There are worse fates for the agreement than fading into irrelevance, but it would be dangerous not to acknowledge this is happening
Belfast Agreement: Within each strand of the agreement, institutions have atrophied through apathy or been overtaken by events. Photograph: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland/PA WireIt has an odd set of differences from the previous programme in 2020. That document contained a list of initiatives to improve British-Irish relations, beginning with a promise to “enhance the role of the British-Irish Council and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference”.
Remarkably, the new programme resolves this by dropping mention of the Belfast Agreement institutions while keeping everything else. In fact, the only reference to any of the agreement’s east-west and north-south institutions is a paragraph in the Tánaiste’s job description, copied from 2020, noting he may attend in lieu of the Taoiseach.
Although the panel has never got off the ground, that is where advocacy should be focused. Some group presumably lobbied for the forum’s return and the government has casually obliged. What all this means is that the Belfast Agreement’s architecture is dying of disinterest. Its elaborate balance of three sets of relationships is too contrived to be necessary under most normal circumstances, and normality is winning out.
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