Graduate School of Social Sciences
Master thesis in Political Science: International Relations
‘Good fences make good neighbours’1: An Exploration and Analysis of the Wide-Ranging Legacies of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement.
Anna Zeverijn Student number: 11057041
Date: June 2019
Supervisor: Dr. Jana Krause – The UN and Peacebuilding Second reader: Dr. Dimitris Bouris
Word count: 21.626
1 Frost, Robert. Originally published in 1914. Mending Wall. [Online] [Accessed: June 13, 2019]. Retrieved from
Table of contents
Acknowledgements 5
Abstract 7
List of Abbreviations 8
1.0: Introduction 9
2.0: Background to the Northern Ireland conflict 14
2.1: Northern Ireland Pre-Troubles 14
2.2: The Troubles 17
2.3: The Good Friday Agreement 20
2.4: Post-Good Friday Agreement Years 22
3.0: Literature review 24
3.1: Peacebuilding 24
3.2: Conflict Transformation 26
3.3: Consociationalism and Peace Agreements 28
4.0: Theoretical framework 33
4.1: Intergroup Conflict or ‘Us Versus Them’ 33
4.2: Concepts 37
4.2.1: An Elite-Led Process 37
4.2.2: Meaningful and Transformative Peace 39
5.0: Argument 41
6.0: Methodology 42
6.1: Limitations 44
7.0: Results and Analysis 47
7.1: Provisions included in the GFA 47
7.1.1: Decentralisation/Federalism and Transitional Power-sharing
Government 50
7.1.2: Citizenship Reform and Demobilisation 56
7.1.3: Disarmament 58
7.1.4: Paramilitary Groups 61
7.1.5: Inter-ethnic/State Relations 63
7.1.6: Judiciary Reform 64
7.1.8: Reparations 67
7.2: Provisions excluded from the GFA 69
7.2.1: The St Andrews Agreement 70
7.2.2: The Stormont House Agreement and the Fresh Start Agreement 71
8.0: Conclusions 74
9.0: Appendix 79
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my sincerest of thanks to those who have supported me through this master and this thesis. Professor Jana Krause has been a wonderful supervisor, guiding me through this process with her advice and encouragement. My thanks also go out to Ebe-Manye Ouattara, for setting aside time to help me resolve a variety of statistical and programming challenges. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and my family, for patiently listening to my thesis plans, offering valuable advice and proofreading my drafts.
Abstract
This thesis aims to explore and assess the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement, a comprehensive peace agreement established in 1998 with the aim of ending the conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles (1968-1998). Using the Peace Accords Matrix and the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey, in addition to a wide variety of academic literature and supplementary data sources, this thesis argues that although the elite-led, consociational Good Friday Agreement initiated a paramilitary ceasefire and produced the establishment of an equally consociational power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, the Agreement was unable to create a meaningful and transformative peace. Instead, this thesis finds that the Agreement institutionalised the ‘us versus them’, zero-sum divide within the newly formed political structures between unionists and nationalists, a dominant cleavage that contributed to the initial outbreak of conflict. As a consequence, this has made the implementation of several key provisions of the Good Friday Agreement significantly more challenging, worsened by the fact that the Agreement did not contain sufficiently detailed plans on how provisions were going to be implemented. This has led to ongoing institutional instability, differing interpretations of the Agreement and weak successor agreements. This thesis thus highlights the relevance of enduring research into the long-term effects of a peace agreement and hopes to make a valuable contribution to this branch of academic literature.
List of Abbreviations
CAIN Conflict Archive on the Internet
DUP Democratic Unionist Party
GFA Good Friday Agreement
IICD Independent International Commission on Decommissioning
INLA Irish National Liberation Army
LVF Loyalist Volunteer Force
MLA Member of the Legislative Assembly
MP Member of Parliament
New IRA / Real IRA New / Real Irish Republican Party
NILT Northern Ireland Life and Times (survey)
NIWC Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition
OIRA Official Irish Republican Army
PAM Peace Accords Matrix
IRA (Provisional) Irish Republican Army
PSNI Police Service of Northern Ireland
RHC Red Hand Commando
UDA Ulster Defence Association
UK United Kingdom
UN United Nations
UUP Ulster Unionist Party
1.0: Introduction
‘The social and institutional legacies of conflict are arguably the most important but least understood of all war impacts,’ so write Christopher Blattman and Edward Miguel (2010: 42). This statement certainly appears to ring true in the case of post-conflict Northern Ireland. Although the period of active conflict and violence in the region, known as ‘the Troubles’ (1968-1998), was officially ended through the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998, scepticism remains as to whether the deep-seated roots of the conflict were sufficiently addressed by the parties involved in negotiating the peace (Tam et al., 2008: 310; Ruppe, 2014: 36). As Tam et al. (2007: 130) write: although the GFA ‘provided a way forward from ‘The Troubles’ (setting up a local assembly and a power-sharing government, embracing all the major political parties), the formal resolution of a conflict is often only the first step toward peaceful coexistence.’
21 years following the signing of the GFA, academic research featuring both Troubles and post-Troubles state and society continues to be produced. This research has contributed to a wide range of literature such as post-conflict reconciliation (e.g. Tam et al., 2008), demilitarisation (e.g. Smyth, 2004), the demobilisation of paramilitary organisations (e.g. Harland, 2010; Ferguson & McAuley, 2017) and the peace agreement or wider peace process (e.g. Hall, 2018). This thesis aims to contribute to this final category.
Many are likely to think of Northern Ireland today as a relatively developed and peaceful region, a component of the United Kingdom (UK). Many are, however, also likely to remember a Northern Ireland that only 21 years ago was still facing ‘violent political conflict’ (Harland, 2011: 415). Alongside Bosnia, Beirut and Baghdad, the travel guide the Lonely Planet once included Belfast as the fourth ‘B’ for tourists to avoid (Bereskin, 2018: 157). Today, ‘conflict tourism’ in Northern Ireland is a rapidly expanding area of business, although not without criticism (Jenkins, 2012). For example, according to Chris Jenkins (ibid.), the UK has:
[Come] to realise the financial gains that can be made by marketing our conflict while also exaggerating the “stability” of Northern Ireland; painting a picture of those who dissent as being in a vast minority with no support whatsoever. The reality is manipulated, history exploited.
Yet what was the conflict actually about? As Orla Lynch and Carmel Joyce (2018: 184) explain:
The most recent period of violence flared up in the late 1960s, both as a reaction to British rule in the region and because the region’s minority Catholic population sought, through the emergence of a civil rights movement, equal treatment under law from the British state […]. What emerged was a protracted conflict that played out between Nationalist (predominantly Catholic) and Loyalist (predominantly Protestant) communities, between the state and these communities and between and within paramilitary groups representing each identity group.
Overall, the conflict claimed an estimated 3,200 lives and resulted in roughly 42,000 injured (Balcells et al., 2016: 35). The era of the Troubles formally ended in April 1998, when the GFA was finalised through its endorsement by eight of the ten Northern Irish political parties represented in the Northern Ireland Peace Forum, followed by its ratification through referenda held in both Northern Ireland as well as the Republic of Ireland (O’Leary, 2018: 223-224). 71 per cent of votes in Northern Ireland and 94 per cent of votes in the Republic of Ireland ultimately endorsed the Agreement, thus officially bringing an end to three decades of violence (ibid.: 224). Alongside Apartheid in South Africa and the conflict between Israel and Palestine in the Middle East, to many the Northern Ireland conflict appeared to be one of the most intractable and irresolvable conflicts of the latter half of the 20th century. Two of these conflicts appear to be over now.
Yet although the GFA resolved the conflict in a political and military sense, negotiating a ceasefire with the most prominent paramilitary groups, it can be argued that the Agreement did not inspire instantaneous conflict transformation. The purpose of this thesis is to explore and contribute to those academic publications that have critically assessed the impact and implementation of the Agreement. Although the peace process in Northern Ireland and the GFA have been hailed as standards for conflict transformation that should be transposed to other areas affected by protracted violence, it remains unclear as to why this view has become popular (Mitchell, 2011: ix). First, several scholars have indicated the continuation of ‘low-intensity intergroup violence’ in Northern Ireland, which is suggested to ‘prevent the
building of inter-ethnic trust and [is] socially and economically disruptive’ (Balcells et al., 2016: 34-35). Yet a key element for conflict transformation and reconciliation is the improvement of trust between groups (Byrne, 2001; Wolff, 2002). Second, as this thesis hopes to indicate, the implementation of the GFA has not gone effortlessly, and the Northern Ireland of today continues to be affected by institutional inefficacy and instability. Even though the GFA has been maintained for over two decades, which is certainly commendable, it is also important to continually assess and, if needed, redevelop such a document, in order for it to be a flexible and ‘living’ agreement.
This thesis aims to contribute to the academic literature that assesses the legacy of the GFA, which could also be interpreted as a contribution to the wider literature surrounding the implementation of peace agreements in general. Only by exploring the legacies of the GFA will one obtain an enhanced understanding of the present political situation in Northern Ireland, as well as how this situation has the potential to affect its inhabitants. Elisabeth Wood (2015: 460) argues that the legacies of civil wars can turn into significant hurdles for post-conflict reconciliation and development. This thesis has the aim to uncover whether this can also be argued for the legacies of peace agreements.
It is furthermore relevant to explore the legacies of the GFA in 2019 as the implementation of a peace agreement is generally considered to be a long process (Joshi et al., 2017: 1004). Fundamental change does not necessarily occur over a couple years, but rather over a couple of decades or even generations (Wolff, 2002: 109; Hall, 2018: 4). However, simply because a peace agreement continues to survive, does not imply that it is flawless. As previously mentioned, several significant issues that the GFA intended to confront have managed to survive in the post-conflict period, such as the continuation of low-intensity intergroup ethnonationalist violence (Balcells et al., 2016: 35). The New Irish Republican Army (New IRA), also known as the Real IRA, can be used as an example, as the group continues to dispute the legitimacy of the GFA (Meixler, 2019). In January 2019, the New IRA was suspected by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) of placing a car bomb outside a courthouse in Derry/Londonderry, and in April 2019 the New IRA was additionally suspected of fatally shooting journalist Lyra McKee, who was a witness to rioting that was also occurring in the area surrounding Derry/Londonderry (BBC, 2019). This suggests that provisions in the
Agreement that had the purpose of addressing the ceasefire and disbanding of paramilitary organisations has fallen short. Although the New IRA is considerably smaller in size and less popular than the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) was during the height of the Troubles, the New IRA is also not the sole paramilitary group that remains active in Northern Ireland (Gray et al., 2018: 106). This indicates that a section of society continues to be disillusioned by the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and how this status has been institutionalised in the GFA.
The overall research question of this thesis is therefore: what are the limitations of the Good Friday Agreement and how do these limitations continue to affect the peace in Northern Ireland? Following this introduction, a background to Northern Ireland and the Troubles will be given, which will provide the reader with the necessary contexts required to understand contemporary Northern Ireland. Subsequently, a literature review will present and critically assess the prior research that has been done on the issues of peacebuilding and conflict transformation in Northern Ireland, consociationalism and consociational peace agreements, also presenting several limitations to the literature. A theoretical framework will then inform the reader on the chosen definitions of concepts that are relevant to this thesis’ analysis of empirical material. In particular, the theory of intergroup conflict, frequently described as the notion of ‘us versus them’, will be highlighted, as well as how this theory is highly significant in the context of post-Troubles Northern Ireland. This will bring me to my argument that although the elite-led, consociational Good Friday Agreement initiated a paramilitary ceasefire and produced the establishment of an equally consociational power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, the Agreement was unable to create a meaningful and transformative peace.
The argument featured above will be explored through both a descriptive statistics methodology, in addition to a document analysis of the GFA and its ‘successor agreements’ that followed it in the years after 1998. Using the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) database, the contents and implementation of the GFA will be explored and critically evaluated. The Northern Ireland Life and Times (NILT) survey will complement the PAM database, by using repeated cross-sectional survey data in order to outline how the people of Northern Ireland have responded to various policies that resulted from the GFA. My findings suggest that the
GFA institutionalised the ‘us versus them’, zero-sum divide within the newly formed political structures between unionists and nationalists, a dominant cleavage that contributed to the initial outbreak of conflict. This has made the implementation of several key provisions of the GFA significantly more challenging, worsened by the fact that the Agreement did not contain sufficiently detailed plans on how provisions were going to be implemented. This has resulted in ongoing institutional instability, differing interpretations of the GFA and weak successor agreements.
2.0: Background to the Troubles and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland
In order to fully understand the nuances of the Northern Ireland conflict, the GFA and in what ways previous attempts at peacebuilding and peace agreements failed, I devote the following section of this thesis to a summarisation of the history of Northern Ireland, starting from the early 20th century until the present. Without understanding the origins of armed conflict and unrest in the past, it would be difficult to comprehend the complex set of social, political and ethnonational challenges that faced Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, and arguably continue to face the region today. These are the challenges that the GFA aspired to alleviate. Overall, this section highlights how, over the decades, these issues have permeated through Northern Ireland politics and society and illustrates how difficult it was to create the GFA.
2.1: Northern Ireland Pre-Troubles
Although the official beginning of the Troubles is placed in the late 1960s, the true origins of discontent and conflict are more likely to stem back to the partition of Ireland in 1921 (Archick, 2018). Since the Plantation of Ulster, when Great Britain effectively colonised the Irish province of Ulster in the early 1600s, a divide or conflict of some kind between the Irish Catholic and British Protestant cleavages has been in place in the region that is now Northern Ireland (Byrne et al., 2009: 162). The origins of these tensions stemmed from territorial conflict and marginalisation; by 1703 the Catholic Irish population possessed less than five per cent of their ancestral land (Balcells et al., 2016: 35).
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was ultimately formed in 1801, yet this did not suppress rising Irish nationalism and what became known as the Irish Home Rule movement (Byrne et al., 2009: 162). This clash between national identities and constitutional preference is also interlinked with religious or sectarian elements; the Irish Roman Catholics were republicans associated with Ireland, whereas the British Protestants were typically unionists who wished to remain with Great Britain (ibid.; Deglow, 2016: 790). Both the Easter Rising rebellion of April 1916, which was followed by the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), exhibit the severity of social unrest present in the region at the time, which were again mainly centred around the question of home rule and increased independence from the United Kingdom (Browne, 2016: 105). Both the Easter Rising and the War of Independence
are suitable examples of the cycles of mass mobilisation that have occurred in Northern Ireland, in conjunction with the civil rights marches in the late 1960s and the hunger strikes of the 1980s (White & Demirel-Pegg, 2017: 142).
In May 1921, mainly as a result of these two events, an official partition between Northern and Southern Ireland was initiated through the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which allowed for a devolved legislature, including a prime minister and cabinet for what was recognised as ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘Southern Ireland’ (Browne, 2016: 105; Hayes & McAllister, 2015: 4-5). Southern Ireland, as had been laid out in the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) that ended the Irish War of Independence, was permitted to become self-governing, whereas the six counties of Northern Ireland chose to remain with Great Britain (Browne, 2016: 105; Phelan, 2016).
The Northern Ireland outlined in the Government of Ireland Act 1920, encompassed the six out of nine Ulster counties that were to become the boundaries of the Northern Ireland we know today, see Figure 1 (Bosi & De Fazio, 2017: 18). As historian Tony Judt wrote in his magnum opus Postwar (2007: 466-467):
[The] political leaders of the new Republic [of Ireland] were themselves not altogether unhappy to forgo the presence of a compact and sizeable community of angrily recalcitrant Protestants. But for a minority of Irish nationalists this abandonment constituted a betrayal, and under the banner of the IRA they continued to demand the unification – by force if need be – of the entire island.
Judt hereby essentially reveals how and with what reason the Irish Republican Army continued to develop in the post-War of Independence period.
In addition to the continuing issue of paramilitary organisations such as the IRA and the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the promise of devolved politics to Northern Ireland also came with its own set of challenges. As written by Bernadette Hayes and Ian McAllister (2015: 5), the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) ‘was permanently in government’ and its
‘successive governments engaged in numerous acts of discrimination against the Catholic minority, particularly at the local government level.’ In addition, Judt (2007: 467) writes that:
[The] Protestant majority dominated local Catholics through gerrymandered constituencies, political clientelism, sectarian pressure on employers, and a monopoly of jobs in crucial occupations: civil service, judiciary and above all the police.
This highlights the extent of disillusionment that preceded the start of the Troubles and the ineffectiveness of the British government’s attempts to accommodate the Irish (Hayes & McAllister, 2015: 5). This makes it all the more surprising that conflict-related violence only began to emerge after forty years of discriminatory politics against a significant proportion of marginalised and discontent society (ibid.).
Figure 1: Map depicting the geographic locations of the Republic of Ireland and the United
2.2: The Troubles
This dysfunctional relationship remained in place until the late 1960s. The first Northern Irish confrontations against British politics ultimately emerged in the form of relatively peaceful street protests, organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (Hayes & McAllister, 2015: 5). However, failure to control these protests, which were increasing in size and becoming more difficult to manage, resulted in the transfer of British troops to the region in August 1969 (ibid.). At the end of 1969, the Provisional Irish Republican Army was formed as an offshoot of the original IRA, which was becoming steadily less dominant; the IRA described by Judt (2007: 467-468) as ‘a marginal political sect […] [which] had little appeal to a younger generation of recruits’. Bosi and De Fazio (2017: 13) highlight the fact that state repression, protests and counter-protests:
[Re-activated] these pre-existing [ethnonational] categories as the most salient organizing principle of Northern Ireland’s contentious politics. The magnification of ethnonational identities solidified the deep divisions between the different factions appealing to opposite ethnonational claims, ultimately radicalizing their repertoires of contention.
Bosi and De Fazio (ibid.: 14) go so far as to suggest that if the civil rights protests had not taken place in the late 1960s, or if the government had offered sufficient reforms in response to the civil rights demands, the Troubles may never have occurred. In March 1972, Westminster imposed Direct Rule in Northern Ireland, two months after Bloody Sunday, when in late January in Derry/Londonderry, 13 people were killed by the British Army during a civil rights protest (Hayes & McAllister, 2015: 6).
Yet a glimpse into the future was offered in 1973, when the Sunningdale Conference led to the coming together of a delegation of the British government and the prominent political parties of Northern Ireland (Byrne, 2001: 335). The conference allowed for the establishment of an elite power-sharing executive in January 1975, which unfortunately swiftly collapsed in May due to a region-wide strike of the Ulster Workers’ Council, who were protesting against both the Sunningdale Agreement and the security and political conditions of Northern Ireland (ibid.; Campbell, 2017: 101). The Ulster Workers’ Council was against the Agreement, as it
would have provided the Republic of Ireland with a direct input in the administration of Northern Ireland, highlighting the extent of flexibility and accommodation that would be necessary in future attempts for peace (Campbell, 2017: 101). Etain Tannam (2018: 245) aptly summarises the period that followed the collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement, writing that ‘the late 1970s saw heightened securitisation in Northern Ireland and deteriorating political stability, hindering cross-border and intergovernmental cooperation.’
Hayes and McAllister (2015: 6-7) write that:
Between 1972 and 1985, there were three failed attempts to establish a devolved, power-sharing government in Northern Ireland: the 1973-74 Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive [the Sunningdale Agreement], the 1975-76 Constitutional Convention and the 1982-86 Assembly.
The latter two attempts failed because Constitutional Convention was unsuccessful in bringing parties to an agreement on how devolved government would be established and the nationalist community was absent from the Assembly (Byrne, 2001: 335-336). According to Hayes and McAllister (2015: 7), these three attempts at peacebuilding furthermore did not succeed as a result of two reasons. First, ‘they were designed to marginalize the political extremes within the two communities,’ and second, ‘all three attempts recognized the unionist right to veto any solutions that they did not endorse,’ (ibid.). Thereby, ‘any form of power-sharing between the communities would not be accepted,’ (ibid.).
The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement represents another key point in the history of the peace process, as it allowed the Republic of Ireland to become more involved in the governance of Northern Ireland, also promising the establishment of desired devolved institutions (United Nations; World Bank, 2018: 188). It was the first time that the British government had acknowledged this role since 1920 and was an ‘experiment in “coercive consociationalism”’ (Byrne, 2001: 336). Yet although the Agreement:
[Recognized] the necessity of greater involvement by the Irish government in matters other than law-and-order issues that locked both governments into a political working
relationship […] [the Agreement] failed to set up an elite power-sharing devolved government between the Unionist and Nationalist communities. […] [The Agreement] did not promote intercommunal consensus or the accommodation of political and cultural differences. (ibid.)
Even though the document was limited, the Agreement was to become a highly significant link in the chain of a gradual movement towards peace in the region, which would only be achieved 13 years later (United Nations; World Bank, 2018: 188). Indeed, the importance of a gradual approach would also become a key feature of the Good Friday Agreement.
The 1993 Downing Street Declaration, which led to the 1995 Frameworks Documents, ‘accepted the principle that Northern Ireland would not become part of the Irish Republic without the consent of a majority, and in turn accepted that the Irish government had a legitimate role to play in the affairs of Northern Ireland,’ (Hayes & McAllister, 2015: 8). In turn, the Frameworks Documents drafted the creation of another attempt at a power-sharing Executive and Assembly (ibid.). Hayes and McAllister (ibid.: 8-10) note four differences between pre-1985 and post-1985 attempts at peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, which, according to the authors, were also the main factors as to why the GFA was able to be implemented successfully:
1.) Process: it was necessary that change would have to be incremental, which is why the discussions were termed a ‘peace process’, not a settlement (ibid.: 8-9).
2.) Inclusion: negotiators realised that inclusive agreements were more likely to succeed than exclusive, thus paramilitary organisations were included in the discussions (ibid.: 9).
3.) Consent: politicians involved in the peace process required the consent of their constituents (ibid.).
4.) Coercion: in order to avoid the potential immobilism associated with voluntary consociationalism (ibid.: 10).
2.3: The Good Friday Agreement2
Regarding the context surrounding the beginning of the peace process that ultimately led to the GFA, Mac Ginty et al. (2007: 6) write, ‘Violence continued but was contained. Although there were regular murders and bombings, and some "spectacular" attacks […], no side was able to gain a qualitative advantage through unilateral military action.’ Mac Ginty et al. (ibid.) describe the situation as a ‘classic mutually hurting stalemate.’ Under these circumstances, the early 1990s saw the start of a series of covert discussions, both within the Catholic-nationalist movement (ultimately also including the IRA), as well as between the Irish and British governments (ibid.; Guelke, 2003: 67). Slowly, a burgeoning pathway for peace began to emerge (Mac Ginty et al., 2007: 6). The IRA initiated a ceasefire in 1994, under the impression that Sinn Féin, the political party associated with the IRA, would be permitted to join all-party negotiations on the future of Northern Ireland (ibid.; Whittaker, 1999: 88). However, the ceasefire was severed in 1996, due to the slow progress of the peace process (Mac Ginty et al., 2007: 6). Only after Tony Blair was elected to be the UK’s new Prime Minister in 1997 was the process revitalised, leading to another IRA suspension of hostilities (ibid.).
Another important element responsible for the creation and ratification of the final peace agreement was the role of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC). The NIWC, formed in 1996, included women from varying cultural, religious and political backgrounds (Fearon, 2018: 5). According to Kate Fearon (ibid.), the members ‘were united in their determination to use their own common experience of political exclusion to influence the agenda, shape the process, change the dynamic and impact the outcome.’ Fearon (ibid.: 5-6) explains that the two delegates who were ultimately elected to join the negotiating table respectively had nationalist and unionist backgrounds, and contributed to the process in four instrumental ways:
1.) Paying attention to the interactions between actors involved in the process, as well as to reaching out to the larger community (ibid.: 6).
2.) Establishing strong policy stances and allowing the community to review these stances (ibid.).
2 The GFA is also often named the Belfast Agreement. These two terms can be used interchangeably, however in this thesis, the name Good Friday Agreement will be used.
3.) Encouraging inclusivity, most significantly for Sinn Féin and lesser-known unionist groups (ibid.).
4.) Broadening the agenda (ibid.).
The GFA was able to remould the zero-sum political dialogue in Northern Ireland into a more mutually advantageous ‘win-win’ discourse, although Fearon does highlight that this win was narrow, claiming that ‘the winners never went beyond the political elites’ (ibid.: 10).
As previously mentioned, the GFA was ultimately signed and ratified in April and May 1998, with large majorities supporting the Agreement in both Northern Ireland, as in the Republic of Ireland (O’Leary, 2018: 224). The GFA, as well as the failed attempts at creating peace in Northern Ireland before it, were brought into being with consociational underpinnings in mind (ibid.: 223). Briefly summarised, consociationalism essentially ‘entails the representation and participation of all major social segments in the governing process,’ which is typically done in the form of power-sharing via a coalition (McCulloch, 2014: 501). Although the Literature Review section below will discuss this theory in far greater detail, according to the United Nations (UN) and World Bank report, Pathways for Peace (2018: 188):
Arriving at an eventual power-sharing arrangement [in Northern Ireland] was motivated largely by mutual experience of trying other avenues for influence and control, for example, using ongoing violent tactics and internationalizing the struggle. Over time, resources on both sides were drained, the military conflict had reached a deadlock, and the international community was not going to take sides to resolve it.
This is a correct, albeit somewhat simplified analysis of the incentives that ultimately led to the GFA. In addition to the four previously mentioned factors that distinguished post-1985 attempts at peacebuilding from pre-1985 attempts, two other features of the GFA should also be acknowledged: its ‘constructive ambiguity’, necessary for getting main parties to agree but also a significant potential weakness, and the ‘parity of esteem’, the notion of recognising ‘the political rights of both communities and the freedom to express those rights in political institutions’ (Hayes & McAllister, 2015.: 11). These potential issues will be revisited in this
thesis’ Results and Analysis section. In doing so, this thesis hopes to untangle these assessments and explore how they may have impeded the process of conflict transformation.
2.4: Post-Good Friday Agreement Years
The fact that the GFA has been maintained in Northern Ireland for the last 21 years is an impressive accomplishment. Yet the successful adoption of the GFA did not lead to immediate stability or reconciliation in the region, nor could it have. The fact that a peace agreement has been installed does not imply that the causes of intergroup conflict have disappeared overnight. In the case of Northern Ireland, the mere establishment of the GFA in 1998 does not necessarily suggest that the entire population of the region were (or are) equally supportive of the Agreement and its legacy. The 1998 Northern Ireland Referendum and Election Study highlighted that whereas 99 per cent of Catholics voted in favour of the GFA, only 57 per cent of Protestants did the same (Ruppe, 2014: 34). Since 1998, trends have furthermore indicated that a significant number of Protestants have continued to express scepticism towards the Agreement’s promises of stability (Hayes & McAllister, 2015.: 14).
As a result of ongoing political instability and problems concerning police legitimacy, prisoner release and the decommissioning of weapons, in October 2006 the St Andrews Agreement was adopted, officially tying Sinn Féin into a power-sharing agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) (ibid.: 13). Sinn Féin additionally acknowledged the legitimacy of the judiciary and police (ibid.). According to Hayes and McAllister (ibid.), the St Andrews Agreement ‘represented the point at which all of the major elements of a consociational solution to the Northern Ireland conflict finally fell into place.’ Indeed, Amanda Hall (2018: 22) highlights that action undertaken after the St Andrews Agreement, ‘brought about positive change, addressing pressing issues of policing, flags, parades, and language, while maintaining devolved government and power-sharing institutions — even as such institutions have been temporarily disrupted.’ The St Andrews Agreement therefore constitutes one of the successor agreements to the GFA that this thesis will analyse, in addition to the 2014 Stormont House Agreement and the 2015 Fresh Start Agreement.
The purpose of this thesis is to explore the implementation of the GFA, in addition to understanding why certain provisions were included and others were excluded in the final document. Having a degree of prior knowledge of the peace process and previous attempts at reaching a sustainable peace agreement, will help the reader better comprehend the decisions made by negotiators at the time. Impressive as the Agreement is, this thesis hopes to indicate that the GFA is certainly also flawed. This thesis aims to highlight how these flaws have contributed to political fragility and the ongoing divisions that continue to occur to this day in Northern Ireland, affecting both politics and society (ibid.: 2). For example, the 2011 World Mental Health Survey found that ‘40% of the population [of Northern Ireland] have had a conflict related traumatic incident’ (BBC, 2011). Suicide rates have also doubled in Northern Ireland since the signing of the GFA, the number of those who have died due to suicide since 1998 currently being larger than the number of those who died during the conflict (Murray, 2018). This introduces the question of intergenerational trauma, and whether the GFA sufficiently addressed the more diverse consequences of protracted conflict (ibid.).
The literature review below addresses how these questions and theories have been approached by academics in the past, and further highlights where and how this thesis can contribute to the discussion of the legacy of the GFA in Northern Ireland. The previous background provides the basis for this literature review, by demonstrating how the case of peacebuilding in Northern Ireland has been constructed and why it is vital that this case should not be forgotten.
3.0: Literature Review
This literature review aims to present the academic research published on the matters of peacebuilding, conflict transformation, consociationalism and consociational peace agreements. The previous Background chapter has already discussed in significant detail the course of the peace process in Northern Ireland, and how, after several failed attempts, the GFA was ultimately established. The section on peacebuilding below is therefore somewhat shorter in length than the sections on conflict transformation, consociationalism and consociational peace agreements.
This literature review highlights the themes and issues that are both frequently and less frequently discussed in the academic work related to the aforementioned areas, thus building a foundation for my argument that the consociational nature of the GFA, led not only to the difficult implementation of the Agreement, but also institutionalised the elite-level entrenchment of effectively the same divisions that defined the Troubles. This, in turn, will have impeded conflict transformation.
3.1: Peacebuilding
The notion of peacebuilding is contentious. This is partially due to the question of how one chooses to define it. By having various definitions of peacebuilding, different interpretations and analyses of peacebuilding in practice are bound to occur. The term was famously introduced by former Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in a 1992 UN report to the Security Council (Gilligan, 2006: 326). According to Chris Gilligan (ibid.), the end of the Cold War stimulated a substantial restructuring of the global community’s approaches to conflict management, the Agenda for Peace report by Boutros-Ghali recognising ‘the significance of peace processes when it added peace building to preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping as a central plank in the UN’s approach to conflict management’. The report itself described post-conflict peacebuilding as ‘action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict,’ (Boutros-Ghali, 1992: 960). Post-conflict peacebuilding constituted the final step of the four processes set out in the report:
Preventive diplomacy seeks to resolve disputes before violence breaks out; peacemaking and peace-keeping are required to halt conflicts and preserve peace once it is attained. If successful, they strengthen the opportunity for post-conflict peace-building, which can prevent the recurrence of violence among nations and peoples. (ibid.)
This restructuring of approaches highlights several parallels with the aforementioned change in methods for peacemaking and peacebuilding in Northern Ireland post-1985. For example, Gilligan (2006: 326) states that ‘The growing interest in peace building [in contemporary politics] has been accompanied by both a growing recognition of the impact of violent conflict on mental health and interventions to deal with the psychosocial dimensions of conflict.’ As outlined in this thesis’ Background chapter, Northern Ireland continues to face significant post-conflict mental health-related challenges. A section of this thesis will therefore be devoted to exploring whether and how the GFA attempted to address this impending issue, as well as the contentious issues of victimhood and reparations.
Although Boutros-Ghali’s delineation of peacebuilding clearly emphasises the post-conflict nature of the concept, the literature featuring peacebuilding in Northern Ireland appears to concentrate around the late 1990s and the emergence of the GFA. From Boutros-Ghali’s description it is furthermore evident that the concepts of peacemaking and peacebuilding are relatively interlinked; both emphasise the necessity of sustaining peaceful conditions. However, without defining the term ‘peace’ as a concept, it is difficult to judge what Boutros-Ghali considers the preservation of peace to be. Our understanding of peace should be dynamic, to quote John Paul Lederach (1997: 20), ‘peace is seen not merely as a stage in time or a condition. It is a dynamic social construct.’ Peace is therefore more than simply the absence of violence (Galtung, 1969: 183). As this thesis will indicate, a single peace agreement does not have the capacity to instantaneously resolve a long history of intergroup conflict and contentious politics (Bosi & De Fazio, 2017: 13). This explains how peacemaking and peacebuilding are closely connected.
Interest in the Troubles, the GFA and Northern Ireland’s post-conflict politics and society has fluctuated over time. Although there has always been a relatively constant output of
literature on these subjects, after the early 2000s there appeared to be a reduction in interest in the region. It seems as though a main catalyst for revitalised attention has been through the emergence of the Brexit dilemma; the production of both academic and non-academic writings that concern the future condition of Northern Ireland has surged post-2016. Although it is certainly beneficial that more attention is being devoted to the area, it does communicate the impression that the region was relatively neglected the past decade or so.
3.2: Conflict Transformation
The concept of conflict transformation emerged around roughly the same period as peacebuilding and was influenced by a similar set of global developments (Smithey, 2011: 43). Echoing what Chris Gilligan previously stated in regard to peacebuilding, Lee Smithey (ibid.) writes:
The potential for significant changes in the geopolitical landscape and the apparent importance of popular movements demanded a reassessment of many conflicts and raised hope that such largescale nonviolent change could be encouraged elsewhere.
Smithey (ibid.) describes how these conflicts of the late 20th century were influenced by a large variety of elements, such as segregation, economic inequalities and social movement mobilisations. As has been outlined in the Background section of this thesis, these factors closely resemble the roots of the outbreak of conflict in Northern Ireland (Balcells et al., 2016; British Council, 2018; White & Demirel-Pegg, 2017). About these elements, Smithey (2011: 43) writes:
All interact to influence the trajectory of a conflict. Even when they might be said to end with the cessation of violence, the laws of unintended consequences tend to contribute to new conflicts over different issues and in new areas. Thus, conflict never ends but transforms in rolling waves of contention.
This notion of unintended consequences is relevant to the setting of Northern Ireland, as even though the GFA negotiated a ceasefire between the UK government, Irish government and
the most salient paramilitary organisations present at the time, those who disagreed with the ceasefire have since formed their own, smaller paramilitary groups (Hall, 2018: 24). Another aim of this thesis will thus be to explore to what degree paramilitary violence has been addressed in the post-1998 period.
Audra Mitchell (2011: 108) conceptualises conflict transformation as:
[Seeking] to bring about security, both military and ‘human’ […] through implementing the transformative processes of governance, development and democratization. […] [This] concept of security – and, indeed, peace – is conflated with the smooth and sustainable functioning of these processes, which is assumed to be necessary to the prevention of renewed conflict.
By exposing the relationship between peace and the necessity of change required in ‘governance, development and democratisation’, Mitchell (ibid.) highlights the far-reaching actions demanded from a peace process. Expanding on this issue, using the case of post-Apartheid South Africa, Graeme Simpson (2000: 25) claims that:
[The] practical translation of the rhetoric of reconciliation into reality, depends upon whether reconciliation initiatives reach beyond the limits of formal political and constitutional change, to tackle those deep rooted social imbalances, which - at the most fundamental structural level - underpin the culture of violence.
This brings me to a point highlighted in other literature, which suggests that the GFA was only meant to be the start of a longer peace process (Jarman, 2004: 429; Hall, 2018: 4; Mac Ginty et al., 2007: 1). Simpson (2000: 23), for example, argues that the final report published by Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, a fundamental instrument for the state’s conflict transformation, ‘simply cannot hope (and does not pretend) to reflect the full complexity of thirty five years of history.’ So too was the GFA unable to compress three decades of ethnonational conflict into a single peace agreement. This claim is crucial to our understanding of the legacies of the GFA, as it highlights how a peace process cannot rest on simply one agreement; achieving an agreement must be acknowledged as a springboard for
more activity concerning reconciliation, improving inter-group trust, dealing with social and economic inequalities and pursuing the implementation of the provisions set out in the agreement itself (Tam et al., 2008). As Simpson (2000: 25) highlights in his article, if this does not occur, this could provide room for an increase in post-agreement violence and disillusionment against the government tasked to carry out the agreement.
In the literature regarding conflict transformation in Northern Ireland, Amanda Hall (2018: 2) argues that a ‘negative peace’ has been established. This term was made famous by Johan Galtung in the late 1960s, labelling the absence of violence as a negative peace if it did not also lead to a transformation of conflict, as well as the transformation of the larger society involved in said conflict (ibid.; Galtung, 1969: 183). Hall (2018: 3, 16, 23) claims that the peace in post-GFA Northern Ireland is negative since the root causes of the Troubles have continued to exist, highlighted in an ongoing ‘culture war’ and the perpetuation of an ‘us versus them’ psychology. The ‘us versus them’ psychology, also known as the theory of intergroup conflict, will be returned to in the following theoretical framework. As I argue that this zero-sum mentality was formally institutionalised in 1998 through the GFA, its consociational nature effectively legitimising a system of politics that would prove to be significantly flawed in the decades that followed, it would be best to divert our attention to the following themes of consociationalism and its effect on peace agreements.
3.3: Consociationalism and Peace Agreements
To reiterate from the Background section of this thesis, the GFA is considered a consociational text, as it proposes a consociational approach to politics in Northern Ireland (Nagle, 2018; Guelke, 2003; Gray et al., 2018). The theory of consociationalism was made popular through the academic writings of Arend Lijphart, who described the socio-political system of pluralism the Netherlands in his book, The Politics of Accommodation, published in 1968 (Hayes & McAllister, 2015: 2). Consociationalism argues that societies are divided into different cleavages, which can be defined as:
[A] specific type of conflict in democratic politics that is rooted in the social structural transformations that have been triggered by large-scale processes such as nation
building, industrialization, and possibly also by the consequences of post-industrialization (Bornschier, 2009: 1).
Bernadette Hayes and Ian McAllister (2015: 1) provide a succinct definition of consociationalism, writing that ‘fundamentally divided societies can come together as a result of an elite agreement, whereby executive power is shared between competing groups.’ Since no group will be able to independently possess a majority, the groups are effectively obligated to work together in order to move forward (ibid.). Echoing this statement, in terms of conflict resolution and peacebuilding, John Nagle (2018: 396) writes:
[Conflict] resolution in divided societies is best-achieved through the accommodation of the political élites representing the salient ethnic or ethnonational groups and institutionally anchored by inclusive coalitions and proportionality in public appointments.
As explained by Nagle (ibid.: 410): ‘The logic of consociational proponents is that the building of trust at the elite level would gradually descend to envelop contending communities, thereby leading to the erosion of ethnic cleavages.’ The elite therefore essentially sets the standard for the remainder of society to adopt, hypothetically leading to some type of trickle-down effect. The parties involved in negotiating the peace process in Northern Ireland – political parties in Northern Ireland, the UK government and the Irish government – understood the Troubles as an ethnonationalist conflict between the British, unionist, Protestant and the Irish, nationalist, Catholic communities, which was ultimately reflected via the GFA in a consociational solution (ibid.: 396). A power-sharing devolved government would be the way forward.
Those who support the concept of consociationalism argue that it is ‘most likely to generate a secure and peaceful polity in which all groups are included in decision-making’ (Garry et al., 2017: 493). In contrast, opponents of consociational power-sharing governments argue that ‘power sharing is based on recognising and giving veto rights to distinct rival social groups, the institutional arrangements simply cement and prolong the underlying division in society’ (ibid.: 494). Indeed, upon dissecting the literature on consociationalism, an issue concerning
the effectiveness of the consociational approach in Northern Ireland immediately emerges. The theory was based on conflict in pluralistic societies; Lijphart used the Netherlands in the 19th and early 20th century as a case study, when Dutch society was divided across four distinct ‘pillars’: liberals, socialists, Protestants and Catholics (Hall, 2018: 12; van Leeuwen, 2018). In a society divided across a binary cleavage, how can one expect consociationalism to have the same regulating effect? According to Brendan O’Leary (2018: 238), ‘Lijphart regards a dual balance of power as unlikely to promote consociation because each segment’s leaders may hope to win a decisive majority, and have insufficient incentives to create a stable consociation’. Is this then not a danger in Northern Ireland? Although there may be multiple political parties present on either side of the unionist-nationalist divide, the divide nevertheless continues to exist, having been institutionalised at the political level by the GFA. John Nagle states that ‘Northern Ireland’s consociational model limits the degree to which ethnicity and nationalism are embedded in politics,’ yet in all elections held since 1998, unionist and nationalist parties have won over 90 per cent of the votes (Nagle, 2011: 167; McCulloch, 2014: 509). As Allison McCulloch (ibid.: 509-510) furthermore points out, of the two major cross-communal parties present at GFA negotiations, the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition has ceased to exist, and the Alliance Party has faced low levels of popular support since 1998. Research has moreover indicated that the correlation between voting behaviour and religion in Western Europe is strongest in Northern Ireland (Nagle, 2018: 410). Naturally, it can be assumed that political parties will attempt to capitalise on both of these two trends, contributing to further entrenchment of the aforementioned divide (ibid.).
Peace agreements such as the GFA can therefore be abused. Due to a GFA provision that was designed in order to determine cross-community Assembly support, a Petition of Concern (PoC) can be deployed if 30 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) request it (Gray et al., 2018: 66). As a direct consequence, ‘the matter at hand would not only have to be backed by a weighted 60 per cent majority in the Assembly but also by at least 40 per cent of those designated as Unionist and Nationalist’ (ibid.). In recent years, however, the PoC has been significantly exploited. Whereas between 1998 and 2011 only 40 PoCs were recorded, between 2011 and 2016 this figure increased to 118, with the DUP requesting a PoC 86 times (Nagle, 2018: 411; Gray et al., 2018: 66). Nagle (2018: 411) explains why this is problematic: ‘The main ethnonational parties have deployed their veto in areas of policy that are not clearly
specified as clearly communal.’ For example, although in November 2015 the Northern Ireland Assembly approved the legalisation of same-sex marriage, the DUP used a PoC to veto the legislation, even though the issue was not directly related to the protection of unionist concerns (Gray et al., 2018: 67). This indicates that the contents of the GFA are thus subject to different interpretations, suggested to be dependent on political affiliation (Ruppe, 2014: 33).
Another key issue raised in the literature surrounds the claim that consociational arrangements are meant to be temporary (Nagle, 2018: 410). As previously mentioned, these agreements have the purpose of encouraging ‘belligerent groups to abandon violence for constitutional guarantees of representation in the polity,’ however, ‘through safeguarding representation, a new predicament arises regarding how to transition to a more flexible system that affords an opportunity for the depoliticisation of ethnicity’ (ibid.). This lack of ‘depoliticisation of ethnicity’ strengthens the suggestion that consociational arrangements have the ability to contribute to a reinforcement of divisions, preventing society from achieving conflict transformation (ibid.). Since this literature review has indicated the significant extent to which politics in Northern Ireland continues to be distinguished across the same traditional lines that divided the conflict, this angle will also be explored in the Results and Analysis section of this thesis.
Yet several scholars claim that the GFA was not a purely consociational text (O’Leary, 2018: 225; Nagle, 2018: 397). As explained by John Nagle (ibid.), ‘Northern Ireland was not only an internal ‘sectarian’ dispute but also involved the UK and Irish governments as key actors.’ This resulted in the Agreement devoting significant attention to both north-south (between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland) and east-west (between Northern Ireland and the Great Britain) arrangements. Another interesting branch of consociational literature, is John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary’s (2007) distinction between liberal and corporate consociationalism. Liberal consociationalism ‘rewards whatever salient political identities emerge in democratic elections, whether these are based on ethnic or religious groups, or on subgroup or transgroup identities,’ whereas corporate consociationalism ‘accommodates groups according to ascriptive criteria, such as ethnicity or religion, on the assumption that group identities are fixed and that groups are both internally homogeneous and externally
bounded’ (McGarry & O’Leary, 2007: 675). Allison McCulloch argues that Northern Ireland combines both types of consociationalism, whereas John Nagle claims that power-sharing governance in Northern Ireland is becoming steadily more corporate (McCulloch, 2014: 506; Nagle, 2018: 411). The fact that the concept of consociationalism, as well as the study of consociationalism in practice, varies to a significant extent depending on the context and the interpretations of the researcher, indicates an important caveat in the assortment of prior literature. One of the aims of this thesis is to assess the state of the power-sharing devolved government that has been established in Northern Ireland. This will hopefully offer increased clarity into the question of how the GFA has influenced the nature of consociational politics in Northern Ireland, as well as to what degree consociational arrangements have been beneficial for post-conflict reconciliation between unionists and nationalists.
The aforementioned approach makes a relevant contribution to the field of consociational peace agreements and consociational politics, as prior literature has claimed that the GFA indicates ‘a clear bias’ towards the acknowledgement of two separate communities, devoting less attention to the people of Northern Ireland as a whole (Gilligan, 2016: 40). Chris Gilligan, for example, represents one of the tougher critiques against consociationalism, highlighting how critics have portrayed the concept as ‘racist because it institutionalises sectarian division at the heart of government’ (ibid.: 41). Nagle (2018: 410), on the other hand, suggests that ‘By encouraging ethnic hardliners to abandon physical force for political representation, Northern Ireland has clearly undergone a major reduction in political violence.’ There are hence a variety of suggested advantages as well as disadvantages attached to the concept of a consociational peace agreement and the type of post-conflict institutions it produces. The purpose of this thesis is to use empirical data to explore which of the previous assessments are the most convincing. This analysis is particularly important since the literature presented in this section have varying years of publication. This thesis thus not only analyses the legacies of the GFA, but also of the legacies of the literature that has been inspired by the GFA, creating an integrated and contemporary evaluation of both.
4.0: Theoretical Framework
The purpose of the following theoretical framework is to supplement the previous literature review. This will be done by selecting and defining the theoretical assumptions and concepts that have been relevant to the construction of my research question and argument, and subsequently indicating how they will be used to analyse the empirical material presented in the remainder of this thesis.
4.1: Intergroup Conflict or ‘Us Versus Them’
As discussed in the literature review, the key criticism against consociational arrangements, such as the power-sharing institutions established in post-GFA Northern Ireland, is the argument that a consociational structure formally legitimises the separation of communities at the political elite level (Hall, 2018: 12; Garry et al., 2017: 494; Gilligan, 2016: 41). Due to this claim, the theory of intergroup conflict is a suitable theoretical lens for this thesis, as it has the ability to illustrate whether and how this institutionalised division can be detrimental to politics and society, particularly in post-conflict Northern Ireland.
In the 1970s, social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner became prominent contributors to the rapidly growing academic field of group membership and intergroup behaviour (McLeod, 2008). These concepts were also relevant to the field of International Relations and have since been analysed and written about in a variety of different ways. Regarding the Troubles, the notions of intergroup conflict, violence, forgiveness and mistrust, to name a few, have all been implemented as theoretical lenses in previous research (Balcells et al., 2016; Tam et al., 2007; Tam et al., 2008; Tam et al., 2009).
An important justification as to why this theory is particularly relevant to Northern Ireland, is due to the ‘categorization process’, or the main infrastructure surrounding the study of intergroup conflict (Crisp et al., 2001: 502). As explained by Crisp et al. (ibid.):
[The] importance of categorization to understanding intergroup relations is clear: this pervasive tendency to categorize people seems to be a necessary prerequisite for
prejudice and discrimination (with no mental distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ there can be no category-based discrimination […]).
The theory of intergroup conflict underscores the idea that communities make a distinction between their own ingroup and a different outgroup, hence the frequently used phrase of ‘us against them’ (Dovidio et al., 2012: 161). According to Ruppe (2014: 35), ‘The positive attributes associated with the ingroup are usually mirrored by less favorable outgroup attitudes and intergroup tolerance.’ This does not, however, necessarily always produce an intractable conflict (Vallacher et al., 2012: 16). Vallacher et al. (ibid.) highlight two determinants that have the potential to ‘transform benign social relations into relations characterized by destructive and intractable conflict.’ The first are ‘exclusive social structures [that] limit intergroup contact and isolate the ingroup across family, work, and community domains,’ and second, since ‘individuals in the outgroup are rarely encountered […] there is nothing to prevent the assumption of outgroup homogeneity — the belief that everyone in the outgroup shares the same stereotypical characteristics, behavioral tendencies, and values’ (ibid.). These two determinants contribute to the formation of collective identities, which in Northern Ireland have been characterised by the traditional British, unionist, Protestant and Irish, nationalist, Catholic cleavages (McAuley & Ferguson, 2016). In the context of Northern Ireland, James McAuley and Neil Ferguson (ibid.: 563-564) write:
Loyalism emerged from and remains, directed by fear and a dread of the Other. As the perceived level of threat intensified, collective identities became polarised, resulting in the enforcement of emotional boundaries between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them.’’ ‘‘Friends’’ and ‘‘enemies’’ then became clearly differentiated and importantly, those groups who regarded themselves as wronged increasingly saw the actions of the Other as unjustifiable.
Supporting the establishment of these ingroups and outgroups, as well as their collective identities, organisations such as loyalist paramilitaries adopt a variety of symbols; in Northern Ireland the use of flags (the British Union Jack versus the Irish tricolour, or the flags of paramilitary organisations), painting kerbs in the colours of the aforementioned flags and parading continue to remind people of the different communities, see Figure 2 (Lynch &
Joyce, 2018: 191). Northern Ireland’s communal division is furthermore characterised by ‘peace lines’, or separation barriers that have been erected between Catholic and Protestant areas, see Figure 3 (Balcells et al., 2016: 41). Niall Cunningham and Ian Gregory (2014: 66) suggest that ‘Peacelines and interfaces are bad things at an emotional and psychological level: they engender fear and hatred of those on the other side of them.’ In 2016, Balcells et al. (2016: 41) recorded a total of 53 peace lines present in Northern Ireland, a number that has increased since the signing of the GFA (Geoghegan, 2015). I would suggest that all of these examples indicate the presence in Northern Ireland of Vallacher et al.’s (2012: 16) ‘exclusive social structures’, which have the potential to impede intergroup contact and the development of trust.
Figure 2: Kerb painting in a Northern Irish neighbourhood3
3 Morris, A. 2015, June 17. Loyalists paint road markings red, white and blue. [Online]. [Accessed: June 18, 2019]. Retrieved from https://www.irishnews.com/news/2015/06/17/news/loyalists-paint-road-markings-red-white-and-blue-137675/.
Figure 3: ‘Peace lines’ have been the norm in interface areas in Northern Ireland since the
beginning of the Troubles, segregating Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods.4
Also relevant to this thesis is the argument that ‘Negative emotions that result from intergroup conflict persist long after the violence itself has stopped. […] Anger, for example, is particularly related to decreased forgiveness’ (Tam et al., 2007: 120). This can consequently affect future attempts at constructive intergroup communication (Ruppe, 2014: 42). Tam et al. (2008: 304) claim that the people of Northern Ireland continue to be psychologically affected by the Troubles, which can be observed through ongoing social and communal segregation, as well as through the lack of mixed schools. This issue is particularly present in working class areas, thus adding another layer to the nature of intergroup conflict in Northern Ireland (Gallagher & Cairns, 2011: 59). Even though this indicates religious, economic, psychological, historical and political dimensions to not only the Troubles, but also Northern Ireland’s post-conflict society, Tam et al. (2008: 304) describe the examples of the ongoing
4 Richard Wainwright Photography. 2010, October 14. Borders and Barriers - The Belfast Peace Lines. [Online]. [Accessed May 7, 2019]. Retrieved from https://www.richwainwright.com/blog/foreign-assignments/borders-and-barriers-the-belfast-peace-lines/.
segregation of education and housing as the ‘less-visible consequences of violent conflict’. As explained by Elizabeth Gallagher and Ed Cairns (2011: 59): ‘although segregation is a result of the conflict and not the cause, it lends a hand in maintaining prejudice and religious stereotyping.’ There thus continue to be visual, physical and emotional reminders of these collective identities and histories, which arguably must make it increasingly more difficult for the people of Northern Ireland to move forward from the ‘us versus them’ mindset (Lynch & Joyce, 2018: 191). This thesis hopes to indicate that the GFA and its successor agreements did too little to address this inherently difficult part of Northern Ireland’s past and present, which has been reinforced by the consociational nature of politics. Indeed, how can one expect positive social change if there is no presence of political or economic change?
4.2: Concepts
Before moving on to a reiteration of my central argument, several key concepts must first be defined.
4.2.1: An Elite-Led Process
Upon dissecting the literature relevant to this thesis, it becomes evident that many publications use the term ‘elite’, without conceptualising it within the scope and wider context of their study. It is, however, important to provide a definition of this concept, as the term can be interpreted in a variety of different ways. It is furthermore important to conceptualise the term, as the construction and implementation of the GFA is argued to have been led by the political elite (Byrne, 2001; Mitchell, 2011: 168). Although the ‘[peace] process to which civil society – and the third sector, in particular – has made such a considerable contribution,’ Adrian Guelke (2003: 75) argues that:
[It] is evident that in the Agreement as a whole too little attention has been paid to the drawbacks of consociational settlements, not least their implications for the entrenching of divisions and the reduction of the influence of cross-community groups and civil society more generally on the political process. (ibid.)
This thesis will therefore also explore to what extent the importance of civil society organisations has been acknowledged by the GFA. In doing so, this thesis can assess the validity of the criticism held against the consociational political structures of Northern Ireland.
Yet who or what are the elite? Fearon (2018: 2) defines Northern Ireland’s political elite as either ‘a Government or an Executive,’ thus alluding to the involvement of both devolved political actors and parties in Northern Ireland, as well as the UK and Irish governments. This conceptualisation is essentially akin to John Paul Lederach’s (1997: 92) construction of ‘top-level actors’. Smyth (2004: 562-563) provides an interesting explanation for why these players are considered elites in the case of Northern Ireland: when the first discussions were held in the early 1990s, they were held in secret; the general public and wider civil society were not aware that another attempt at peacemaking was being made. Smyth (ibid.: 563) furthermore highlights how this secrecy had the potential to feed spoiler groups, as spoilers could claim that the GFA was created without the consultation of the general public. Indeed, Mac Ginty et al. (2007: 2) write that:
There is often a dissonance between the peace agreed at the elite level and the interpretation and experience of that peace at the group and individual level. In many cases, the peace process or peace accord becomes stalled, affording relief from direct violence but unable to develop towards a transformative peace in which underlying conflict causation and maintenance factors can be addressed. There is a real danger (as evidenced in Kosovo, Sri Lanka, and Northern Ireland) that mistrust, violence, and disaffection develop amid the "permanent impermanence" of the stalled peace process or peace accord.
This statement relates directly to the central theme and argument made by this thesis. Although it has been claimed that the referenda held in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland had the purpose of addressing this issue of exclusion, criticism remains that this did not satisfy ordinary citizens’ wish for consultation (Smyth, 2004: 563). This is therefore the largest risk of elite-led politics.
