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Teachers' notes
This themed collection includes all the original documents used to create The National Archives resources for use in secondary level school assemblies to mark the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement which ended the conflict in Northern Ireland.
In addition, our short video gives an overview of the conflict and the peace process that brought it to an end, what the Agreement did and its results. These resources can be used to build knowledge about the Agreement and support student discussion about how it successfully brought an end to the violence and brought in a new era of peace in Northern Ireland.
This themed collection, however, allows teachers to create their own differentiated resources.
- Students can also be encouraged to do their own research within an archival collection for their own individual projects and enquiries.
- Using the themed collection, students could ‘curate’ their own ‘exhibition’ of the most significant sources on the topic.
- Students could also use the documents to substantiate or dispute points made in the introduction to the collection.
- The collection allows students to work independently with a group of sources or source type, ranging from documents from the Prime Minister’s Office, Secretary of State or Northern Ireland, press releases, newspapers and so on.
Working with original documents should offer students a chance to develop their powers of evaluation and analysis and support their course work. Please note, the transcripts of the resources retain any typographical errors included in the original documents.
Possible questions/themes to explore using the documents collection:
- What evidence is there that the talks are going well or that an agreement is imminent?
- Do the documents reveal challenges or barriers to agreement in April 1998?
- Which sources reflect key points in the journey towards a peace agreement?
- Are there documents which suggest how the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement achieved?
- How do the documents explore the part played by different individuals in the peace process.
- Students could research the collection to argue if there was one individual or a group.
- Which documents infer the significance of the Agreement?
- What was the significance of the Downing Street Declaration?
Once students are familiar with the collection it would be worth discussing as a group:
- How historians use documents to develop a line of argument and formulate their own interpretations.
- Why does this collection contain documents from The National Archives, The Irish Archives, and the Public Record office for Northern Ireland?
Links
Video:
From Conflict to Peace – The Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement – 25 Years On
Introduction
The Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement (BGFA) of 10 April 1998, is the most significant attempt, since partition in Ireland, to address division in Northern Ireland.
It was the third agreement between the United Kingdom and Ireland (following the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985) focused on securing a solution to divisions and an end to the campaign of violence in Northern Ireland and, at times, across the two countries, particularly since 1969, although there had been occasional violent campaigns since the Fenian bombing campaign in the UK in the nineteenth century. The violence in Northern Ireland had endured for centuries involving the native Irish and descendants of British colonists who had arrived with the Plantation in the seventeenth century, thus as long in Ireland as Europeans in North America.
The Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 was negotiated between the UK and Irish governments as well as the then government in Northern Ireland and the main opposition party. It failed to secure broad support from the unionist community and collapsed the following year in 1974.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 was between the two governments alone. It endured until the Belfast Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and secured the right of the Irish government to have an input on issues in Northern Ireland, a right underpinned by international law through the registration of the Agreement with the United Nations.
The BGFA differed in a number of important respects from the earlier agreements, not least its far-reaching nature, seeking to address all the dimensions of division.
Firstly, in terms of inclusion, it was close to comprehensive. The two governments, as well as all political parties bar one, the Democratic Unionist Party, were involved. That inclusivity meant that, for the first time, subject to strict conditions on non-violence and eventually on putting all weapons beyond use, representatives of paramilitary groups, which had been engaged in violent campaigns, were involved in the negotiations.
The second way in which the BGFA differed from earlier agreements was in external arbitration, the appointment of an experienced outsider, United States Senator George Mitchell, as the Chair of the talks. His presence, as a respected outsider with no prior engagement on Ireland, together with his wide experience as a senior member of the US Senate (Majority Leader 1989-1995), helped keep the focus on the issues.
The BGFA, as mentioned, embraced a wide agenda, dealing with issues like sovereignty, discrimination, the disbandment and disarmament of paramilitary groups, reform of justice and policing, self-government in the province, the release of prisoners. It established two institutions in Northern Ireland – the Assembly and the Executive – and three North-South institutions – North-South Ministerial Council, the North-South Inter-Parliamentary Association and the North-South Consultative Forum. Three institutions were set up to facilitate interaction between the UK and Irish governments – British–Irish Intergovernmental Conference, the British–Irish Council and the British–Irish Interparliamentary Body.
Thus, by creating this broad system of interaction, the Agreement provided institutional mechanisms for cooperation on a broad level and for dealing with divisive issues as they arise.
Importantly, the BGFA addressed the consent principle in a fundamental way.
Through two referendums on the 22 May, 1998, held simultaneously in both Ireland and Northern Ireland – thus, island-wide – it secured agreement to there being no change in the sovereign status of Northern Ireland until and unless a majority there so voted. But, equally and no less importantly, by gaining a significant majority for the Agreement in Northern Ireland (70%), implicitly it secured, for the first time since partition, the consent of a significant nationalist minority to being part of Northern Ireland. Moreover, because of the island-wide referendums, the BGFA has a huge majority mandate of support from the people of Ireland.
This project, From Conflict to Peace, aims to acquaint students at secondary school level (GCSE and A level) with the BGFA, to demonstrate the enormous benefits of the Agreement to society in Northern Ireland and to sensitise them to the fact that their generation is one of the first to go through school and live in peace, with no intrusive security industry impinging on their daily lives, and, importantly, without ever hearing the sound of a gunshot or an explosion.
Moreover, the Agreement has created the drivers which offer the prospect over time of a blurring of communal and traditional identity and a greater degree of finding common social cause across communities. Equally, the Agreement’s emphasis on parity of esteem and fair employment, as well as its reforms in law enforcement, removes the impulse to see challenges in communal, sectarian terms and shifts the focus to the same drivers as in a settled, unified community.
Obviously, there is no guarantee that the BGFA will hold and not be threatened by the actions of the minority still committed to violence. Yet, as demonstrated by this project, there is a dramatic and popular contrast in society post-BGFA and the divided society which preceded it.
The historically strong popular mandate given to the Agreement in 1998 needs bolstering, not least through projects like From Conflict to Peace which remind the generations which follow of the division which went before and of the huge benefits of an Agreement involving all the main elements of society. The current generation of young people have the opportunity to bed down the Agreement further and continue the process of helping social division to wither.
Frank Sheridan is a retired Irish Government Diplomat who participated in the Peace Process
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