Good Friday Agreement

Signed in Belfast on Good Friday, 10 April 1998, the Good Friday Agreement, also called the Belfast Agreement, largely ended the bloodshed of the Troubles, the conflict that had cost more than 3,500 lives in Northern Ireland since the late 1960s. It set up a power-sharing government in which unionists and nationalists govern together, settled how Northern Ireland's constitutional status could change, and created new links with the Republic of Ireland and across the two islands. Voters in both parts of Ireland approved it by large majorities.

When the Irish Free State was founded in 1922, six northern counties remained in the United Kingdom. Tensions between unionists, who wished to stay British, and nationalists, who hoped for a united Ireland, erupted into sustained violence from the late 1960s. Determined attempts at a political settlement got under way in the late 1980s, and the 1990s brought ceasefires, some later broken, and years of difficult talks. The final negotiations were chaired by the American envoy George Mitchell, sent by President Bill Clinton, with the British prime minister Tony Blair and the Irish taoiseach Bertie Ahern leading for the two governments.

The settlement consists of a short treaty between the British and Irish governments and a much longer Multi-Party Agreement reached with eight Northern Irish parties and groupings. These ranged from the Ulster Unionist Party and two small loyalist parties linked to paramilitary groups, through the cross-community Alliance Party and the Women's Coalition, to the nationalist SDLP and Sinn Féin, associated with the Provisional IRA. The Democratic Unionist Party was the only major party to oppose the deal. Deliberately vague wording on some issues, sometimes called "constructive ambiguity", helped win acceptance but postponed hard arguments over weapons and policing.

At the heart of the agreement is the principle of consent. Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority of its people wish, and both governments are bound to give effect to a united Ireland if majorities in both parts of the island vote for it. Ireland for the first time recognised, in a treaty binding on it, that Northern Ireland belonged to the UK, and it amended Articles 2 and 3 of its constitution, which had claimed the whole island; Britain repealed the Government of Ireland Act 1920. People born in Northern Ireland may identify as Irish, British or both, and may hold either citizenship or both.

The agreement built institutions in three "strands". The first created a Northern Ireland Assembly with cross-community voting on key decisions and an Executive whose ministries are shared among the parties. The second set up a North/South Ministerial Council for cooperation with the Irish government. The third established a British–Irish Council, bringing together the two governments, the devolved administrations and the Crown dependencies, along with a British–Irish Intergovernmental Conference.

On 22 May 1998 referendums were held on both sides of the border. In Northern Ireland, with a turnout of about 81 per cent, 71 per cent voted yes; in the Republic, 94 per cent of those voting approved the constitutional change. Some 400 paramilitary prisoners were to be released early if their organisations kept their ceasefires; in the end 428 were freed.

Power passed to the new institutions on 2 December 1999, but progress was halting. The Assembly was suspended several times, chiefly over the slow decommissioning of IRA weapons, which was declared complete only in September 2005. After the St Andrews Agreement, a power-sharing executive led by Ian Paisley of the DUP and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin took office in May 2007. The Executive collapsed again in January 2017 and was restored in January 2020.

The UK's departure from the European Union raised fears for the open Irish border that the peace process had made possible. The arrangements eventually agreed with the EU placed checks on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland instead, which many unionists opposed. The question of how Brexit fits with the agreement remains a live issue.

Our 1994 and 2000 maps show Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, bordering the Republic of Ireland, before and after the agreement.