Essay
Comment
Politics
War & peace
7 min read

What it takes to travel from ceasefire to peace

With Bertie Ahern, Kevin Hargaden explores an unlikely journey.

Kevin is a social theologian studying ethics and economics.

A TV graphic labelled 'ceasefire' lists bullet points
How the news was reported in 1994.
RTE.

August 31st marks the thirtieth anniversary of the historic IRA ceasefire. After decades of effective civil war in Northern Ireland, on this day in 1994, the nationalist paramilitary force announced “the complete cessation of military operations” and declared that they looked forward to a just and lasting settlement with “a spirit of determination and confidence”. While not without interruptions, that ceasefire has led to more than just a cessation of conflict. While still fragile, Northern Ireland has a functioning parliament, closer ties than ever with the Republic of Ireland, and the dissident threat – still present – is marginalised. 

One of the remarkable elements of that day at the end of summer 1994 was how unlikely it seemed just a year before. The intensity of “The Troubles”, as the conflict is called, varied over the years but a series of atrocities in 1993 left an already traumatised population in a state of desperation. In March of that year, the IRA exploded bombs in the market town of Warrington. This callous attack clearly sought to strike terror into the hearts of English civilians – people who had no real connection to whatever injustices had been inflicted on the nationalist communities of Northern Ireland. Two children, Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry, were killed and almost sixty people were injured.  

Another IRA bombing, in October of that year, caused outrage and disgust across Britain and Ireland. Again, hitting a civilian population, the Shankill Road bombing had been intended to target Loyalist leaders but ended up devastating a fishmongers. Ten people were killed.  

Brutal responses followed from the Loyalist side. Five days after the Warrington bomb, the Ulster Defence Association murdered four construction workers and a week after the Shankill Road bombing the same organisation descended upon a Halloween party held in a bar in rural Derry, killing 8 people and leaving 12 with dire injuries.  

Along with many other atrocities, the year ended with most people on the island dreading another generation of pointless violence. But below the surface, intense grassroots efforts and official negotiations were beginning to bear fruit.  

The viewer is bound to see the peace process that emerged as a kind of miracle. How could forgiveness reign in the face of such savagery? How can a society build a future out of the wreckage of such a past? 

This story is told vividly in the BBC documentary Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland. Spread across five episodes, the show does not intend to offer an encyclopaedic analysis of how the Troubles emerged. Instead, it focusses on the experiences of the ordinary people embroiled – whether intentionally or not – in the conflict. The effect is deeply moving, even overwhelming at times.  

So often, our culture engages with war and conflict as abstract concepts to be debated. Even in the context of active, live battle, we are typically presented with “talking heads” offering expert opinion. But in Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland you get to hear from the people who planned the attack, or who conducted the arrests, or who were just trying to buy some fish for dinner when a bomb exploded in the shop. This direct testimony from those were caught up in the Troubles allows the viewer a visceral understanding of what is at stake, without having to understand the centuries of colonialism, conflict, and oppression that generated the civil war. That human trauma, that is glimpsed in great poetry or felt as an echo in a folk song is captured in this series directed by the award-winning James Bluemel. 

There is a stubborn misunderstanding that the Northern Irish conflict was “Catholics against Protestants”. Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland disposes of this myth, if in part by showing how those two groups were never distinct. It was a complex conflict fuelled by land and ideology, traumatic history and conflicting cultures. Religion was a component of course, but expressed through the lens of sectarianism, the almost racial animosity that grew up between the opposing tribes, the marker that differentiated them. When one man, named Michael, is shown tending gently to the racing pigeons he keeps, the effect is incongruous in the extreme because his story is one of unimaginable despair.  

He was raised Catholic; his mother was Protestant. She had ten children. And one day, two women showed up at their home and took his mother away and she never returned. The IRA killed her. It wasn’t because of her views on Papal primacy or biblical authority. Something even more absurd and terrifying was at work here, a hatred that at some point did not even need justification.  

The consequences of each callous and brutal attack rippled outwards, affecting not just the victims but their loved ones and then their community. By the end of the five episodes the viewer is bound to see the peace process that emerged as a kind of miracle. How could forgiveness reign in the face of such savagery? How can a society build a future out of the wreckage of such a past? 

That was their baseline assumption throughout – no one at the table was “happy with the fact that thousands of people had been killed and maimed.” 

This exposes one of the limitations of the format of the series. By placing the perspectives of ordinary people at the centre of the narrative, profound truths are exposed. But the mundane details of how the peace process developed – why it was the IRA agreed to a ceasefire and how things developed from there to the Good Friday Agreement and the years since – are unaddressed. Perhaps a sequel is required where the politicians and diplomats who made that possible are given the chance to tell that story? 

One of the undoubted architects of peace in Northern Ireland is Bertie Ahern, who was the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland from 1997-2008. I sat down with him to do just that – to hear his recollections of the process that brought about peace. Since his youth, he had always taken a keen interest in Northern Ireland – “I took a particular interest in the Civil Rights movement when we were in school; that was before it got into the violence.” Raised in a Republican family just north of Dublin city centre, once the Troubles began, it was hard “not to be subsumed into everything that was happening on the island.” As he became a political leader, he was keenly aware of how the violent conflict exacerbated underlying problems – even his vision for economic regeneration in the Republic was blocked because “part of the reason that it was difficult to get investment and to get people to come here was the Troubles.” 

As he remembers the process, it would be misleading to think it popped out of nowhere in the 1990s. There had been attempts through the years, notably with the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, but also through less publicised conversations between the peacemakers and paramilitaries, like the conversations led by Fr Gerry Reynolds at Clonard Monastery – which began to generate movement. He attributes the ceasefire to the Downing Street Declaration that was orchestrated by the British Prime-minister John Major and Ahern’s then boss, Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, on December 15, 1993. That showed a serious willingness from London to engage, and the 1994 ceasefire was the result.  

But when the ceasefire broke down in 1996, all that work dissipated. “That was a disaster, really.” With the election of Tony Blair, Ahern suggested they “take it up again”. With a concerted focus – “I was nearly doing the Northern stuff full-time” – progress was restored. He remembers that the negotiations involved ten different parties, including the British and Irish governments and the active and influential participation from the American government and “went on practically non-stop from September 1997 to Good Friday 1998.” The strategy sought to be as inclusive as possible – “we would try and get everyone in” – and “to be as comprehensive on the issues” as possible, so that no issue was off the table. Patience and resilience were central. Although there was “a huge amount of conversation and talks up to Christmas, it didn’t really gather momentum until February.” 

With the “totality of all the issues out on the table”, the dialogues began to bear fruit. How draconian legislation might be rolled back, how paramilitary prisoners could be released, how demilitarization would proceed and how the police could be reformed. He remembers that negotiations on that question – the reform of the corrupt Royal Ulster Constabulary police force – went on deep into the Good Friday night, April 10th. When an obstacle appeared, the London and Dublin governments reminded people of the goal of stopping the violence. That was their baseline assumption throughout – no one at the table was “happy with the fact that thousands of people had been killed and maimed.” The second guiding principle was that “you have to try to treat everyone with dignity, regardless of what views they have.” And slowly, rapport was built up between people who had been combatants.  

When the agreement was finalised, a kind of euphoria followed. “That week we were just at it night and day; we had been at it night and day since March.” But the celebrations, as intense as they were, did not linger. The agreement had to be passed by popular referendum in both the North and the Republic of Ireland. And the work continued even after that. Ahern notes that it took years to achieve an agreement “and then another ten years to implement it”.  

But the effort was undeniably worth it. “I think the big success of the Good Friday Agreement was that the Troubles have by and large ended.” And the story of how that happens traces back to a cassette tape released in August 1994 announcing the IRA ceasefire. 

Article
Comment
Romance
5 min read

Getting hitched should benefit more than the advantaged

Marriage’s decline impacts outcomes for all.
A bride dressed colourfully stands next to her groom, dressed similarly, as he sits in a wheelchair.
Ellie Cooper on Unsplash.

Of all the dramatic changes to Britain in the last half century, one of the least discussed is the extraordinary decline in marriage.  

The marriage rate has fallen by two-thirds in the last 50 years. It was just above six per cent in 1972 and has now been under two per cent since 2017. 

This remarkable decline has corresponded with a rise in a relatively new relation type: cohabitation. Cohabitation was extremely uncommon before the 1960s, and even by 1986 just 10 per cent of new mothers were cohabitants. It is, however, rapidly becoming the mainstream. Now 35 per cent of babies are born to cohabiting mothers, and the total number of UK cohabiting couples increased from 1.5 to 3.7 million between 1996 and 2022.  

Much of this is due to couples delaying marriage: 84 per cent of religious and 91 per cent of civil marriages are now between couples that already live together, and the average age when first marrying has climbed by 10 years since the early 1970s. But it is also due to many more couples not marrying at all. 

Opinions understandably differ on this social transition away from marriage and towards cohabitation. It is a point of progress worth celebrating that the previous societal shunning of those, especially women, who had children outside of marriage has been left in the past. However, such progress has not been without consequences. Cohabitations are less stable, on average, than marriages. Cohabiting parents are around three times as likely to separate in the first five years of their children’s life as married couples.  

This stability is not simply because wealthier, more highly educated people tend to have stable families and also tend to marry. Studies by World Family Maps and the Marriage Foundation have shown marriage to be a larger factor in family stability than either education or income.  

Nor does the stability come from couples staying together miserably.  Studies undertaken in 2017 and 2024 looked at the outcomes of couples 10 years on from considering their relationships to be ‘on the brink’. In the initial study, while 70 per cent of cohabiting couples had separated in the decade since considering themselves ‘on the brink’, 70 per cent of the married couples had remained together. Perhaps even more crucially, just seven per cent of those married couples that had stayed together were unhappy in their relationship a decade on. The 2024 study found none of the sample of married couples that had stayed together were still unhappy 10 years on. For those that had stayed together, things had improved. 

This family instability that the decline of marriage has caused is also unevenly distributed. Affluent couples – often those most likely to criticise the concept of marriage – are much more likely to marry than disadvantaged ones.  

Looking at socioeconomic groups, seven in ten mothers from the most advantaged group are married, while just a third of those from the two most disadvantaged groups are. The effect is geographic, too. Institute for Fiscal Studies research has found parents having children are more likely to be married if they are living in better educated areas. For the advantaged, it is compassionately affirmational to suggest that every relationship is equal, even though the advantaged themselves choose the most secure option of marriage: a hypocrisy only tolerated due to the potent fear of seeming judgemental. 

The consequence of this is deepening inequality: disadvantaged families are rendered more likely to breakdown, while children from affluent backgrounds are disproportionately likely to enjoy the ‘the two-parent privilege’, the substantial emotional and developmental advantages of growing up in a stable home. Melissa Kearney coined the phrase, and her evidence shows how children grow up, on average, to have better educational outcomes, better emotional and physical wellbeing, and higher incomes if they are raised in two-parent homes. 

Stable families are foundational to a stable society, and marriage is crucial to stable families.

So, why are marriage rates so much higher among wealthier couples than poorer ones, and why is this gap growing? 

We can isolate three reasons in particular, each more solvable than the last.  

Most challenging is the feedback loop effect: people whose parents, role-models, and friends have not married are unlikely to do so themselves. The demographic trend compounds itself.  

Second, and easily addressable if only the will was there, is the public messaging effect: politicians – and to some extent celebrities – have consistently told the public that marriage is unimportant. In 2017, Marriage Foundation research found that it had been a decade since a cabinet member had discussed marriage in a speech. This has hardly changed in the years since. In 2024, the only major party whose manifesto even mentioned marriage was Reform; even then the focus in the relevant section seemed to be less on marriage and more on getting ‘people trapped on benefits back into the workplace’. 

Third is the cost of weddings. A quick flick through top wedding magazines suggests that the average wedding costs upwards of £20,000. Survey evidence from both Marriage Foundation and the Thriving Center of Psychology have found that most young people view weddings as unrealistically expensive. 

This financial problem is solvable: much of the costs relate to venue hire. Unless they are having a religious marriage, a couple will need to find a venue that has gone through the bureaucratic process of becoming an ‘approved premises’. The cheapest of these are register offices which, including all expenses, still cost about £500. 

This is eminently mendable. The Law Commission proposal to reorganise wedding law around the officiant, not the venue, opens the door for a future of more affordable weddings by removing the regulatory barrier. It will also bring the law in line with that of other home nations. 

This proposal will not work by itself, though, it will need to be supported by creativity in wedding planning.  

Wedding costs can be substantially reduced by taking a DIY approach. Food, drinks, and decorations can often be coordinated amongst enthusiastic (and appropriately competent!) guests.  

Booze free weddings are a growing phenomenon, and especially good for weddings with children.  

Such ‘group-effort’ approaches often have a unique feel thanks to the high participation of guests, and people are more likely to remember events that they feel a sense of ownership of, having helped make them happen. 

Alongside this is a recommendation by the Centre for Social Justice. It proposes subsidising the necessary statutory fees for the poorest couples, up to £550 per couple. An inexpensive and hugely beneficial adjustment to improve wedding accessibility for the least fortunate.  

Stable families are foundational to a stable society, and marriage is crucial to stable families; perhaps it is time for all of us to make tying the knot easier.  

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief