I WAS just a kid when the Troubles began. Throughout my childhood and teenage years Radio Ulster would broadcast a litany of horrors every single day, it seemed.
Some came closer than others. About a month before my 10th birthday in 1973 the IRA placed two car bombs in my hometown, Coleraine. Six people were killed on that day in June.
My dad, who was a bricklayer, joined the Ulster Defence Regiment on a part-time basis. Every morning I’d see him from my bedroom window look under his car for any bombs before he got in it to drive to work. On patrol in 1982 the IRA did try to blow him up but didn’t succeed.
And yet our family was one of the lucky ones in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. We didn’t lose friends or family members as so many others did through those years of bombings and shootings. We didn’t live in Belfast or Derry or on the Border where the violence was at its worst. But the Troubles touched – tainted – everything in those years. I left to come to Scotland when I was 19. I was happy to leave it all behind.
Even so, after spending most of my life since then – nearly 40 years – living here I still see myself Northern Irish. And so, it’s maybe not surprising that I consider the most important political development of my lifetime was the Good Friday Agreement, signed on April 10, 1998. “The most significant moment in NI history,” Derry Girls writer Lisa McGee tweeted a week ago and it’s difficult to argue with.
Last week’s anniversary passed by relatively quietly. Irish and British politicians issued a few statements paying lip service to its importance and then hurried on to talk about the other stuff that was going on in Ukraine or with the Chancellor and his wife’s taxation issues.
Next year will mark the quarter century and that will presumably get a bigger show. But what state will the Agreement be in by then? Jeffrey Donaldson the leader of the DUP has recently suggested it might need changing, arguing that Northern Ireland’s status as part of the UK is not protected as it stands.
Meanwhile, there is also the fallout from Brexit to deal with. The Northern Ireland Protocol is a source of tension amongst Unionists and led to riots last year. Who knows what will happen after next month’s election to Stormont?
There is a progressive argument for saying the Good Friday Agreement has locked in Northern Ireland’s political polarities and as a result not allowed politics to match the strides made in civic life.
But when politicians and loyalist activists start to talk down the agreement let’s be clear what it has achieved in the last quarter of a century. However flawed, imperfect and at times non-existent the political process at Stormont has been in those years, the social rewards of the Good Friday Agreement have been huge. Peace was the gift it gave us. Nothing in Northern Ireland is perfect, but no one is looking under their cars for bombs these days. That’s more than something. And it’s worth celebrating.
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