Northern Ireland will mark 25 years of relative peace next week as US President Joe Biden jets in to hail the “tremendous progress” since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
The 1998 deal largely ended the 30 years of violence known as The Troubles and brought in a form of power-sharing between pro-Irish republicans and pro-UK unionists.
But the new system has often been dysfunctional, and issues arising from Brexit have threatened to inflame old wounds.
Police are on high alert for possible unrest around Mr Biden's visit, which is expected to be brief.
About 160 people have died in sporadic violence since 1998, compared to an estimated 3,600 deaths during The Troubles, said Jon Tonge, a professor of British and Irish politics at the University of Liverpool.
When Mr Biden visits “there’ll be a lot of backslapping and congratulations in the air because as a peace deal you’d probably give it nine, possibly 10 out of 10,” said Prof Tonge.
“What will be glossed over during the Biden visit will be the chronically unstable politics that have followed the agreement.”
Mr Biden, who likes to speak of his Irish ancestry, will also visit the Republic of Ireland during a four-day trip. Irish leader Leo Varadkar said the “number one objective” was to “welcome a son of Ireland home.”
In the north, the White House said Mr Biden would “mark the tremendous progress” of the past 25 years and “underscore the readiness of the United States to support Northern Ireland’s vast economic potential.”
Mr Varadkar said the US role in the peace process was “immense and indispensable.”
Donatienne Ruy, a European politics expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said protecting the gains of the peace process was a rare bipartisan cause in modern US politics.
Former president Bill Clinton lobbied heavily for the peace process during the 1990s, when his special envoy George Mitchell helped broker the talks in Belfast.
The talks brought together the mainly Catholic republicans who support a united Ireland, and the largely Protestant unionists who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK.
Northern Ireland conflict — timeline
1921: Ireland is partitioned between Protestant north, which remains in the UK, and Catholic south which soon breaks away from Britain
1969: Amid growing sectarian unrest, British troops are deployed to Northern Ireland
1972: Thirteen people are killed by British soldiers on Bloody Sunday; London imposes direct rule
1984: Former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher narrowly survives bombing at height of IRA campaign
1994: IRA declares ceasefire amid tentative peace talks
1998: Good Friday Agreement ends The Troubles and paves way for power-sharing
Good Friday Agreement — in pictures
The deal was signed on April 10, 1998 by former UK prime minister Tony Blair, his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern and leaders of the opposing Northern Irish parties.
Mr Clinton this month described it as one of the happiest days of his life. Mr Blair said the deal offered “fair treatment” for the two communities.
In the deal, Britain and Ireland agreed that Northern Ireland’s “present wish” was to remain in the UK but that they would respect whatever choice it made in future.
The agreement established a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly in which each side effectively has a veto.
It sought to lower the temperature by reforming Northern Ireland’s police service, withdrawing British troops and decommissioning paramilitary arms.
The Irish Republican Army formally ended its armed campaign in 2005.
A critic of the deal, former Ulster Unionist Party MP William Ross, told The National he would not be celebrating what he called a “surrender to IRA terrorists.”
Mr Ross said the region had been in “continual turmoil” since 1998, with partisan bickering taking the focus away from everyday issues such as the national health service.
“I don’t know what Tony Blair thought he was doing but he certainly wasn’t fulfilling his first duty, the unity of the kingdom,” Mr Ross said.
He said the anniversary was “a matter of deep regret rather than a matter for celebration.”
“Whenever you see President Biden lauding an agreement, remember he is a man who has identified very closely with Irish republicans and Irish nationalism whose desire is the destruction of the UK. People should keep that in mind.”
Since 1998, the assembly at Stormont has often been suspended because the two sides cannot co-operate.
The UUP was split by the agreement and was overtaken by the Democratic Unionist party — which opposed the Good Friday Agreement — as the largest unionist force in 2003.
Northern Ireland has had no devolved government since February 2022 after the DUP pulled out over Brexit. In all, the assembly has been out of action about 40 per cent of the time, said Prof Tonge.
“Northern Irish society is still as polarised on some measures as it was in 1998 — hardly any integrated education, segregated housing, still separate facilities for Protestant and Catholic areas,” he said.
“You’re always going to have the conflict. It’s just that the conflict is, mercifully, played out via peaceful political institutions.”
Ms Ruy said the deal was “the best it could have been at the time” but that politicians had struggled to break out of the old divide, even as a generation grows up in the aftermath of The Troubles.
She highlighted the progress made by the cross-community Alliance Party, which scored its best ever election result by becoming the third-largest Assembly party in 2021.
Another shift is that there are now more Catholics than Protestants in Northern Ireland, according to the 2021 census, eroding what was once an inbuilt unionist majority.
The current political stalemate resulted from unionist fears that ties to the UK were being severed by the Northern Ireland Protocol resulting from Brexit.
UK and EU negotiators agreed that trade checks could not take place on the Irish land border, for fear of inflaming sectarian tension.
But the workaround they agreed on — keeping Northern Ireland within the scope of EU laws — led to unionists crying foul that the region was being carved off from Britain.
A revised deal, the Windsor Framework announced in February, aims to address those concerns by simplifying checks and giving the Northern Ireland Assembly a veto over new EU measures.
However, the DUP has not given any indication that it intends to return to power-sharing, and pundits are doubtful that a rallying cry from Mr Biden will change the party’s mind.
“The DUP has spent a lot of its political life saying no,” said Prof Tonge.
“Tony Blair couldn’t persuade them to back the Good Friday Agreement and neither could Bill Clinton. So Biden’s not going to persuade the DUP back into the political institutions.”
