Northern Ireland 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement: an introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

In this introduction, we set up a theme that runs through the special issue. There are, we suggest, two dominant readings of the Northern Irish peace process – one ‘liberal,’ the other ‘nationalist’ – that see the region in the process of becoming a multicultural (neo)liberal democracy, albeit in different constitutional settings. The teleogical nature of these perspectives means, however, that they fail to grasp what is perhaps the most essential characteristic of contemporary Northern Irish society, namely its liminality. If we are to understand the true nature of post-conflict Northern Ireland, it is imperative, we contest, to grasp its quintessential ‘inbetweenness.’

KEYWORDS:

• Northern Ireland
• Good Friday agreement
• liminality
• peace process

Acknowledgement

The editors wish to thank Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Priya Rajan for their enormous help in putting this special issue together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The quotations in this sentence and the two that follow are from the original text officially titled Agreement reached in the multi-party negotiations (1998). https://www.dfa.ie/media/dfa/alldfawebsitemedia/ourrolesandpolicies/northernireland/good-friday-agreement.pdf.

2 McCaffrey’s calculation that 2,400 people were living who would not be without the Belfast Agreement was made on its twentieth anniversary. Presumably, that guesstimate would now be rather closer to 3,000, a figure that is beginning to approach the total number of fatalities that actually occurred in the Troubles.

3 FactCheckNI calculated that on 8 November 2022 the Assembly had been suspended, at various stages, for 3,162 days. A further 227 days had elapsed by the time of writing, 7 July 2023. That gives a total of 3,389 days, or 9.3 years. See: https://factcheckni.org/articles/has-the-executive-been-in-a-state-of-collapse-for-40-of-its-existence/.

4 Finchley was the affluent north London constituency represented by the then Conservative Party leader. Her famous quotation was, of course, intended to convey that Northern Ireland was simply another region of the United Kingdom, but its self-evident absurdity ensured that it had precisely the opposite effect.

5 The Agreement saw the Dublin government pledge to replace the existing articles 2 & 3 of the Irish Constitution that had laid claim to the territory of Northern Ireland. Those provisions were replaced with a rather gentler aspiration to ‘unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland.’ https://assets.gov.ie/6523/5d90822b41e94532a63d955ca76fdc72.pdf.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Colin Coulter

Professor Colin Coulter teaches in the Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, Ireland. He works primarily on the political and socio-economic divisions in Northern Ireland, the political economy of the Republic of Ireland, and the politics of popular music. His most recent book is the co-authored Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday: lost futures and new horizons in the ‘long peace’ (Manchester University Press, 2021).

Peter Shirlow

Professor Peter Shirlow is the Director of the Institute of Irish Studies in the University of Liverpool, UK. His research focuses primarily on the spatial and ideological expressions of ethnonational division in Northern Ireland. His most recent book is the co-authored Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday: lost futures and new horizons in the ‘long peace’ (Manchester University Press, 2021).