ABSTRACT
This is a story of high hopes engendered by the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement but then disappointed by the realpolitik of Northern Ireland politics and Republic of Ireland economics. That Agreement, which marked the effective end of 30 years of widescale political conflict in Northern Ireland, had an integral and pragmatic North-South cooperation dimension as part of its three ‘strands’. It set up a North South Ministerial Council (NSMC) to bring together the Irish government with a Northern Ireland executive ‘to develop consultation, cooperation and action within the island of Ireland – including through implementation on an all-island and cross-border basis – on matters of mutual interest’. It set in motion the establishment of six North-South bodies and one North-South limited company to implement agreed policies: InterTradeIreland, Waterways Ireland, the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB), safefood, the Loughs Agency (originally including Irish Lights), the North South Language Body and Tourism Ireland. And it identified six areas for inter-governmental cooperation through existing agencies: transport, agriculture, education, health, environment and tourism. The North-South institutions were an ultra-careful balance between nationalist demands, however symbolic, for something that could be seen by them as the potential embryo of a united Ireland, and unionist requirements that they be as minimal as possible (Coakley 2005, 111). In the event they turned out to be more minimal and functional – in that unionists had to be persuaded of their practicality – than aspirational – satisfying nationalist ideology. Given unionist sensitivities, the North-South ‘strand’ had been central to the difficult final weeks of negotiation. Four days before the Agreement was signed, Ulster Unionist deputy leader John Taylor said he would not touch Senator George Mitchell’s first draft with ‘a forty foot pole’ largely because it proposed over 60 possible North-South bodies. Nevertheless, there was still a political imperative underlying the practicality. In the words of Dr Martin Mansergh, one of the senior Irish officials involved: ‘The Irish government would have been concerned that, taken together, the [North-South] areas contained significant substance. Unionist concerns would have been more about control of the process’ (Mansergh 2001, 5). It was a difference of emphasis that would come to haunt the implementation of the NorthSouth strand of the Agreement.
