A fortnight before the signing of the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998, 25 years ago tomorrow, two republican terrorists were waiting at the back of a supermarket in Armagh city, Northern Ireland, for Cyril Stewart. Mr Stewart was a former police reservist, medically retired the previous year after a heart attack. He was well known in the city and in local football circles where he was an official. He was executed in cold blood in front of his wife at the back of a Safeway’s in pursuit of Irish unity.
Barely three weeks earlier, the future inaugural First and Deputy First ministers of the Northern Ireland Executive stood together in a small village, 20 minutes’ drive from where Mr Stewart was murdered. David Trimble and Seamus Mallon, who led the first cross-community government, visibly stunned and distraught, were visiting families of two more Irishmen slain in pursuit of another perverted fantasy. The Loyalist terrorist group the LVF had apparently outsourced the random murder of Catholics in the mixed village. Their victims were a young Protestant and Catholic man, Phillip Allen and Damien Trainor, lifelong friends. Phillip had asked Damien to be his best man at a wedding that never happened. The leaders of moderate unionism and nationalism decided to walk through the village of Poyntzpass together in a symbolic act of solidarity that surely made a difference to those who would later be asked to endorse their peace building.
One of the benefits of the Good Friday Agreement is that ‘Lost Lives’ has never needed a sequel
These three poor men, forgotten or unknown beyond their friends and neighbours, warrant only a footnote in the awful three-decade tally of slaughter that the Good Friday Agreement was designed to close the book on. Amidst the testimonials and critiques that will spray forth over the next few days, we can easily lose sight of the little agonies that Northern Ireland is now largely spared of. They are collected together, victims and perpetrators, in one of the most important publications ever produced by the Troubles. It is called, simply, ‘Lost Lives.’ It records without partiality the details of the passing of thousands of people whose lives were cut short by violence. It should be on every desk of every history teacher on the island of Ireland. Its intimacy is shaming and devastating.
One of the benefits of the Good Friday Agreement is that ‘Lost Lives’ has never needed a sequel. There are perhaps thousands of people walking above ground who otherwise would be consigned to early graves or have lives disfigured by physical and psychological injury. God knows, we have enough walking wounded from the previous conflict as it is. These benefits were not delivered without enormous cost and compromise. For all victims of terrorism, seeing violent extremists released from prison early for crimes of a nature that otherwise would see them still incarcerated to this day, was an enormous and still underestimated sacrifice.
For republicans, dedicated to the forcible removal of the British state before peace talks, their abandonment of the bomb and gun to participate in a UK devolved government administration required – and still requires – herculean revisionism. For unionists, a semi-detached constitutional relationship with the British ‘mainland’ that could be terminated by a now realised political majority of nationalists haunts their well-tended fears.
The genius of the Good Friday Agreement and its subsequent endorsement throughout the island of Ireland was to convince a divided people that both communities had to lose in order for everyone to win. Sinn Fein were almost completely irrelevant and the DUP rejected the fraught political process that allowed moderate unionism and nationalism, then in electoral ascendancy, to find the common ground. In recognising a quarter of a century of unfilled graves, we need to hear more about John Hume and David Trimble who suffered terribly for trying to forge a way forward.
A quarter of a century later, we are in danger of losing sight of the gains made in the shadows of past and present turbulence over moribund political institutions and Brexit fallout. Peter Shirlow, a Northern Irish professor of Irish studies at Liverpool University – and a frequent visitor to the loyalist Shankill Road heartland – has written recently of the massive societal changes taking place under the surface that have produced a more pluralist polity.
Cultural ‘hybridity’, as he calls it, is slowly rendering past difference obsolete, despite ongoing political polarity and stagnation. Integrated marriage, integrated schooling and integrated living are taking effect. This manifests in surprising ways. Support for Irish unity remains a minority view, despite enormous time and effort trying to engineer it into an urgent, populist project. The non-aligned Alliance party continues to hoover up the votes of those tired by headcount sectarian electoral contests but who are instead exercised by the parlous state of roads, education and health services. Making Northern Ireland work is replacing making Northern Ireland different in the hearts and minds of people as secularism gradually supplants religious intolerance.
The Agreement is not perfect and must never be regarded as a holy grail in a province that has had enough of holy war. The peace process that will be lauded this weekend has not found a way to deal with sectarianism, as violent hate crimes in Belfast and Derry just this month have demonstrated. But, wherever you stand on it, the leadership of Ulster Unionism and the SDLP and their negotiating teams helped over the line by US Senator George Mitchell in those unbearably tense days leading up to 10 April 1998 should not be overshadowed.
The last word should go to the late David Trimble who spoke about his trouble with the ‘vision thing’ in his Nobel Peace prize acceptance speech in 1998, awarded with John Hume for their work to stop the guns and give a traumatised people hope. He lauded
‘Politicians of the possible . . .who seek to make a working peace, not in some perfect world, that never was, but in this, the flawed world, which is our only workshop’.
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