The Good Friday agreement should only be changed with cross-community consent in Northern Ireland, Tony Blair has said, amid calls to amend the peace deal to prevent political parties from collapsing power sharing in the province.
The former prime minister, who played a pivotal role in negotiating the historic agreement in 1998, acknowledged that there was a case for reforming the devolved structures at Stormont, given the regularity of collapses in governance in the region over the last 25 years.
He cautioned, however, against any move to alter the veto system to circumvent the Democratic Unionist party and reinstate power sharing, saying reform could only come if it was supported across the different traditions in the province.
The existing system is based on mutual veto powers, enabling blocs of unionist and nationalist politicians to block moves that otherwise would command majority support and, in extreme circumstances, shut down the institutions and prevent them from operating.
The DUP is currently exercising its veto to blockade Stormont in protest at post-Brexit trading arrangements. Sinn Féin collapsed the ministerial executive in 2017 amid a row about a botched green energy scheme.
Rishi Sunak’s government has faced calls from some of the DUP’s main rivals, particularly the cross-community Alliance party, to change the rules to allow the majority of Stormont politicians to get back to work.
The former Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern, another of the architects of the Good Friday agreement, suggested last week that the deal should be reformed to prevent political parties from interfering with the self-government of Northern Ireland again.
Ahern said there was a strong case to be made for amending the agreement to stop either the DUP or Sinn Féin from unilaterally collapsing the devolved institutions in the province in future.
In an interview with PA Media to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday deal, however, Blair said changes should go ahead only if they had backing from the different communities.
“People often ask me whether there’s a case for reviewing the Good Friday agreement, the institutions, the way one party essentially can veto the process, and I always say to people that of course there is a case for reviewing it and, in time, maybe that review process will yield a change,” he said.
“But I don’t think you can yield a change that’s going to work unless it brings the communities together. One thing I’ve learned about Northern Ireland is that there’s a difference between the ideal answer and the realistic answer.
“The ideal answer may be that you change the whole system, for example, by the way you choose ministers or have the executive up and running. But the realistic truth is if you were to act, for example, in direct contravention of a large part of unionist opinion, it wouldn’t work, it just wouldn’t work.
“I don’t think it’s possible to change it unless you get the most important elements in Northern Ireland politics in agreement.”
Blair said change could not just be “top down” and needed to involve an element of “bottom up” endorsement by grassroots communities.
While the peace deal largely ended the violence in Northern Ireland, the former Labour leader acknowledged that there was more to do to achieve true reconciliation between the different communities.
“One of things I learned about the peace process is, you can create an agreement, and you can create a legal framework, and you can do the reforms and pass the laws, but that’s not the same as two communities trusting each other,” he said.
“And I think it just takes time, it takes quite a lot of time. I think there’s still a lot of reconciliation to happen. But at least if there’s peace and, if we get back to some form of political stability, I think you’ve got the right circumstances for that reconciliation.”
