to indicate that republican opponents of the Good Friday Agreement were gaining support, especially in Derry—the constituency of Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness.12 McGuinness angrily condemned bombings of the city where he once commanded the Provisional IRA. Calling the dissidents “Neanderthals” and “conflict junkies,” McGuinness denounced the same means—violence—and the same ends—unification of Ireland—that he once embraced. The timing of the bomb seemed calculated to embarrass McGuinness, appearing for the first time at a Tory conference. Instead, unfazed, he argued that changing times had made armed struggle obsolete.
Later that day, members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) rushed to condemn the attack.13 Sinn Féin MLAs echoed McGuinness, in a profound shift from their earlier refusals to condemn republican violence. The debate captured in a singular moment the new historical narrative about human rights and the conflict that has emerged in recent years and illustrated its logic with striking clarity.
Sinn Féin MLA Martina Anderson, herself convicted of explosives offenses and released under the GFA, offered a robust defense of past PIRA campaigns and attacked the illegitimacy of current violence. In the past, she said, violence had been the only means to protest the injustice of “a state whose institutions were designed and sustained in the interest of one dominant ruling class, … a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people … an Orange state … 50 years of oppression” (Northern Ireland Assembly 2011: 40). Yet “The Good Friday Agreement changed all of that,” she said. “It is quite clear that the conditions that we endured in the past no longer exist” (40). If the conflict was simply due to a lack of rights, then “curing” the conflict by ensuring rights is possible. For some republicans I worked with, this is tantamount to heresy—they did not fight for equal rights within a British state but for Irish sovereignty.
Unionists, of course, were incensed at suggestions that the conflict was necessary. An Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MLA sarcastically thanked Anderson for her “jaundiced and misplaced lesson on the history of this Province,” arguing that “There is no excuse for violence in this Province: there never has been any excuse, and there never will be” (Northern Ireland Assembly 2011: 40). SDLP MLA Pat Ramsey reminded the chamber of a civil rights demonstration in Derry on the same day in 1968 and asserted that “the people of Derry will overcome” (39). He called the dissidents “born-again Provos,” whose violence is neither more nor less legitimate than PIRA’s.14
Unionists and dissident republicans, some of whom continue to defend armed struggle while others do not, are not the only public skeptics. Henry McDonald, the Ireland correspondent for the prominent British newspaper the Guardian, grew up in a working-class, nationalist community, and he is particularly scathing about the argument that armed struggle was necessary to reform the local state: “The idea that thousands would have to die and thousands more go to jail or themselves lose their lives so we could have an Irish Language Act or the control of policing and justice powers within the Northern Ireland state is a gross, deliberate distortion of history” (see also McDonald 2008; emphasis original).15
In this section’s epigraph, Gerry Adams, former internee, alleged PIRA leader, and president of Sinn Féin since 1983, treats the GFA as a foundational document that ensures equal rights for citizens with opposed national aspirations.16 Such characterizations are part of this new political narrative, explaining both the past and future of the conflict in terms of rights. The political power of this narrative lies in its encapsulation of ordinary understandings of the conflict, bolstered with reference to historical facts.
This narrative power became apparent to me soon after the GFA was ratified. “Angela,” a republican community activist from Ballymurphy, was thrilled after the vote to support the GFA in the spring of 1998. I spoke with her frequently in the months following the agreement, and she eagerly discussed current events as they unfolded, such as elections to the new assembly and its televised first session. Part of her excitement about the GFA, she confided, was because she finally felt she had equal rights. She described what it had changed in terms of both abstract ideals and concrete, everyday experiences. It meant, she said, that her Irish nationality was acknowledged as legitimate and that her son could wear the uniform of his Irish-language primary school in downtown shops with pride and without fear of harassment.
I was wary of her enthusiasm. Surely a single document did not eliminate the risk of sectarian abuse overnight? But my concerns about aggressive teenagers in shopping centers seemed misdirected as the summer of 1998 unfolded. In July, loyalist protests at the rerouting of an Orange parade in the town of Portadown escalated into violence and intimidation, and hundreds of families were displaced from their homes. The violence ended when three brothers, aged nine, ten, and eleven, died after a petrol bomb was thrown into their home in Ballymoney. The murders took place in the early hours of July 12, the annual holiday celebrated by unionists and the Orange Order.17 As the holiday dawned and news of the deaths spread, both parade supporters and opponents were shocked. That day, another controversial Orange Order parade along Belfast’s Ormeau Road was met by a silent protest with black balloons, a sharp shift from assertive protests in previous years. The murders appeared to have shaken even GFA opponents such as the hardline Democratic Unionist Party’s (DUP) Ian Paisley, who had been stridently proclaiming that the Portadown parade must not be rerouted. But the calm did not last. In August, dissident republicans bombed the market town of Omagh, killing twenty-nine people.
Apparently, not everyone had been notified that the conflict was over. Angela was both grief-stricken and outraged. It quickly became apparent that the Omagh bomb’s planning had occurred in the Republic of Ireland, where dissidents regrouped in protest at Sinn Féin’s acceptance of the Mitchell Principles in 1997.18 Angela imagined confronting the dissidents herself: “If you feel that the war needs to go on, … why did you go to Dundalk for twenty-five years? Why did you go to Cork? Why, if you feel the war should go on, why are you not in the middle of it, fighting it? … Because I would like to know. I’ve watched it. I’ve watched all the suffering. I have watched the effects of what the bomb does and what the bullet does. And the armed strategy. I’ve watched all that and I never want to see it again.” The political power of the GFA, then, lay in its promise of an ending as much as the much-touted beginning of peace—a longed-for conclusion of violence.
The horrifying violence of summer 1998 seemed to sharpen the resolve across political parties as well as the populace. But the violence also indicated that the deeper causes of conflict are not easily removed. In one sense, Angela and proagreement republicans are correct; the GFA recognizes the aspirations of unionism and nationalism as irreconcilable, stating, “We acknowledge the substantial differences between our continuing, and equally legitimate, political aspirations” (GFA, Declaration of Support, item 5). Yet the GFA and the Northern Ireland Act (1998) that enacted the settlement address this problem with a rhetorical sleight of even-handedness: “the power of the sovereign government with jurisdiction there shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions and shall be founded on the principles of full respect for, and equality of, civil, political, social and cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities” (GFA, Constitutional Issues, item 1, my emphasis).
In this fashion, the GFA avoids a broader social reckoning regarding conflict and human rights, framing “both communities,” the opposed collectivities of unionists and nationalists, as primary subjects of rights. Inclusive references to all citizens, diversity, identities, traditions, and parity of esteem obscure, but do not conceal, the extent to which the GFA’s institutions and implementation entrench collective subjects of rights. The GFA’s pragmatic recognition of profound differences between the political aspirations of unionists and nationalists also reproduces those differences, central to the conflict, as the basis for the new rights politics that will ostensibly resolve it. This approach limits the way rights are claimed in postconflict politics, in the same way that rights debates were reduced to assertions of communal entitlements during the conflict. Thus, recognition of “both communities” fails to transform both institutional and everyday debates about rights and provides continuity with the past, rather than an end