The Good Friday Agreement

(Paperback)

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Twenty years after theGood Friday Agreement, although Northern Irish politics has avoided returningto the bloodshed of the Troubles, by every other metric it has objectivelyfailed. The botched parliament at Stormont lumbers from crisis to crisis and hasscarcely passed any laws. At the time of writing, Sinn Fein and the DUP arerefusing to share power and Northern Ireland is facing being run directly fromLondon.

This remarkable bookexamines power-sharing and the peace process in Northern Ireland on thetwentieth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and asks what it hasachieved beyond an end to violence. She concludes that, although it brought anend to violent blood shed on Northern Ireland's streets, it also failed tocreate healthy and functional politics.

The Good Friday Agreementserved an important purpose in 1998, but has since been out-paced by local andglobal politics. It is no longer fit to facilitate the peaceful politics itmade possible, as the current collapse of power-sharing sadly shows.

Author Bio

Siobhan Fenton lives in Belfast, where she reports on British and Northern Irish politics for the UK media. She writes for The Independent, The Guardian, The New Statesman and The Spectator and has guest presented for BBC Radio 4 on Northern Irish politics.