On 10 April 1998, the so-called Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement) was signed. The agreement helped end a period of conflict in the region, known as a riot. One way to answer this question of freedom of choice is to examine the aphorism so cited by SDLP leader Seamus Mallon that the 1998 agreement is “Sunningdale for slow learners.” 91 The implication of his statement is that if there had been “faster” learners in 1973/74, power-sharing and North-South cooperation on the basis of the principle of consent would have been successful much earlier and the war could have ended much earlier.92 It is difficult to see that, in the context of the violence of the early years of unrest, there were many things that union leader Brian Faulkner or any other union leader could have done to garner union support for power-sharing, or that another British Prime Minister (much less another Taoiseach), through violence or deception, could have faced fierce Unionist opposition to the Sunningdale agreement. Similarly, it is difficult to know who in the IRA could have carried the day to accept the legitimacy of a rebuilt Northern Ireland assembly and the union veto to the Irish agreement. (It is remarkable that Adams himself was pushed to the head by his criticism of the 1975 IRA armistice.) 93 Finally, it seems that there was no plausible Conservative leader (much less from the Labour Party) who could have won agreement on violent union opposition. In other words, Sunningdale failed, not because of poor leadership (or a “slow learner”), but because the circumstances were not conducive to an agreement that embodied the essential principles of consent, power-sharing and cross-border institutions. In other words, the structural changes that had just taken place after the riots broke out were a necessary condition for the adoption of the framework offered, but they were rejected in 1973 by Sinn Fein/the IRA and by trade unionists. 14 Therefore, the GFA, as a common and reciprocal redefinition of British and Irish public sovereignty over Northern Ireland, was a remarkably incomplete and unfinished constitutional process. The withdrawal of the United Kingdom and its border problem in Ireland show that the 1998 agreement did not go far enough to provide for an explicit, indisputable and constitutional (new) definition of the Dublin and London obligations as the sovereign guarantee of the agreement. It goes without saying that the inclusion of former paramilitaries in peace negotiations does not guarantee such an outcome.

In South Africa, the African National Congress party and the apartheid government have created more uniform structures in their peace agreements containing explicit elements of reconciliation. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that the shape of the peace process in South Africa has contributed to the success of the agreement and its borders. The lessons of these cases are clear: practitioners must consider the potential long-term costs of a peace process focused primarily on the short-term goal of ending the fighting. 114 The idea of the agreement was to get the two parties to work together in a group called the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Assembly would take some of the decisions taken previously by the British government in London. One of the main obstacles to Sinn Fein`s inclusion in the peace process has been the nature of its links with the IRA, the paramilitary organisation responsible for most of the attacks on British and Ulster security forces and loyalist paramilitaries, as well as a series of high-profile attacks in England, including an abortive attack on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, which killed one of his accomplices.