I think I was six years old when my parents took me to Dublin Zoo. We travelled the 160-odd miles from the north coast of Northern Ireland to the capital of the Republic in my dad’s Mini Traveller. 

This was back in the summer of 1969. The roads maybe weren’t great back then but I’m guessing we must have set off late in the day because we ended up camping out overnight. Me and my two sisters slept in the back of the car while my mum and dad slept in a field. How unlikely that would seem only a few years later.

The Troubles had already begun, but the use of that term would only come into widespread use from that August and things hadn’t reached the point where my father felt there was a problem going south of the border. 

That point, though, was only a matter of months away. Which makes that holiday to Dublin Zoo my last pre-Troubles memory. 

In the years that followed my school days and holidays would play out against a backdrop of shootings and bombings and death and destruction. Radio Ulster would report the latest atrocity and then play the latest single by The Carpenters.

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I was lucky enough not to live in Belfast or on the border, where that horror was a daily occurrence. But the town I grew up in, Coleraine, was blown up in 1973, when six people were killed by an IRA car bomb, and then again in 1992 when the town centre was destroyed.
During my teens my father was a part-time member of the Ulster Defence Regiment and would begin every day by checking under his car for car bombs. When I left in 1982 to come to university in Scotland it was just a year after the end of the Hunger Strikes. There would be another 16 years of death and destruction to come before the signing of The Good Friday Agreement would finally bring an imperfect, provisional peace.

Right up until its signing just over a quarter of a century ago, The Belfast Agreement (and how Northern Irish is it that the accord has two names, one for each side?) seemed an unlikely, even impossible thing. Some 25 years on I wonder if there is a danger that it is being taken for granted.

Or rather there is a danger we take what it gave us for granted.

Read more: Surveying the view from another crossroads

There’s an argument that Northern Ireland hasn’t really changed that much in the last 25 years. There are still more than 100 peace walls in place after all. Dissident terrorists are still active. Indeed, the threat level has recently been raised to “severe”. And neither the orange nor the green has faded away. 

But to do so you need to squint really hard to miss the bigger picture. The accord signed on April 10, 1998 was an act of faith. One much needed. As Monica McWilliams, former leader of the Northern Ireland’s Women’s Coalition, said earlier this week, “We had suffered enough – 30 years. It was a huge challenge. There was something in it for everyone, but there was pain in it for everyone." 

Most notably for those families who had lost loved ones and who then had to witness the release of paramilitaries as part of the accord.

But it is always worth remembering – and celebrating – what that accord has given us. A generation has grown up without worrying if a trip into Belfast city centre might be risky, has not had to worry about who is in that idling car at the end of the street. And for the most part, a generation has been able to go on TikTok or Facebook or Twitter and not learn about another atrocity.

For all of the uncertain impact of Brexit, Northern Ireland in 2023 is not the same place as it was in 1998, 1982 or 1969. And that’s because of the Agreement. This is not a small thing. Not a small thing at all.