Fergus Finlay: Good Friday Agreement must not be seen as the success of two men

None of us have seen yet the results of your no doubt intense work, but I feel the need to tell you I’m getting more annoyed by the minute. Prove me wrong ladies and gentlemen (please!), but so far all I’m seeing is the bones of a Bertie/Blair fest, with a few American politicians thrown in. All fine and decent people, don’t get me wrong, but if that’s your idea of what the Good Friday Agreement was about, you’re missing the point entirely.

I’m writing this now because there’s still a couple of weeks to go, and there’s time to get it right. If you don’t, you’ll be doing a serious injustice to a challenging process and a lot of people whose contribution to peace was immense.

Apart from the two men who signed the Agreement, there’s a couple of other things you can’t afford to forget. Perhaps the most important is that the road to peace in Northern Ireland is marked by 3,500 graves. Most of the people who died in the conflict are forgotten now, except for their families. Some of the names — not enough, I know — will stick in my head forever.

For instance — and I’ll just give one example — I never think of the peace process without remembering Julie Statham.

Julie was in love with a boy called Diarmuid Shields. She once wrote a little poem to him — “When I hold you all seems right with the world, And I will love you forever no matter what” — were two of its lines.

Her life was destroyed when a group of men from the Ulster Volunteer Force went to Diarmuid’s home in Dungannon in early 1993 with the intention of killing his entire family. They failed, but they did gun down Diarmuid and his father, Pat. Those were the first sectarian killings in 1993 — and there were to be many more that year. A month after Diarmuid was murdered, Julie, an honours student in Queens university, but whose heart was broken beyond repair, took her own life.

Apart from the people, the road to peace in Northern Ireland created all sorts of other monuments. Frizzell’s chip shop on the Shankill Road; Greysteel in Derry, the LaMon Restaurant just outside Belfast, Enniskillen. So many place names in Northern Ireland, synonymous with cruelty and tragedy. And that’s not to mention places like Brighton, Warrington, Talbot Street, and Lincoln Place in Dublin. All turning points — all moments in our history when we all said never again.

But you know the great song ‘Green Fields of France’ don’t you? And especially that verse that says “the killing and dying it was all done in vain, oh Willy McBride it all happened again, and again, and again, and again, and again …” until it began at last to stop, Good Friday, twenty-five years ago.

But here’s the other thing you need to remember in your planning. Good Friday wouldn’t — couldn’t — have happened without an independent body chaired by George Mitchell. That body was designed to put flesh on the (already meaty) Joint Framework Documents. They in turn were the process that built on the IRA and Loyalist ceasefires and helped to rebuild the IRA ceasefire when it collapsed. And the ceasefires would never have happened without the Downing Street Declaration.

There were 1,500 days, give or take, between the first of those events — the Declaration — and Good Friday in 1996. It might sound like a lot, but every single one of those days, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, involved peace work — back-breaking, risk-taking, painstaking work — by talented public servants on both sides of the Irish Sea. (You, ladies and gentlemen organising this celebration, know every one of their names.) I had the privileged position of being able to observe a lot of it (though not the very end) at very close quarters. And here are some of the things I saw.

John Major and Albert Reynolds took huge personal risks to get the Downing Street Declaration over the line. Major had no majority in the House of Commons, and Reynolds was taking on a task Charlie Haughey had been afraid of.

The IRA and Loyalist ceasefires involved immense acts of faith. Adams and McGuinness showed huge leadership at a critical moment. They were matched in every sense by David Ervine and Gusty Spence, two men who never really got the respect and admiration they deserved.

It’s often forgotten now, but there was a hugely complicated bit of work to be done to build on the ceasefires. It led to the Joint Framework Documents published in the spring of 1995. That work was done almost single-handedly by Dick Spring on the Irish side and by Patrick Mayhew on the British. It was an astonishing negotiating accomplishment because of the immensely difficult position John Major was in by then. And those documents contained among other things the design of the Assembly that is the key to future progress in Northern Ireland. Then, when the question of decommissioning weapons became a further stumbling block, John Bruton proposed, and John Major accepted, the establishment of an international body to seek to manage that thorny issue — and Bruton in that way introduced George Mitchell to the process.

They’re some of the things that happened in the 1,500 days. But even that is not the whole story. Seamus Mallon, David Trimble, Ian Paisley in his strange way, Bill Clinton, and many, many others — all made an amazing contribution, and also took huge risks. And above all of them stood the man without whom peace might never have happened at all. John Hume.

He was at Sunningdale in 1973, and he was present when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. In the quarter of a century between those two events, John Hume never wavered in his commitment to a democratic peaceful solution. And he will be forever remembered as the architect of peace.

So if this sounds like begrudgery, you’ll have to forgive me. I don’t for a minute begrudge Bertie Ahern or Tony Blair a day in the sun for the agreement they signed twenty-five years ago, but if it is allowed to be seen as “their” Good Friday Agreement, that would be a complete travesty. Too many people died along the way. Too many places are etched forever in memory. Just as the conflict was multi-faceted, so was the making of peace. Two allies may have presided over the ceremony, but peace was ultimately made between, and by, two communities in conflict with each other. That’s what needs to be endlessly celebrated. And endlessly built on.