TOMORROW, American President Joe Biden will roll into town to mark 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement and 25 years of peace here in Northern Ireland.
It’s a special occasion, there is no doubt. Whatever your views on the Good Friday Agreement, there’s no denying that hundreds, perhaps thousands of people are alive today because of it. How many generations of people would simply not exist now had the conflict raged on? It’s almost impossible to contemplate.
I spent the weekend working as a field producer with international TV news companies on Good Friday Agreement coverage. We spoke to young people who were born after the signing of the Agreement about what their lives have been like, the opportunities gifted to them by peace, how they have mercifully little experience of the dark days of the past.
Reg Empey speaks to The Irish News to mark 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement
They have hope, they have enthusiasm, energy, a love for Northern Ireland that those perhaps of my generation who were ground down by the daily conveyor belt of brutality and death find hard to conjure up at times. Some of them have developed, similar to all generations, a certain fatigue with regards our stop-start politics. But they are able to look to the future with hope, and that is something that was not afforded to a lot of young people before the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
I thought of that hope of youth when I visited a graveyard for another segment. I walked down a row of those who had lost their lives as participants in the conflict. Young men, some only 18 and 19, dead. Gone forever. I wondered what lives they would have led had war not come to this place, if it were a normal society, if we hadn’t lost generations to death and destruction.
Gerry Adams speaks to The Irish News to mark 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement
We filmed another segment in a memorial garden. I walked around looking at the names and ages of the innocents caught up in the brutal actions of others, some of them not even allowed to reach their teenage years, their precious lives cut short as they were just beginning. I wondered how their lives might have played out, had war not come to this place, if it were a normal society. They would have surely had children themselves, no doubt, their families would have had lives not consumed by their loss. How things would have been so very different.
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During the weekend we also spoke to those who lost loved ones during the conflict. People whose lives stood still when their loved ones died, people who have spent their entire existence since fighting for justice, longing for peace in their hearts, traumatised people, broken people. Those for whom every family occasion is tinged with heartache and sore loss, forever.
So for those who say the Good Friday Agreement is not worth celebrating, I say take a walk around the graveyard and look at the lives lost to this place. Look at the blood spilled, the hatred spewed, the brutality we visited upon one another. In comparison, was that all worth it? I would say no.
Tony Blair speaks to The Irish News to mark 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement
On Belfast’s peace line there used to be a gate with the words ‘There’s no such thing as good war or bad peace’ painted on it. There was never a truer word spoken.
Our peace is an imperfect one, we’re not there yet. There are still some who are wedded to violence, who mean their fellow humans harm, who set out to murder and maim to further their outdated ‘cause’.
This week, we can mark how far we have come and we can renew our vow to keep going, 25 years on, to take lessons from the past and the mistakes made, and use them as building blocks for the future, to believe in a brighter future, to hold on to hope and not give in to the despair that keeps trying to knock us off course.
Hope is worth celebrating, every day of the week.
Brid Rodgers speaks to The Irish News to mark 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement
