FROM PHIL VISHY, OUR UNITED KINGDOM CORRESPONDENT, IN DUBLIN

A NEW POLL suggests that the 1998 Good Friday Agreement is quickly becoming an article of religious faith for many Irish people.

“It’s grown well beyond an international agreement,” says Dr Noel Lemming, a university lecturer who specializes in conflict studies. “Particularly in the south among the old political class of what is always contemptuously called the Free State by their political enemies.

“So much so that it’s now the fastest growing belief system in the country, bordering on a religion. Some people even wrote GFA in the religion column of the 2021 census, I believe.

“When Catholicism and other faiths are in full retreat in Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement has managed to capture the imagination of people for whom belief in anything now is a struggle after the financial and other traumas of the past couple of decades.”

And then, along came Brexit.

“Brexit has been a major factor, a sort of crystallizing moment for people,” says Fintan Lumpy a social commentator whose weekly blog, “Everything Wrong With Ireland That Can Be Fixed If You’ll Only Listen To Me”, has a large audience.

“You see, the development of what was a rather dry armistice agreement into a living religion, had actually been going on for years, mainly in Dublin, in small gatherings of the middle class, the old Fine Gael and Fianna Fail support base. What you might call Official Ireland. These people had once espoused all-Ireland unity but the harsh realities of The Troubles had made them not just accepting of partition but actually desirous of it, to protect themselves and all they had. Brexit threw them into disarray.”

“Yes, for these partition parties,” explains Dr Lemming, “the Agreement had been a full stop, and end in itself, and an achievement in the face of the disastrous Celtic Tiger debacle. Over the years, with nothing but austerity to show voters, they fell back on the Agreement as articles of faith, a creed, fixed forever, unchangeable, protecting them from the horrors of the North.

“With Brexit, suddenly there are demands for a united Ireland everywhere. Added to the Northern Ireland Protocol, and the demographics of Northern Ireland, a once far distant possibility becomes very real and very threatening.”

Lumpy says that “Politically, Agreementism is a kind of Constantinople Christianity, a shelter behind strong walls, a hope against hope, providing comfort, particularly in Dublin, to those who genuinely fear the possibility of a unified island.

“And remember, they have a lot to fear. Everything they are is invested in partition. The two old political parties, the whole apparatus of state, they carry no weight in the North. Should a united Ireland ever emerge, their position could weaken substantially. So you hear them pay lip service to unity but kick it constantly down the road. The politics of Oh Lord Make Me Good but Not Quite Yet. Indeed, it’s not unusual for religions to develop alongside political trends – look how well Christianity did out of the rise of Constantine in ancient Rome.

“Anyway, belief in the Agreement, celebrations of the Agreement, quotations from the Agreement, they have acquired a special meaning, especially in the year of its twenty fifth anniversary. People who once celebrated Wolfe Tone and Partrick Pearse and Michael Collins now hail Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair and John Hume and David Trimble. Indeed, it is interesting to see how a once ostracized Bertie Ahern has been rehabilitated as a kind of St Peter figure, a first Agreement Pope, if you like, while the now dead John Hume and David Trimble are treated as quasi-saints.

“The presence of Bono at the time of the signing of the Agreement obviously gives the whole thing an even greater sense of the spiritual, and that photograph of him holding John Hume and David Trimble’s hands in the air following the deal, is now an icon for the Agreement Movement, a sort of Jesus on the Cross, flanked by the two rebels. Each community can work out who is the saved rebel and who is the damned. Perfect.”

“I agree there with Fintan,” says Dr Lemming. “You might even add that Ian Paisley was the St Paul of the agreement – furiously against it until he was converted. I mean he sat down in government with an IRA commander. That said, it must be understood that the Agreement doesn’t evoke the same sublime veneration north of the Irish border as it does in the south these days. Probably because it quite obviously isn’t working at the moment. No, in the North, it is actually a declining faith, I’d say. Of course, there are still staunch adherents but many have given up on it. They simply continue as they always have, watching each other with grave suspicion, and waiting, because for them it has never been an end, just a means.”