Agreement Day, a decade on

I posted last month on my personal reflections of Good Friday 1998 and on some of the key dates which will be be marking here on O’Conall Street over the coming month and a half in the run up to the anniversary of the referendum. Yesterday Mark Durkan reflected on the final days of negotiation and their impact on Ireland. Here is a clip on John Hume on the day which is worth a listen.

Work started early today. We have a major announcement to manage later and the meetings were underway before 8.00am. I did get time to scan the papers before kickoff though and noted some decent journalism across the board marking the day. There is also a conference in Belfast today,  although very few of the actual negotiators except the party leaders will be there. The audience is also somewhat elitist.

The DUP’s Peter Robinson reminded us in the Irish Times this week that he still loathes the Agreement and rejects it entirely. Everyone else disagrees but in what I believe is the enduring testament to its impact on this island, nobody is talking about walking out of the institutions it created or undermining the many changes it brought about.

It’s a shame the day is not properly acknowledged here in Northern Ireland but not a surprise. The DUP although complicit in its working are not going to revise their position and Sinn Fein never liked it much in the first place. Yet all around them is the evidence of its success; a powersharing executive, North – South institutions, a new police force, an equality agenda, a growing economy and peace.

There is still an elephant in the room. A big ugly, scary beast which will take much longer to go away. Our sectarian conflict has bred deep seated sectarian attitudes which are all too alive. This week BBC Spotlight and BBC Panorama both sought to shine a light on the reality of bigotry ten years on. The DUP and Sinn Fein have rejected the one policy mechanism which was in place to tackle this problem – the ‘Shared Future’ document. They say working together is enough to tackle the issue. They could not be more wrong. Sectarianism is not going to just disappear. Like a bad colleague it needs managed out of the system. I hope for all our sakes they recognise this soon and begin in a structured way to tackle the problem.

That would be a real achievement and something to celebrate on every anniversary of the Agreement.