More than two-thirds of people in Northern Ireland believe big changes are required to the power-sharing institutions created by the Good Friday agreement, research commissioned by a parliamentary committee has found.
The same proportion of the population, 70%, think the peace accord of 1998 has failed to deliver stable governance with the Stormont assembly not sitting for nine of the 25 years that have elapsed since the Belfast agreement was struck.
The research was conducted by YouGov and Ohio State University for the House of Commons Northern Ireland affairs committee.
That level of scepticism about the deal’s success in delivering stability remained consistent across age, religion and political affiliation.
The committee chair, Simon Hoare, said the poll provided an “important snapshot” of current thinking in the region.
The devolved government sitting in Stormont was created under strand one of the Belfast Good Friday agreement, which was considered an ingenious way of getting previously warring sides, republicans and loyalists to run the country together.
Under the power-sharing system, elected politicians are required to self-designate as unionists, nationals or “other” to ensure laws could only be passed that worked for all communities.
A quarter of a century on, and three-quarters of the respondents in the survey consider the requirement that key decisions have to have support from both nationalist and unionist sides gives the DUP and Sinn Féin an effective veto, with growing parties such as Alliance locked out.
Stormont was collapsed for three years after a Sinn Féin walkout in 2017 and has been suspended for more than a year after the DUP pulled the plug in a protest over Brexit.
Support for reform is widespread but Bertie Ahern, one of the architects of the peace deal, has said it could only happen once the DUP was back in Stormont. The party, led by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, said it would not be “browbeaten” into a return and few are expecting it to resume power-sharing until September.
Donaldson faced a cacophony of calls to return to Stormont in Belfast last week with leading figures involved in the peace deal, including Bill Clinton, urging politicians to face down “ugly” moments and “get the show on the road”.
“I ask you not to be discouraged, this is human affairs, there are very few permanent victories or defeats in human affairs. All these old ugly problems are always rearing their heads. You just have to suck it up and beat it back and deal with it,” Clinton told a conference at Queen’s University.
