18th Mar 2008
Good Friday - ten years on
The tenth anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement starts either this Friday (Good Friday) or on April 1oth, the calender anniversary of the signing the agreement. I’ll post something on Friday with my recollections of the day that changed Ireland and a couple of pics from inside the talks. There is a good bit of media interest in the anniversary and I’ll probably pop up somewhere along the line offering a perspective to our local hacks.
With the benefit of a decade of reflection some things stand out more than others. I was directly involved throughout the talks and present every step of the way to Good Friday. Whilst much has been written about the talks, the referendum campaign and subsequent elections are particularly interesting from a communications point of view and have been less well documented.
O’Conall Street will mark the anniversary with reflections, from a communications perspective, on the key moments in the referendum campaign from April 10th. I will look back specifically at the divisions within unionism (particularly in the UUP), the Balcolmbe St Gang appearance at the Sinn Fein Ard Feis, Micheal Stone’s Ulster Hall rally, Tony Blair’s pledges as well as the U2 concert which proved a crucial turning point. I’ll post on each all the way to May 22nd when over 71% voted yes. hopefully some of my fellow press officers at the time will contribute with their own reflections along the way.
Dates to look out for are:
April 10th - Good Friday Agreement
April 24th - Three UUP MPs join Paisley to say no.
May 1st - Orange Order says no.
May 10th - Balcombe Street Gang at RDS
May 14th - Michael Stone at Ulster Hall
May 16th - Molyneux says no.
May 17th - Joint Statement from Clinton and Blair
May 19th - U2 Concert
May 20th - Blair pledges
May 22nd - Referendum
[...] I didn’t wake up on Good Friday 1998. I didn’t need to. Nobody had slept in the SDLP negotiating team since Wednesday night. The Mitchell deadline of a deal by Thursday had come and gone but change was in the air and nobody was going home until the job was done. [...]