If the first day of an event to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement was anything to go by, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party is in for a difficult week.
As global leaders and key negotiators of the peace deal descended upon Belfast, the party came under the magnifying glass and found little favour in a room of people who took significant risks to build peace in the North in 1998. A quarter of a century on, and 15 months into the DUP’s boycott of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing institutions, the party is running out of road – and out of friends.
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast, where the conference is being held, said “governing together took courage”, while former British negotiator Jonathan Powell bluntly stated that the DUP need to get back to Stormont, “otherwise we are in a complete cul-de-sac”.
