In Ireland it’s always some anniversary or other. No sooner is the end of the national Decade of Centenaries in sight than a big anniversary of the Belfast Agreement arrives. Twenty-five years have elapsed since peace – or at least a functional simulacrum of peace – was achieved in the North, and to mark the occasion RTÉ is rolling out a two-part documentary about the deal featuring interviews with all the big players.
The broadcaster’s Decade of Centenaries output was a mixed bag. Often, there were too many contemporary historians and not enough first-hand testimony – or even, it seemed, much curiosity about what it was to live through those seismic events. But with The Agreement (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm) Trevor Birney brings us right back to the late 1990s, when the Provisional IRA and its representatives finally took a place at the negotiating table.
The path to peace was not always straightforward. One of the most chilling moments the first part of the documentary covers is the IRA’s planting of a bomb near Canary Wharf, in London’s docklands, in 1996, essentially as a negotiating tactic. Two people were killed and more than 100 were injured so the terrorists could make a point. We are also reminded of the savagery of the loyalist terrorism that visited the quiet Armagh village of Poyntzpass in March 1998, when two friends, Philip Allen and Damien Trainor – one Protestant, one Catholic – were shot in an indiscriminate attack.
The footage from the aftermath of the killings is heartbreaking. But for viewers of a certain age the weirdest feeling is the deja vu. How strange to be swept back to a time when this sort of violence was simply part of the daily news cycle. You were briefly shocked – then shrugged and moved on. Tomorrow was another day, sure to bring another atrocity. In the meantime you had your life to be getting on with.
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There are lots of talking heads. They include the US special envoy George Mitchell, whose mix of steeliness and amiability proved crucial as the sides hashed out the Good Friday agreement. We hear from Tony Blair, who recalls the “complete disarray” of the talks when he flew to Belfast at the eleventh hour, and from Bertie Ahern, who remembers taking an urgent call from Mitchell having just left his mother’s funeral in Marino, in north Dublin.
With negotiations tangled up in the weeds, there seemed a real danger that one or both sides would leave the table. But Ahern and Blair, dealmakers rather than ideologues, kept the process alive – not least in the talks’ final 48 hours, when, having said it was “not a day for soundbites”, Blair promptly said: “I feel the hand of history upon our shoulder.” Now, looking back, he says: “When no one wants to walk away, you always have a chance to get an agreement.”
Birney, who directed last year’s Quinn Country, about the businessman Seán Quinn and the collapse of his empire, brings the 1990s alive by splicing in pop hits from the era. (He could have used more Spice Girls.) He also parachutes in Miriam O’Callaghan, who walks around Belfast, astonished by the transformation into a thriving metropolis of a city that often resembled a war zone.
She tracks down two teenagers from Enniskillen, in Co Fermanagh, who were interviewed in 1998 about the agreement. Gareth Wallace, who was from a unionist background, expressed concerns about Dublin having a potential say in the governing of the North. It’s like a real-life Derry Girls sequel as O’Callaghan catches up with the now middle-aged Wallace and with Stephanie Kenny-Quinn, who is from a nationalist background. “It gave us a positive outlook,” Kenny-Quinn says of the agreement. Wallace agrees. “You can absolutely say the hand of history was on us,” he says, echoing Blair. “It was a moment in history.”
