Senator George Mitchell says Belfast Agreement will always be a challenge

The people of Northern Ireland are too self-critical and should be aware they are not the only society in the world where there are internal disagreements, Senator George Mitchell has said.

The former chair of the talks that led to the Belfast Agreement said there was a great deal of self-criticism which was “unwarranted” and that he as an American would not lecture others on political differences.“I try to deal with the positives of Northern Ireland and try to move them away from the negatives that have accumulated over the time,” he told the Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement.

He said the agreement, which will be 25 years old next year, was a continuing process and the current impasse had to be seen in that context. “No resolution can ever be regarded as permanent or unchanging for all time,” he told the committee. “So it is for the current leaders of Northern Ireland, Ireland and of the United Kingdom to find practical, workable solutions and answers to the current problems to preserve the peace to further freedom and opportunity for their people.”

It succeeded in achieving an end to the violence but did not solve all the problems that led to the Troubles in the first place.

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Senator Mitchell told the committee that nobody should think of the Belfast Agreement as a “perfect, permanent solution”. Should power-sharing be restored,it will only suffice to meet the “current challenges”.

The agreement, which was signed in April 1998, came from the parties in Northern Ireland and not from outsiders, he recalled, and the solution to the present problems would also only come from within. “There is no magic formula which I or anybody else can do as outsiders. This cannot be forced from outside. I could not write up a plan and hand it to the leaders in Northern Ireland.

“That’s the only way it can be sustained in the long-term. Nobody intended that the mechanism used in the agreements be fixed for all time in Northern Ireland. There will come a time when the people will move on to other forms to achieve political consensus.”

He suggested those who negotiated the Belfast Agreement did so in “vastly more challenging circumstances” than politicians have today. “You know what it was like during the time of Troubles – a time of profound fear and anxiety. Nobody wants to return to that. The longer they go without resolving the current problem, the more likely something like that will happen – God forbid. There has to be a willing to compromise. Compromise is a sign of strength and not weakness.”

He described the Belfast Agreement as 700 days of failure and one day of success. He was most proud of the fact that it stopped the violence in Northern Ireland.