Political leadership needed to inject life into the peace process
Do our current leaders have the same skills as those who helped secure the Belfast Agreement?
British prime minister John Major and taoiseach Albert Reynolds during a press conference in London in December 1993 following their joint declaration on the North. Photograph: Peter Thursfield/The Irish Times
It’s hard to believe that 20 years have gone by. Looking back I think about the leadership qualities of those involved who helped us get to the point where an agreement was possible. Those leadership qualities that always make history are apparent leading up to the agreement, and are what we need today to inject new life into the peace process.
How did we get there? When we think about that week in 1998 we can often forget that the Belfast Agreement was actually more than a decade in the making.