It’s a car journey that will stay indelibly etched in my memory forever. Fifteen years ago today, my then girlfriend (now wife), my best pal and I set off from Dublin for the Dingle Peninsula where a group of us had booked a house for the Easter weekend.
It was the days before motorways and by-passes so traffic was brutal. The marathon journey took over six hours. But we didn’t mind. To paraphrase Tony Blair, we had the “hand of history” for company.
We barely spoke for the entire journey, glued instead to the radio coverage coming live from Castle Buildings in Stormont. The reports were filled with tension and optimism in equal measure, with a corresponding impact on our collective mood.
Bad news followed good. A deal was ‘on’. The deal might be ‘off’. Jeffrey Donaldson had walked out. And then, late afternoon, it emerged that David Trimble and the Ulster Unionists were on board. Incredibly, unbelievably, the agreement was reached.
The three of us in the car were then in our late twenties. We hadn’t been equally affected by the troubles. Coming respectively from Belfast (my pal), Dundalk (myself) and Dublin (my girlfriend), they obviously had differing impacts on our lives.
But, given the conflict had begun in 1969, before the IRA ceasefire of 1994, none of us remembered a time when there was peace in the North. The very first news story I can remember was the IRA’s kidnapping of Dutch industrialist Tiede Herrema and the subsequent siege in Monasterevin in late 1975. I was only six. And the North was to dominate the news agenda for the following two decades.
I had learned of that 1994 IRA ceasefire in the Boston Globe while holidaying in the US – no mobile texts, tweets or iPads back then.
And while I had been aware of speculation about a peace process, I can still remember the feeling of shock at the (very pleasant) realisation that the conflict in the North mightn’t necessarily last forever. That might sound funny now. All wars ultimately end but, back then, after a quarter of a century it was then pretty hard to believe that the troubles would too.
Four years on from that first IRA ceasefire, after many setbacks, the men and women holed up for days in Stormont at Easter 1998 had a chance to secure that peace for ever. And as my battered car sat overheating in gridlock, we were acutely aware that something amazing was happening a couple of hundred miles up the road. Something that we had never dared to even hope would ever come to pass.
Of course, there were many more twists and turns in the peace process subsequent to the Good Friday Agreement. And the recent flag protests in the North are proof that nothing should be taken for granted.
But there is no question that something genuinely momentous happened on this day fifteen years ago. Today, given the complexity of what went on during those awful three decades, I struggle to explain the troubles to my own children when they ask about it. I do get frustrated by my ability to adequately communicate what it was all about. But that’s more than compensated by a sense of gratitude that it’s something that they hear about in a historical context and not that they have to digest on a daily basis on the news and in newspapers.
For that reason, I will always get a feeling of goose bumps when I recall Friday, 10th of April. What happened in Castle Buildings that day showed that politics can be a force for good.
The three of us in my little car were utterly irrelevant to the whole process but that didn’t lessen how important it felt to us. A genuinely great day and, for the record, a pretty good weekend afterwards in Kerry as well.
