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This chapter highlights the importance of strategic direction in negotiations and how convergent political positions were created and informed by an ethos of inclusivity. It also looks at the importance of deadlines in a peace process.
This chapter explores the period of the Sunningdale Agreement and how the Irish Government sought to influence Sunningdale and deal with its aftermath in the wake of unionist intransigence.
This chapter elaborates on the impact of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and how the Irish worked in Belfast to create closer ties with the British by monitoring and assessing policing and justice issues and raising questions about possible discrimination and anti-equality activities.
At their summit on the western Balkans in Thessaloniki in June 2003, European Union (EU) leaders declared: 'Fragmentation and divisions along ethnic lines are incompatible with the European perspective, which should act as a catalyst for addressing problems within the region'. This chapter is based on secondary sources on Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H). In B-H an amoral approach was adopted, notably by the UK, based on minimising intervention, particularly by refusing to commit troops to a peace-enforcing role. B-H might seem a more successful power-sharing case than Northern Ireland, in as much as the State institutions, however dysfunctional, have at least been in being ever since the Dayton accords. In Macedonia importantly, interethnic dialogue after the outbreak of civil conflict could be presented instead, as Brussels was keen to do, as an integral part of the path to eventual EU membership, via an Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA).
The Belfast Agreement requires Ireland to provide an equivalent level of protection for human rights as applies in Northern Ireland, a requirement which would appear to cover the right to equality and non-discrimination. The lack of serious engagement with the North-South dimension is particularly notable given that the Belfast Agreement requires Ireland to provide an equivalent level of protection for human rights. The Belfast Agreement can be said to be explicitly founded upon a set of foundational general principles. Considerable emphasis is placed on the importance of equality as a key animating principle in the text of the Agreement. This reflects the reality that the history of segregation and discrimination in Northern Ireland means that any successful peace process will inevitably have to engage with the lack of equality that has and continues to burden the province.
More than a decade on from the Belfast agreement, the sectarian 'force field' of antagonism in Northern Ireland remained as strong as ever. The Belfast agreement restricts north-south collaboration to twelve specified policy domains in an annexe, though the main body of the text speaks of 'at least' six implementation bodies and six areas of policy cooperation. To make the 'external' arrangements work, 'internal' governance of Northern Ireland must place a premium on dialogue and deliberation across sectarian boundaries. This can best be done through a requirement to reach cross-communal majorities on executive formation and dissolution. To implement the constitutional changes, new legislation would be required substantially amending the Northern Ireland Act 1998, passed at Westminster to implement the agreement, and the Northern Ireland Act 2006, which paved the way for renewed devolution.
This chapter presents a concept of an evangelical subculture to explore how both the politics of the post-Agreement period, as well as more mundane, everyday concerns about God, faith and life, have helped shape changes in evangelicals' personal religious practices and identities. In Northern Ireland, evangelicals have maintained much higher rates of church attendance, with up to four-fifths attending services at least once a week. Evangelicals repeatedly tell their testimonies to one other, formally and informally, so telling conversion stories is central to the evangelical subculture. Most evangelical churches offer a staggering variety of social activities. People have the opportunity to participate in something nearly every day of the week. The chapter outlines the ways in which post-Agreement politics have affected evangelicals' religious journeys.
This book examines how the conflict affects people's daily behaviour in reinforcing sectarian or ghettoised notions and norms. It also examines whether and to what extent everyday life became normalised in the decade after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA). Cross-border commerce has been the stuff of everyday life ever since the partition of Ireland back in 1921. The book outlines how sectarianism and segregation are sustained and extended through the routine and mundane decisions that people make in their everyday lives. It explores the role of integrated education in breaking down residual sectarianism in Northern Ireland. The book examines the potential of the non-statutory Shared Education Programme (SEP) for fostering greater and more meaningful contact between pupils across the ethno-religious divide. It then focuses on women's involvement or women's marginalisation in society and politics. In considering women's political participation post-devolution, mention should be made of activities in the women's sector which created momentum for women's participation prior to the GFA. The book deals with the roles of those outside formal politics who engage in peace-making and everyday politics. It explores the fate of the Northern Irish Civic Forum and the role of section 75 of the 1998 Northern Ireland Act in creating more inclusive policy-making. Finally, the book explains how cross-border trade, shopping and economic development more generally, also employment and access to health services, affect how people navigate ethno-national differences; and how people cope with and seek to move beyond working-class isolation and social segregation.
In focusing on markets and commerce, this chapter discusses the complex cross-border institutions designed to encourage crossborder economic activity, and the cross-border flows of economic actors in their roles as tourists, commuters and students. It is concerned with the impact of devolution on everyday life through the prism of cross-border commerce. The story of cross-border economic cooperation is linked to the creation of North-South implementation bodies in 1999 under Strand Two of the Good Friday Agreement. The chapter shows how cross-border linkages and flows, with a consequent impact on everyday experience, have increased since 1999. One area where there is a strong impression of a cross-border market or commercial life working to its optimal level is that of shopping. Crossborder shopping is an issue that periodically (and temporarily) becomes a favourite topic for media interest and political oratory.
On his first full day in office as US President in January 2009, Barack Obama appointed the chair of the talks leading to the 1998 Belfast agreement, George Mitchell, as his Middle East envoy. Anticipating the decision, the Washington Post reported that the former Senate majority leader was 'highly regarded as a negotiator for his work in the successful Northern Ireland peace process'. As the former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia complained, the US administration interpreted the Goldstone report, scrupulously framed by international standards of human rights and humanitarian law, as an obstacle to progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli State had pre-empted Obama's inauguration with the invasion of Gaza, committing war crimes, echoed by its enemy Hamas, according to a 575-page report for the United Nations Human Rights Council by a distinguished team led by Justice Richard Goldstone.