How can we build on the ‘radical peace’ made in Northern Ireland?

Among the UK and Ireland’s greatest successes of the last century has been the achievement of peace in Northern Ireland. Almost three decades on, Larry Attree asked five key experts how peace and security was built in Northern Ireland, and what is now needed to sustain it in the face of unrest, social division and uncertainty over the future.

Northern Ireland’s peace process as an outlier

In a world shaped by the legacy of 9/11, the peace process that was pursued in Northern Ireland is an outlier. Many governments have moved towards spending big on the latest technology to counter security threats, in a world where conflicts are seldom getting resolved. Peace processes today are messier, often lacking well-wishing neighbours and strategic external mediators committed to peace.

So it’s worth reflecting on what enabled the process of ending the conflict and improving security to succeed in Northern Ireland. As renowned peace scholar Roger Mac Ginty notes, part of Northern Ireland’s success was mere luck: ‘it had good neighbours, and Blair and Clinton were optimists. Such can-do are leaders absent from Europe today’.

But it wasn’t just luck. Northern Ireland achieved an improbable peace by complementing the political push for an end to violence with work to address deeper issues over the long haul. As Queen’s University Professor and former UN Special Rapporteur on Counterterrorism and Human Rights Fionnuala Ni Aolain observes: ‘Many states consolidate authority by leaning into a security lens – and this usually makes insecurity worse. Northern Ireland was unique in being an exception to this trend. There were some kinetic elements, but it was clearly a more human security-centred approach.’

A key part of what made the process work was the recognition that peace would not arrive in a Trump style ‘deal’: ‘it would take decades to build, not be achieved within an electoral cycle’. Despite the vast improvements in security since the height of the Troubles, only recently, in 2023, did Northern Ireland celebrate its first year without a security-related killing since the Troubles began.

A journey towards trust

The Good Friday Agreement was the foundation of efforts to build trust in communities and tackle inequalities, improving their wellbeing over time. The agreement initiated a journey towards community policing – with human rights at the centre. The Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland made several important changes to make the police force more legitimate among Catholic communities, changing its name, composition, structure, oath of office and symbols. The new Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) had a policy of recruiting more Catholics and minorities, a core focus on community-oriented policing, crime prevention, order maintenance and local participation.

Political leaders are often recognised as the architects of peace in Northern Ireland, but individuals had to dig deep to make peace work. Davy Beck is the PSNI’s Assistant Chief Constable today, but he joined the police at 18, and spent several years as a uniformed officer in South Armagh.

‘As the great and the good were making these agreements, we were at the cutting edge of delivery, caught between political change, the community perspective and the combatants themselves. I saw some challenges in that period. Policing was one of the most significant issues. With no real political agreement on it, the Independent Commission on Policing was brought forward to generate some consensus on a new beginning for police in Northern Ireland. The Patten report provided the roadmap. There was a real commitment to human rights and policing with the community. There were challenges and cultural issues, and some wanted to criticise the process, but this was my compass over the years – that focus on policing with the communities allowed us to navigate’.

Building confidence in hostile communities was hard. ‘Stopping further police from getting murdered sometimes meant sitting down with individuals I knew had murdered my own colleagues,’ ACC Beck recalled, ‘I had to do it, but I would sometimes be planning my escape route as I went into a meeting’.

Representation, women and minorities

One element that made peace more possible and more durable was the push by women to claim a role in peace and security. Within the peace process, in the face of much opposition, representatives of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC) were elected to help broker peace. They ensured the Good Friday Agreement backed women’s equality and advancement, and were also instrumental in setting up a Civic Forum, ensuring the new legislature would consult a wide range of civil society representatives. One of NIWC’s founders, Monica McWilliams, was a signatory to the Good Friday Agreement. She went on to lead the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, and currently sits on the Independent Reporting Commission for the Disbandment of Paramilitary Groups in Northern Ireland.

As she recalls today, women’s political struggle also had to be followed through with practical actions to ensure inclusion of minorities and women in security provision. ‘Not only did we have to push for more Catholics to be recruited into the police, but also those who came from working class backgrounds on the loyalist side. If we wanted to stop police being murdered, we had to ensure communities felt represented in the police. But the idea was also that women couldn’t be in the police – that you couldn’t have a gun and a skirt (that was the uniform at the time). We went to Strasbourg to get a ruling on that’. Over time, police were persuaded to focus more on addressing domestic violence. 

Staying focused on peace as divisions evolve

Yet peace and security remain under construction. Paramilitary groups on both sides still operate and remain involved in crime. The devolved government has collapsed repeatedly due to political deadlock. Sectarian divisions have persisted – within society and over Northern Ireland’s future – visibly expressed in the form of flags, parades and bonfires. And the legacies of unresolved injustice, socio-economic exclusion and youth disillusionment persist.

The signs that all is not well occasionally erupt into acts of violence. The riots in Ballymena this summer can be interpreted in different ways: they certainly echo more than a century’s outbursts of anti-immigrant violence across the UK; but they also show that social cohesion and police-community relations require ongoing attention.

Despite the fragility of the situation, Northern Ireland has nonetheless been badly neglected by Westminster politicians. As Mac Ginty quipped ‘[2018-2019 Northern Ireland Secretary] Karen Bradley came here less than Bruce Springsteen’. Although from the outset, peacebuilders like McWilliams argued that ‘social and economic rights were fundamental to the conflict’, this wasn’t taken seriously, and class divisions remain profound and problematic. As elsewhere, the evolution of Northern Ireland’s economy has left huge segments of the public behind, with no way into the new knowledge economy. These issues require work on both sides of the border.

Still waiting for the truth

Community divisions likewise remain rooted in truth and justice processes that were neglected under the Good Friday Agreement and left people waiting for answers that have still not arrived. According to ACC Beck, roughly 100 cases are still in the pipeline for inquests, and this still keeps communities apart and frustrates efforts to complete the disbandment of paramilitary groups. The Good Friday Agreement’s sections on reconciliation – including good intentions to promote more integrated housing and ensure that education would promote reconciliation – were shelved.

Failure to follow through on truth, justice and reconciliation priorities in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement is one of McWilliams’ key regrets over the process. Marie Breen Smyth – who until last year was the Independent Reviewer of National Security Arrangements for Northern Ireland and of the Justice and Security (NI) Act 2005 – also sees truth and justice as crucial, and connected to the persistence of social and political divisions in Northern Ireland:

‘We have a class fracture and a historic fracture, that builds on unaddressed grievances. We’ve lacked the right mechanism for investigating past injustices. We’re trying to find ways for armed actors to come together. But unless we sit with communities, listen to their concerns, and find pathways for them to address them, we can’t make progress. Law and order can’t be imposed on them, and we as public servants need to respond to their concerns’.

For Professor Ni Aolain, criminal justice offers ‘a very limited form of truth – the more formal these processes get, the less truth is delivered’. In this sense, overcoming the deficits in justice left in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement may be less about formal, legal efforts than more informal processes that can provide people with closure. The new legacy framework to enable truth for families of the Troubles announced by the British and Irish Governments in September could therefore play a vital role if it fulfils its aims. 

Cohesion requires more than water cannons

As with justice, the next generation of politicians needs to adopt a broad view of how to work on security problems that goes well beyond policing. Foreshadowing the recent unrest in Ballymena, in 2023 Dublin experienced a night of disorder and looting as far right groups mobilised in response to an attack on schoolchildren by a mentally disturbed immigrant. In response, they attacked police, public transport and refugee accommodation. In the aftermath, the policy conversation in the Republic was all about the police’s readiness to take a tougher line with rioters. As Ni-Aolain put it ‘in the Republic, we have had zero conversation about the kind of policing we need’.

According to Breen-Smyth, this kind of rhetoric is mirrored in the North: ‘According to politicians in Northern Ireland, we can arrest our way out of problems’. Organised crime, the remains of paramilitary movements and racist violence does require firm, proportionate policing responses. Yet those who played key roles in ending the troubles know two things. Firstly, that ‘robust’ security measures can create more problems than they solve. And secondly, that holistic strategies for tackling underlying issues and growing community confidence are no less critical for tackling this kind of violence. As ACC Beck put it, ‘A loan of a water cannon is not going to change things. We need to strive to do something for those communities.’

Under the GFA, in coming years a referendum is likely on Ireland’s reunification. In preparation for the integration of Northern Ireland, the Republic will need to get to grips with all that’s been learned about policing, security and justice in the North, and both societies will need to reckon with far-right political movements that appeal to adherents by othering migrants and minorities.

Unfortunately perhaps, those who led the way in improving Northern Ireland’s security are now handing over the reins to a new generation, who no longer remember the cost of allowing violence to escalate, the reasons why old compromises need to be preserved and the urgency of tackling underlying social, economic and justice issues.

For Ni Aolain, the response needs to ‘hold two things at the same time: we need to remember what was great about the radical peace that was achieved here in Northern Ireland – and we need to recall that a better peace is possible. We need to keep working on a model that incentivises the movement to the middle and for communities to continue negotiating with and tolerating each other.’

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Larry Attree has worked on peace and security issues for over two decades with leading NGOs, the UN and other agencies. He lives with his family in Dublin.

This article draws on a British International Studies Roundtable ‘Security policy & practice: lessons from the Good Friday agreement’ held in Belfast, June 2025.

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The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.

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Image Credit: Greg Clarke. PSNI officers in Derry, Northern Ireland. License.