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Good Friday Agreement 25th anniversary: has the DUP run out of road? [1]
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Date: 2023-04
If the first day of an event to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement was anything to go by, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party is in for a difficult week.
As global leaders and key negotiators of the peace deal descended upon Belfast, the party came under the magnifying glass and found little favour in a room of people who took significant risks to build peace in the North in 1998. A quarter of a century on, and 15 months into the DUP’s boycott of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing institutions, the party is running out of road – and out of friends.
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast, where the conference is being held, said “governing together took courage”, while former British negotiator Jonathan Powell bluntly stated that the DUP need to get back to Stormont, “otherwise we are in a complete cul-de-sac”.
And a keynote speech from former US senator George Mitchell, who drew from his experience serving as US special envoy, during which he chaired Northern Ireland’s peace talks through to their successful conclusion, also made for uncomfortable listening for members of the DUP in the audience. Walking on stage to a standing ovation, Mitchell warned of the “one hundred percenters… who demand everything and reject progress unless they get it.”
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Noticeably absent from the speech – and indeed, the entire first day – was DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson, who is also the only party leader not participating in a panel discussion later in the week. The DUP is instead opting to substitute in MLA Emma Little Pengelly, who Donaldson co-opted into his Assembly seat last May after deciding to remain in Westminster until, he said, “the issues flowing from the Northern Ireland Protocol are satisfactorily dealt with”.
Donaldson’s absence broadcasts its own political message but given that he walked from the Ulster Unionist Party in 1998 in protest against the Good Friday Agreement, his reluctance to celebrate its anniversary is perhaps unsurprising.
Before closing his speech, Mitchell appealed to the current generation of political leaders, expressing: “It is not a sign of weakness to resolve your differences by democratic and peaceful means. To the contrary, it is a sign of strength and of wisdom.”
Former British prime minister Tony Blair, in a softer appeal of his own, specifically addressed the DUP in pleading: “You know in your heart of hearts what the right thing to do is, and you should just get on and do it.”
The absence of a functioning Assembly makes for an ugly backdrop during this milestone anniversary, and unlike President Biden, who delivered a light-touch call for the return of power-sharing during a visit to Northern Ireland last week, former political leaders are not bound by the same level of diplomacy.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dup-powersharing-stormont-reform-good-friday-agreement-25-anniversary-hillary-clinton-tony-blair/
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