A Northern Irish generation was supposed to inherit peace and prosperity – instead they got secondhand trauma
It’s 23 years since the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast agreement, which effectively brought the conflict in Northern Ireland to a halt but didn’t deliver on the promises of peace, prosperity and stability. It would be easy to attribute the recent violence in Belfast and elsewhere to Brexit, to the Northern Ireland protocol, to the perception of policing between the two communities among other things, but that would be a simplification of issues that run as deep as the Lagan river.
In 1998, when I was 10 years old, my generation was told that peace was within reach, that the new Northern Ireland assembly would finally allow the people of this place to govern themselves. The devolution of policing and justice arrived after a number of false starts, and for a while, all seemed calm – yet much of it was held together by naivety and hope. The conflict may have ended, but the fighting didn’t. The fight for jobs, education, mental health and addiction support, for housing and investment continued on and on, with the political establishment across these islands simply equating the absence of violence with success of the peace process.
