The celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement at the Abbey Theatre on Sunday evening was suitably muted, given Stormont’s post-Brexit political paralysis. However, the Ukraine flag badge in the lapel of one performer, the former US president Bill Clinton, was a stark reminder that peace, however uneasy, is a prize worth cherishing.
Clinton, appearing via video link, recited Seamus Heaney’s famous lines from The Cure at Troy about hope and history rhyming. Heaney, like so many of the architects of the Belfast Agreement – John Hume, David Trimble, Seamus Mallon, Martin McGuinness and Mo Mowlam – is no longer with us, but his words, like their achievement, still resonate.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who recalled that he was a 19-year-old student when the agreement was signed, expressed his thanks to that previous generation of politicians who had secured peace. “Let us go forward in hope and forge a shared peace and future on our shared island,” he said.
Tánaiste Micheál Martin said: “Twenty-five years ago, difficult choices, hard compromises and real leadership achieved what some thought impossible, peace in Northern Ireland. Today, our island is at peace. Those difficult choices were worth it. And while that peace is imperfect, life on this island, and in particular Northern Ireland, is so much better. This is undoubtedly worth celebrating.”
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There were many perspectives in the theatre this evening, the Tánaiste said, “but we are united in wanting the best for the future. We are in a vastly better place, and that is what we celebrate tonight.”
Chris Heaton-Harris, the UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, acknowledging the stellar line-up of poets, singers and musicians, said: “The land of saints and scholars has always also been the land of laureates and lyricists.” He quoted a poem, If I Was Us, I Wouldn’t Start from Here, by Damian Gorman, whose musical about John Hume has just opened in Derry: “Especially in a broken home like ours/ Where broken doors and windows feed the cold,/ Each generation has a sacred task:/ To tell a better story than it was told.”
The evening, put together by Alan Gilsenan, began with an uilleann piper playing, segueing into an almost deafening duet with a Lambeg drummer. The Derry-born author Kerrí Ní Dochartaigh spoke of “a peace as delicate as the wings of a moth”. Roddy Doyle’s Two Pints characters discussed the proposed building of a wall down the middle of the Irish Sea: “I wouldn’t want to be on that job.” The two Dubs had never been north of the Border. Too far. One asked the other where he was off to for his holidays? “Florida.”
Gail McConnell recalled she was 17 when the referendums were held on the Belfast Agreement. “I would have voted Yes,” she said, “in the knowledge I would have voted for the early release of one of my father’s murderers.” Her award-winning poetry book, The Sun Is Open, “reckons with that day and its long aftermath”. A lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, she sees in her students, all born after the ceasefires, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of that conflict. “We owe them so much. Politicians elected to govern owe them so much,” yet Stormont hasn’t been in session for seven of those years, she said.
Willie Drennan recited an Ulster Scots ballad from the era of the 1798 Rebellion. Linda Ervine spoke movingly of falling in love with the Irish language. “I discovered the language had surrounded me all my life in Béal Feirste. Imagine being born and spending your whole life in a place and not knowing its original name and what it means. As a Protestant from east Belfast, learning Irish hasn’t taken anything from me but has enriched my life.” She offered thanks in Irish to the Belfast Agreement negotiators who created the space that allowed her to do it.
The poet Michael Longley recalled holidaying in the Burren with his wife, Edna, when the peace deal was signed, “looking for Easter snow on the hills” and spotting “a single spring gentian shivering at our feet”. He recited his poem Ceasefire, which was inspired by Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie was murdered in the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing, and The Iliad, where Priam visits Achilles to ask for the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles had killed. “I get down on my knees. And do what must be done/ And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”
The Belfast singer Duke Special, shorn like Samson of his dreadlocks, sang a song by an eighth-century monk, translated by Ciaran Carson. The BBC journalist John Toal recalled how his grandfather Frank Toal, an anti-Treaty republican from Keady, Co Armagh, in his bed close to death, asked for the windows to be opened so he could hear the Orange bands. “Sure everyone should have their day.”
Patrick Radden Keefe, the New Yorker journalist and author of Say Nothing, about the murder and secret burial of Jean McConville, called the Belfast Agreement “a forward-looking miracle” that, perhaps inevitably, did not dwell on the past. There never was any truth or reconciliation process, he said, and the peace process still felt incomplete. The younger generation should feel free of the Troubles’ pathology, but they too are dogged by the past.
“We are here to celebrate, as we should,” he said, but “I don’t think silence should be the price of peace. The history of violence does not go away just because you ignore it.” Quoting William Faulkner’s line that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past,” he concluded that “we need a mechanism to deal with the past, otherwise there will be a dissonant tell-tale heartbeat under the merriment of daily life”.
The penultimate act was Paul Muldoon, who recited his poem Lines Written on the 25th Anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which will be published in a Weekend Review dedicated to the Belfast Agreement in The Irish Times next Saturday.
Finally, there was a performance by Clannad and the Cross-Border Youth Orchestra of Theme from Harry’s Game, the Donegal group’s hit song that accompanied a bleak 1982 Troubles drama based on Gerald Seymour’s 1975 novel, a blast from the past for those old enough to remember it, and a sobering reminder of how far we have come from those grim days.
