A chara, – Seán Moncrieff (“The only time I met Gerry Adams he told me he likes to trampoline naked”, Magazine, November 19th) states, in an otherwise interesting column, that the Good Friday Agreement “(from the nationalist standpoint) wasn’t as good as Sunningdale in the previous decade”. Not true. The 1998 Good Friday is a comprehensive and inclusive agreement, involving all of the parties, with the exception of the DUP, which walked out. And it had significant international participation.
The Good Friday Agreement, in its 12,000 words and almost 40 pages, secured significant progress in the areas of policing and justice; demilitarisation and arms; discrimination and sectarianism; reconciliation and victims; economic, social and cultural matters; prisoners; equality and human rights; the Irish language; and constitutional and political matters. It also scrapped the Government of Ireland Act.
Sunningdale in its four pages and 2,000 words made no attempt to deal with many of these and paid lip-service in a few other instances.
The underlying ethos of the two Agreements are also different in that republicans insisted that the bedrock of the Good Friday Agreement had to be equality. Consequently, measures were put in place to achieve that.
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This is reflected in the fact that the word “equality” is referenced 21 times in the Good Friday Agreement. It is not mentioned at all in the Sunningdale Agreement.
The communiqué issued on December 9th, 1973, described as “The Sunningdale Agreement” defines in paragraph four what the participants viewed as “the majority”. It upholds the unionist veto.
In the Good Friday Agreement, there is no veto.
A majority of all citizens in the North will determine constitutional change – that is 50 per cent plus one. Of course, those of us who want unity also want the largest vote possible for this. That is why the Irish Government needs to plan now for the future, including through a Citizens’ Assembly.
All who live on this island need to figure out how we share our home land together. In my view that is now a challenging but do-able project. That is the potential of the Good Friday Agreement.
Sunningdale may have its place in history but the Good Friday Agreement is about the future. – Is mise,
GERRY ADAMS,
Belfast.