The Belfast Agreement of 1998: from ethnic democracy to a multicultural, consociational settlement?
By Paul Bew
But , of course, consent is a two-way street, and the Good Friday Agreement contains much that is designed to win nationalist support for a new dispensation in the North. It is in these areas where the main difficulty for unionists lies, but as far as balanced constitutional change is concerned unionists can now contemplate for the first time since 1925 a new international agreement which fully recognises 'Northern Ireland's status as part of the United Kingdom' and which is not gainsaid by anything in the Irish Constitution. (11) In its structural aspects the Agreement is three-stranded, and it is to these strands that we now turn.
NOTES
1 The terms, 'Stormont Agreement', 'Belfast Agreement' and 'Good Friday
Agreement are used interchangeable in this text to describe the one Agreement
reached at Stormont Castle Grounds in Belfast on 10 April 1998.
2 Brendan O'Leary, 'The Nature of the Agreement', Fordham International
Law Journal, Vol.22, No.4, 1999. P.163on.
3 See Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, Northern Ireland 1921-1996:
Political Forces and Social Classes (2nd edn), Serif, London, 1996, Chapter
6,
especially pp. 213-17.
4 See Paul Bew, Henry Patterson and Paul Teague, Between War and Peace: The
Political Future of Northern Ireland, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1997,
pp. 203-16.
5 For the text of the 'Heads of Agreement' document, see Appendix 12.
6 For the text of the Joint Declaration, see Appendix 2.
7 Parliamentary Brief, Summer 1994.
8 For full text of Annex A, see Appendix 2.
9 For text of Framework Document, see Appendix 9.
10 For text of the new Article 3, see Appendix 2.
11 See on this point Brigid Hadfield, 'The Belfast Agreement, Sovereignty and the
State of the Union', Public Law, Winter 1998, pp.599-616. |
