Whoever came up with the name, the Good Friday Agreement, deserves a Pulitzer Prize for brilliance. An agreement prefaced by ‘good’ is bound to earn goodwill. Good Friday, however, is the day that Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss and, in 1998, many Northern Irish people felt at least a twinge of betrayal at former paramilitaries from both sides being welcomed to the top table by the British government.
In fact, for some, perhaps the agreement, officially the Belfast Agreement, had more of a Black Friday resonance with its associations of a sell-out and peace at any price. The release of paramilitary prisoners as part of the GFA precluded future justice for victims of the Troubles.
Not that the date is emblazoned on my consciousness. I was teaching in France at the time, falling in and out of love with my Greek boyfriend, and the sense of history was lost on me. When I finally returned to Belfast in 2002, I enjoyed the freedom on the streets as a legacy of the agreement, but I also went to the Sandy Row riots that summer and witnessed the palpable discontent first-hand. Back then, the overriding sense among loyalists was that their districts received the full force of police ire, whilst republican areas were being appeased.
I sometimes wonder if the architects of the agreement truly believed that the dividends of peace would last. Would they have guessed that the only bomb nowadays in Belfast city centre is a Jägerbomb? The atmosphere of violence has so faded that former death threats have turned into bragging rights in memoirs. Last year, Bono claimed to have been threatened by the IRA, only for Gerry Adams to shoot his words out of the water.
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Currently, there is deep frustration at the DUP’s refusal to go into government on account of the Northern Ireland Protocol. That’s not to say that the protocol hasn’t had its problems. For instance, my neighbour has to order specialised food, no longer delivered due to Brexit, for her ill pet, making it more expensive than caviar. But there are issues in society more urgent than this and it’s time to address them. It was notable that Arlene Foster in her parting speech in Stormont quoted both Wilde and Beckett and yet her former party still doesn’t see the value in funding writers. Investment in the arts in Northern Ireland sits at a meagre £5.44 per capita, contrasting sharply with the Republic of Ireland at £25.90 per capita.
It’s impossible to predict how close we are to a Border poll. As Lenin said, ‘There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.’ I’m sure civic nationalists envision Irish unity as a momentous occasion, but it may arrive through incremental steps. It’s hard to imagine a Berlin scenario with a David Hasselhoff equivalent (Daniel O’Donnell?) singing on a cherry picker as the Falls/Shankill peace wall is dismantled.
Last year’s Northern Ireland census showed that Catholics are now the larger community. Protestants have inherited Catholic minority status and, in this society where more media coverage is afforded to the under-represented, I might as well flaunt my Protestant heritage to the max. However, the low support for a united Ireland in Jon Tonge’s November survey of all polls since Brexit was surprising.
It’s difficult to unravel the Celtic knot of confused identity, but it strikes me that one possible reason for Northern Irish Catholics to spurn a united Ireland is a reluctance to lose their strong sense of northernness. Amusingly, I know a Belfast Catholic who chose to study a Northern Irish history module at school for the sole reason that “Northern Irish history is shorter than Irish”.
It’s complicated in the South too. When I discussed unity last autumn with a writer from Cork, he expressed concern at Belfast becoming the second city to Dublin. His feeling was that Belfast would divert literary attention away from Cork.
I was recently asked in an interview if I thought that, in the event of a Border poll, unionist writers would be able to speak out freely without threat of cancellation. I would hope so, but we all know the contumely of social media. Perceptions of the past are still so sensitive. In the words of George Orwell’s 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future”.
Throughout Ireland there is still a power struggle over ownership of the correct narrative. In Dublin last year, I met a southern writer who expressed dismay at a new historical novel featuring a sympathetic B Special character. But literature’s function is to humanise and, logically, why shouldn’t a member of the B Specials be as sympathetic as an IRA man? The best thing about literature is that it isn’t reductive like song lyrics, which traditionally reinforce a patriotic prejudice.
One of the most important sections of the agreement recognised “the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves as Irish or British, or both”. “Both” was key. It’s how I choose to identify and I’m aware it makes me culturally different from the southern Irish. It’s understandable how southerners bridle at northerners wanting to stay in the UK – it must feel like being shunned for a bigger, more cosmopolitan friend. And yet Northern Irish links to the UK are tangible as well as cultural. When I was a child at our caravan in Ballywalter, the misty land I looked out to across the sea was Scotland, not Ireland.
The north/south cultural divide was recently exemplified in the online debate on whether northerners find the word Nordie pejorative. Although Nordie is a diminutive, I don’t personally find it offensive. Besides, the last thing we Nordies would ever want to do is police Southies’ words!
In my east Belfast street, the bunting will soon be going up for King Charles’s coronation and, for a few days only, we will be as British as Finchley (as if). This coronation isn’t the one my neighbours yearn for. They’re actually waiting for Prince William’s reign when at last they’ll have the next King Billy. My own days of royal sentiment have long since dimmed. In 1981, when I was a boarder at Friends School in Lisburn, we girls were woken up during the night by the boarding mistress, who joyfully announced to us the birth of the future King William as if he was baby Jesus.
Looking back over the past quarter of a century, the agreement’s best tenets were the recognition of hybrid identity and power-sharing. One big negative, on the other hand, was its use as a veiled threat by various parties - even more so during Brexit negotiations - to suggest that a rebuttal of its principles might lead to a return to violence. Nevertheless, most Northern Irish people are thankful that the agreement established a long period of peace.
Will a united Ireland happen? Yes. Will England again rule Ireland in the centuries ahead? Possibly. Borders fluctuate, even when islands have a ring of steely-grey sea around them. Nothing is ever written in stone - except an epitaph, of course, and as yet it is too early to write the definitive one on Northern Ireland.
Rosemary Jenkinson’s latest collection of short stories, Love in the Time of Chaos, is published by Arlen House. It is internationally distributed by Syracuse University Press.
