Northern Ireland: sharing power to share the future

From the late 1960s until 1998, Northern Ireland went through a period of violence known as "the Troubles." A 1998 report by the Northern Ireland Victims Commissioner counted more than 3,600 deaths since 1969, just over half of them civilians.

On April 10, 1998, after long negotiations, the British and Irish governments and most Northern Irish parties concluded the Good Friday Agreement, also called the Belfast Agreement. It created an assembly in which power is shared between communities and cooperation between the north and south of the island, and recognized each person's right to identify as Irish, British, or both. On May 22, 1998, the people approved it by referendum: 71% yes in Northern Ireland, 94% in the Republic of Ireland.

Not everything was simple. Four months later, a bombing in Omagh killed 29 people. The same year, John Hume and David Trimble received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. And peace kept taking hold: in 2007, the British Army ended its deployment.

The agreement does not ask people to forget or to love each other overnight. It asks them to build shared institutions. That is an Ubuntu intuition: we become fully ourselves when we recognize that the other is also part of the "us."