Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

People Before Profit-Solidarity has produced a short pamphlet on the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. For the purpose of this debate, I will read some extracts from it. The 25th anniversary of the agreement has been marked by praise for the negotiators who pieced the text together. However, when the historical record is examined, it will appear that the architects of peace were not just politicians. The demand for an end to all violence came from mobilisations of organised labour. In 1992, thousands joined a rally in Belfast organised by the Belfast Trades Council after the murder of five people in a bookie’s shop on the Ormeau Road. In 1993, 7,000 people gathered outside Belfast City Hall for a rally called by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, to express opposition to the Shankill Road bombing and the massacre in Greysteel. In Derry, another 5,000 people gathered. In 1994, 2,000 workers from Harland and Wolff walked out of their jobs after a 50-year-old Catholic welder was murdered by the UVF. The demand for peace came from below and acted as a pressure point on paramilitaries. Ownership of that peace cannot be appropriated by any one group of elite politicians.

The hope in 1998 was that, with consensus having supposedly been reached on how to handle issues arising from sectarianism, communities would come together through working in harmony on practical, day-to-day matters. The underlying assumption was that there were two irreconcilable cultures and identities in the North that have equal validity and that must be represented at a governmental level. Therefore, Sinn Féin and the DUP have been able to consolidate their support at the expense of the SDLP and the Ulster Unionist Party. The guns may have gone relatively quiet, but the sectarian axis of politics remains. The sectarianism at the heart of the Northern state means that the DUP are using their communal veto to prevent the emergence of a Stormont Executive. They have manufactured a cause by focusing on the protocol. With no shame about being in a minority when it came to a referendum, they are engaged in obstructionist policies that have one motive, namely, to shore up their political base in the face of opposition from rivals like the Traditional Unionist Voice, TUV. All this manoeuvring reveals that the DUP is so sectarian that it will not have one of its members serve as deputy First Minister to a Sinn Féin First Minister. Although the titles are purely symbolic, the institutionalisation of sectarianism has magnified this as the key issue. The Tories have pandered to the DUP every step of the way. All of this exposes the underlying problem with the Belfast Agreement.

The Good Friday Agreement ended the worst of the armed conflict. Most people report that the feel safe in their communities. There is a lot more mixing of young people without any regard to which communities they come from. On the other hand, more people have died by suicide since 1998 than were killed during the entire conflict. There are more peace walls than there were before the agreement. People have seen a peace built not on increasing prosperity for the majority but, rather, on the promise of cheap labour for multinationals. Workers in the North earn, on average, 10% less than their counterparts in Britain and less again than workers in the South. Certainly, some in the North have found prosperity since the agreement came into force. There has been a 40% rise in the number of millionaires in Northern Ireland between 2010 and today, but the majority of people have not shared in this supposed bonanza. Real wages in 2023 have not returned to pre-2008 levels. Welfare reform has ensured that wages have fallen considerably. Living standards have also fallen considerably.

We say, therefore, that a Border poll is urgently required in order that people can have the option of choosing whether they wish to remain in a failed state. Such a referendum should be held across the entire island. If it is successful, it should lead to a constituents' assembly to develop proposals for a different country in which sectarianism will be confined to the dustbin of history. People Before Profit-Solidarity will advance a clear socialist position and argue for an end to the tax-haven status that currently dominates this State. We will also argue an end to the domination of the church in the control of schools and hospitals and for the creation of a secular Ireland in which all workers will make gains.

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