Hillsborough vs. Belfast
This paper will deal with the Northern Irish conflict, focusing mainly on the two Anglo-Irish Agreements. The most recent and well-known is the 'Belfast Agreement' or the 'Good Friday Agreement' of April 10th, 1998, the older agreement is the 'Hillsborough Agreement' of November 25th, 1985, which was signed by both prime ministers of Britain and Ireland, Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald. Firstly a short introduction to the conflict in general will be given, after which the agreements will both be discussed in more detail. The events leading up to both agreements and the consequences will then be analyzed and compared. The goal of this paper is to find an answer to the following research question:What factors made the Belfast Agreement more stable and why, and is there anything that can be said about the future of the peace process by deduction from this comparison?This question will be answered after the comparison between the two agreements in the conclusion, which will be followed by a discussion in which the conclusions drawn in this paper will be scrutinized. For further reading suggestions and a source list, I would like to refer you to the last page, where a comprehensive list of all used sources
Northern Ireland's largest party, the Ulster Unionist Party, had serious concerns about entering into a process which included Sinn Fein, but calculated that since the British and Irish governments would engineer a settlement anyway, they must attempt to mould it from the inside. Nevertheless, a year later, a lot of the notions of the Report were taken into the Hillsborough Agreement. The devolved government can and will not work as long as there are still paramilitary operations going on. The problem with both agreements, or maybe even their genius, 'was that it did not attempt to unravel - nor take an axe to - the Gordian knot. He succeeded in establishing control in a small area surrounding Dublin, but the different Irish clans held strong and the major expansion of English dominion did not take place until the sixteenth century. Catholics generally believe it has made little difference to their lives, while Protestants are bitterly resentful of its existence. It should be noted that the major problem with deriving conclusions such as these is that there is no way of researching their validity. It can be seen that at the time of the Hillsborough Agreement, it id not enter peoples minds even to include Sinn Fein or other radical parties in the negotiations, whereas nowadays it would not enter peoples minds not to, as they are such large actors in the conflict. " After much debate, this proved enough for the IRA to call a ceasefire on August 31st, 1994. Each factor by itself could not have helped the Hillsborough Agreement; all were needed to establish a (somewhat more) stable peace agreement. The Irish problem has shifted significantly since the twelfth century. The Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 somewhat revived this issue again. The Thatcher/Haughey initiative was overshadowed by the hunger strikes at Maze prison, where several republican prisoners died of self-imposed starvation.
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