Bertie Ahern, one of the architects of the Good Friday agreement, has urged politicians “not to fall into the trap” of starting a debate about reforms to the historic Northern Ireland peace deal.
Speaking at a session of the British-Irish parliamentary assembly, sitting in Stormont for one day, the former taoiseach implied that to open a debate now would give unionists a further excuse to continue their boycott of devolved government, with “fatal” consequences for power sharing.
Ahern also urged the governments to step up efforts to end paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. He said paramilitaries were now a “fact of life” .
He was speaking just weeks after former the Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis said the historic peace pact was “fraying, if not outright broken” and after multiple calls from the Alliance party for changes to the Good Friday agreement.
The deal was originally conceived as a way of getting opposing nationalist and unionists communities to share power in government.
The Alliance party is now the third largest in the Northern Ireland assembly and want the changes to parts of “strand one”, which require support from 50% of both designated unionists and nationalist members of the legislative assembly (MLA).
Alliance says this amounts to a veto that allows Sinn Féin or the Democratic Unionist party to hold “the assembly and the executive to ransom”.
Kate Nicholl, Alliance MLA for Belfast South, told Ahern it was clear that reform was needed because the veto did not deliver the “cross-community consent” envisaged by the 1998 deal, as her party’s base, of neither “green nor orange” political persuasion, did “not count”.
She said reform would be a solution to the impasse over Stormont, allowing the assembly to be up and running even if the DUP did not return to its seats.
Earlier Ahern urged the governments involved in the original deal including the British and Irish to stop the political drift over paramilitary activity, now endemic in Northern Ireland and recently highlighted by the attempted murder of the policeofficer John Caldwell in Omagh.
“It is a fact of life in this divided society that there is unfinished work to do with dealing with paramilitaries,” Ahern said. “The paramilitarism and the structure of the paramilitaries is still there.”
While the paramilitary issue was addressed in 1998 with the setting down of arms of the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries, it “has drifted on for 25 years”, he said.
Ahern urged government leaders to step up engagement on the matter in line with the recommendations of the Independent Reporting Commission, which was created to monitor progress on tackling paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland.
“I’m not here to denounce any of the efforts or the work or the engagement that goes on in paramilitaries. That’s not the point I’m making. In normal society we have to work to where they’re no longer there ,where they’re no longer part of society, or where they’re no longer part of what happens,” he said.
Speaking at the same conference, Sir John Holmes, a former adviser to both John Major and Tony Blair, spoke about the “miracle” that they had ever reached a deal in 1998.
“It was not simple. And it was not inevitable. And it was in many, many ways I think a miracle that we got there,” he said. “Lesson is not that peacemaking is easy, or usually rewarded it most definitely is not .. [But it] is possible and always worth investing in.”
But Holmes, who has since worked internationally including in Myanmar, added: “The international community … seems to have lost the knack of solving difficult problems and producing peace and has lost even the will to tackle them”
