of that year to be exact.

Easter’s movable feast renders every date between late March and late April impractical for other purposes.

Other dates are possible: the agreement referendum was held on May 22; it became law on November 19; the new Stormont first met on July 1.

We might want to avoid another holiday in July.