The Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement (April 1998)

2012 ◽  
pp. 265-275 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Friday ◽  
Belfast Agreement

The mental health impact of the Troubles, 1969–1999

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Health Impact ◽  
Peace Accord ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
Good Friday Agreement ◽  
The Impact

This Chapter is the first of two that describe efforts to understand the mental health and related impacts of the conflict in Northern Ireland, often referred to as The Troubles. The Chapter covers the period from the outbreak of violence in the late 1960’s up until the period around the peace accord, the Belfast Agreement (or Good Friday Agreement) of April 1998. The early studies reveal little, if any, major effects on the wellbeing and mental health of the population, but as the years go by, evidence starts to build of the impact of the violence, particularly as the ceasefires of the early and mid 1990’s take hold. The developing understanding of the impact was due in part to the evolution of methods and approaches being used by researchers - which is discussed in more detail at the end of Chapter 5.

Identity on Parade in Northern Ireland

2019 ◽  
pp. 24-50
Author(s):  
Jonathan S. Blake
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The Past ◽  
Marching Bands ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Orange Order

This chapter introduces the history and political context of loyalist parades in Northern Ireland. It traces how parades have changed over the past two centuries in response to shifting political conditions. The chapter then shows how parades influence and are influenced by politics in the post–Good Friday/Belfast Agreement era. In the discussion of contemporary parading, the chapter presents data on the number of parades, paraders, and spectators, which demonstrate the prominence of the movement in Protestant society. It also describes the major parading organizations, including the Orange Order, the other loyal orders, and marching bands, and explains the main sources of disputes between Protestants and Catholics over parades.

Language and Cultural Politics in Northern Ireland

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-172
Author(s):  
Ronnie Moore
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Irish Context ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
Regional Or Minority Languages

This paper presents an outline of the circumstances surrounding the current political stalemate in Northern Ireland. It considers the role of language as a key justification for the unravelling of the complex political arrangements formulated by The Belfast Agreement or Good Friday Agreement (GFA). The discussion begins by problematizing the notions of “identity” and “minority” in the Irish / Northern Irish context as an important backdrop and within the framework of the European commitment to, and Charter for, Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML). In particular it looks at historical memory, constructed history, ideology and notions of nationalism, as well as the role of politics and manipulation of language.

scholarly journals A Charter of Rights for the Island of Ireland: An Unknown Quantity in the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement

2007 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-835 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Egan ◽  
Rachel Murray
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
The Political ◽  
Unknown Quantity ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
Legal Document ◽  
Legal Difficulties ◽  
Final Agreement ◽  
Political Settlement

AbstractThe basic aim of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement was to try to achieve a political settlement to the conflict in Northern Ireland. While the channels for the settlement were to be primarily institutional, the importance of safeguarding the rights of both communities in Northern Ireland by addressing equality and justice issues was recognized, to varying degrees, by all parties to the process that led to the drafting of the Agreement. As the negotiations progressed, the human rights section of the Agreement grew exponentially, moving ‘from the margins to the mainstream’ so that the final Agreement contains a whole section on human rights protections. Not only have these particular elements of the Agreement come to fruition, but they also have received a considerable amount of public and political interest as well as academic comment and analysis. Buried within the human rights chapter, however, is a concept that has so far received minimal interest or enthusiasm from any quarter. That is the reference in paragraph 10 of the ‘Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity’ chapter to the possibility of establishing an all-island Charter of Rights.The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it traces the genesis of the Charter of Rights concept through to its inclusion in the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement; secondly, it examines the approach thus far taken by the Joint Committee of the two human rights commissions to the task entrusted to them in relation to the Charter by the Agreement; and finally, it explores some of the issues that need to be considered and the challenges faced by that Committee in future efforts to assist in the construction of any such Charter. In so doing, it describes the political and legal difficulties faced in attempts not only to formulate agreement on human rights but also to create a legal document which may be applicable to two jurisdictions. It concludes by suggesting ways in which the project may be progressed.

The British–Irish Council and Devolution

1999 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
The Other ◽  
National State ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
The Government

THE BRITISH-IRISH COUNCIL SPRINGS FROM AND IS PROVIDED FOR IN the Belfast Agreement signed on Good Friday 1998. Its coming into force depends upon the implementation of the Agreement. The Council is established, however, not by the 1998 Northern Ireland Act, which gives legislative expression to the bulk of this Agreement, but by an international treaty, the British–Irish Agreement, attached to the Belfast Agreement.The Belfast Agreement together with the legislation providing for devolution to Scotland and Wales establishes a new constitutional settlement, both among the nations which form the United Kingdom, and also between those nations and the other nation in these islands, the Irish nation. The United Kingdom itself is, as a result of the Scotland Act and the Government of Wales Act, in the process of becoming a new union of nations, each with its own identity and institutions – a multi-national state, rather than, as many of the English have traditionally seen it, a homogeneous British nation containing a variety of different people.

Engendering transitional justice: questions of absence and silence

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eilish Rooney
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
Practical Implications

The globalisation of transitional justice as a framework for the resolution of conflicts is a remarkable phenomenon of the post-Cold War era (Bell and Craig, 2000). In different contexts this framework has significant consequences for women’s equality. This article asserts that a conceptualisation of gender that intersects with other dimensions of inequality in state formation provides an important tool for understanding contemporary transitional justice processes. This complex tool of intersectional analysis is used to explore the issue of women’s equality in Northern Ireland’s transition. This is applied to the problems of women’s absence from negotiations and the silence in these negotiations on matters to do with women’s day-to-day lives. The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement and the enactment of the equality legislation enacted in the Northern Ireland Act 1998 are the textual sites of analysis. These documents comprise the formal transitional framework for Northern Ireland. The article examines the theoretical tensions and practical implications inherent in universal claims for women’s equality in a situation where recognition of ‘difference’ is enshrined in both the equality legislation and the mechanisms for future democratic representation. The article concludes by suggesting that transitional justice discourse can benefit from the theoretical challenges posed by intersectionality and that social stability in NI and in other conflicted societies may be strengthened through addressing the corrosive impacts of inequality.

scholarly journals Mourning the Troubles: Anna Burns’s Milkman as a Gendered Response to the Belfast Agreement

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela Santos Brigida ◽  
Davi Pinho
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Fresh Start ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The Past ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
The City

The past two decades have produced extensive criticism of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement’s (1999) progressivist logic in its proposal of a “fresh start” as the best way to honour the victims of the armed conflict that took place during the Troubles (1968-1998). In this paper, we argue that, by refusing to forget and to move on without exposing its grief, Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) mourns the Troubles in the public arena, undoing the Agreement. With special interest in Burns’s narrator and protagonist who evades the reality of violence by “reading-while-walking”, we read Milkman as a gendered response to this enforced forgetfulness. If walking the city frames this young woman’s trauma within the collective trauma of the Troubles, it also offers the nomadic possibility of refusing the sectarian identities available to her.

The Irish Border

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milena Komarova ◽  
Katy Hayward
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Eu

The emergence, development, and transformation of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland reveals much about the changing nature of nation-statehood over the century that followed its creation. In its own way, it is also a subject of innovation. The three interrelated strands of relationships safeguarded by the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement of 1998 in many ways define the border. These relationships run within and between the two islands of Ireland and Britain, and also between the two political traditions in Northern Ireland. Nationalists and Unionists have come to define much of their ethos in relation to the symbolic meaning of the Irish border: The former want the border removed and the latter see the border as necessary to keep Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. This helps to understand the prominence given to the Irish border in the context of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU), as well as the controversy around the terms of the U.K.–EU Withdrawal Agreement, which changed the nature of the relationship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom as well as between Northern Ireland and Ireland. As a consequence of Brexit, the future of borders in and around Ireland—their openness and their governance—will be inevitably shaped by the vicissitudes of the EU–U.K. relationship.

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