There are two things that can be said about the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

The first thing is that it has worked out better than we all thought. The second is that it has worked out worse than we thought.

Strange as it may seem …both of these statements are true.

To explain this, I have to go back to the 1960s. We lived in a world that was peaceful and settled. Although I suppose that depends on how “peaceful” and “settled” are defined.

“Northern Ireland” was safe. The periodic acts of violence had not worked and the most recent IRA campaign from 1956 thru 1962 had been a humiliation. The old men from the 1950s and 1960s retired from the IRA and went into nostalgic republican mode.

Of course this meant the unionist government went about its own default position of discriminating against Catholics…in the workplace, in housing and in policing.

Shameful as it is to say it…we…Catholics…were defeated. We knew our place. Or more precisely our parents knew their place. The best expression of Irishness we had was music…old ones (national songs) like Boulavogue and The Rising of the Moon and new ones (rebel songs) like Sean South from Garryowen.

Indeed in md 1960s I recall the amazement that local BBC featured a group called the Go Lucky Four singing Kelly The Boy From Killane. For the record two BBC journalists, the legendary Vincent Hanna and John Bennett (he died earlier this year) were members.

Civil Rights movement of course and more accurately the reaction to it brought us over twenty five years of violence but really the violence was ended thru fatigue in the 1990s and culminated in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

We voted for the Agreement. We were just tired.

We were sold a mantra that nobody was right and nobody was wrong. We were all at fault. Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa.

Yet we knew that one side…THEM was more at fault than the other side…US. It is not just about being biased to our own side. There is also historic analysis. Historians do not claim that Blame can be equally distributed…eg the American Civil War. One side was more right than the other side.

And in 1998, we were sold a LIE. Creative Ambiguity is the fancy word for it. Nationalists went out and voted (enthusiastically) for the Agreement in the belief it was a series of stepping stones to a united Ireland. And Unionists went out and voted (reluctantly) for the Agreement on the basis that it was a series of obstacles to a united Ireland.

The Agreement of course was not an end in itself. There was a lot of ANY OTHER BUSINESS…the setting up of a power sharing Executive, decommissioning weapons, release of prisoners, reform of police, dealing with outstanding issues of Justice.

The problem was could people who actually signed the Agreement “deliver”?

On the unionist side, the UUP were undermined by DUP. Reform of Police for example meant that the RUC (who had held the unionist line for most of the century) were being sold out. And the release of prisoners was a necessary compromise, even as it offended the law abiding majority of unionists and unionist victims.

And the nationalist SDLP found themselves under attack from Sinn Féin for conceding too much ground to appease unionists.

If any UUP or SDLP member believed that in 1998 they would be in coalition in perpetuity and the extremes as represented by DUP and SF would be permanent docile minority voices, they were quickly exposed as wrong.

The first consequence of the Good Friday Agreement was that the unionist and nationalist voters lost faith in UUP and SDLP and handed leadership to DUP and Sinn Féin.

IT WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS.

In those ten years after the Agreement, I retired and went to university in 2005 and graduated in 2009. I became more politically active.

I think I felt that it was irrelevant that nationalists and unionists had different views on the Good Friday Agreement. Against the background of Peace, the only game in town was Demographics.

Sooner or later, there would be more nationalists than unionists. It is not simply about birthrate. But I always felt that against a background of Peace (as in the 1960s) and “Justice”, the best hope for unionists was to make common cause with fairly non committed Catholics thru the Alliance Party.

Nationalists have more to fear from the Alliance Party and worse academics and conflict resolutionists than DUP or UUP.

I coined the phrase “letsgetalongerists” in 2010. It is a derisive term which upsets people in the so called middle ground. To be clear, I am a very nice person and I get along with everyone and I use the word to describe the faux letsgetalongerists for whom the Good Friday Agreement is an end in itself. And that measures such as taking down barricades and integrated education would mean Norn Iron would have a new settlement within the United Kingdom.

Effectively some parts of the LetsGetAlongerist credo is the acceptable face of unionism.

I think when I joined Slugger O’Toole in 2010 and started blogging here in 2011, LetsGetAlongerism was a dangerous foe to nationalists. Like Greeks in a Trojan horse.

Progressively UUP and SDLP were marginalised as there was a DUP and SF coalition glued together by the Alliance Party.

BREXIT changed everything. The “UK” became less attractive…even ugly as its backers included a lot of racists. Paradoxically the Republic of Ireland became more attractive to “liberals” and middle ground folks because of the Abortion and Same Sex marriage referendums.

The Republic had become a liberal society at the heart of Europe while Norn Iron (unionism) was tainted by xenophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism …a narrow minded backwater where loyalist drug cartels ply their trade in full view of the police.

NO IT WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS.

I was thinking recently of a discussion on the RTE Late Late Show about ten years ago, involving serial media malcontent, Fintan O’Toole and the Wolfe Tones, a veteran folk group specialising in Irish rebel songs. For O’Toole, these songs were offensive and not really a reflection of modern Ireland. Turns out that the recently retired folk group are more representative than O’Toole.

Likewise there are many commentators, north and south who despise the rise of Sinn Féin. I wont deny that Sinn Féin has a certain whiff of cordite and more so have a code of loyalty that is overdone. But the same could be said for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael for several years after independence.

Commentators on Slugger O’Toole are routinely irritated at the moral failure of Catholics who unashamedly vote for SF and its connexion to violence.

But this runs alongside a narrative that is increasingly showing that the security forces (sic) and their loyalist allies were also mired in violence.

Basically the Wolfe Tones defeated Fintan O’Toole. And Sinn Féin defeated Slugger O’Toole. They are…as far as I know not related.

Ultimately the nonsense that we were all to blame for the Troubles and that it was all 50-50 cannot hold. Conflicts do not end with people agreeing that everybody is to blame.

Our Conflict ended with nobody winning and nobody losing. But lets be honest, at Appomattox in 1865, Berlin 1945 and Saigon 1975, there were no agreements. Just Victory and Defeat.

We can look at the Good Friday Agreement and it is clear that nationalists thought it was a good deal and that unionists thought it was a bad deal but the best they could get. But the LetsGetAlongerists moved quickly to give unionism a new hope. If unionists could move away from sectarianism and embrace nationalists, thru shared communities and integrated education, it was still possible that Norn Iron could actually work.

Certainly back in 2011 when I started “Keeping an Eye on the Czar of Russia” , my greatest fear was LetsGetAlongerism.

BREXIT changed all.

It is a strange thing that the Alliance Party has moved from being the fifth party in Norn Iron to being the third party (overtaking UUP and SDLP) but is probably less potent than before. Doubling their number of MLAS but still retaining just two Executive seats did not really register for the near two years that Stormont did not sit. And since the Executive got up and running again in 2024, there has been an air of decay around it.

If LetsGetAlongerism was once a wing of moderate unionism, it seems that some middle ground people have re-invented themselves as nationalist letsgetalongerists. There is now little reason to assume that Alliance people are all unionists.

NO IT WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS

Clare Hanna, the new SDLP leader recently described Ireland as a powerhouse of culture. I like this phrase. It seems accurate in terms of actors, music, sport. There are a lot of good reasons to feel good about being Irish.

Anti-nationalists in the commentariat and BBC got a bit irritated a couple of years ago when the Irish womens football team qualifying for the World Cup chanted “oooh aaah up the Ra” (IRA) in the victorious dressing room. How very dare they? Dont they know that this is inappropriate post 1998? Serial pearl clutchers like Fintan O’Toole, Malachi O’Doherty, Andy Pollak and Mick Fealty also get worked up about this kinda thing….but nationalists are too far gone beyond the new dispensations (that never happened) to care what they think.

Really does it matter that the Two Johnnys sing a song about meeting a young northerner at university in Dublin……..and she is a supporter of three things….the GAA, the “ska” and the Ra”. And her father is a big scary fxxker from South Armagh”.

Funny?

Not to mention Kneecap..t.he rappers from West Belfast. They have made balaclavas acceptable…but not if youre a unionist, a letsgetalongerist or a pearl clutcher.