Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern sign the Belfast Agreement. Image, BBC, fair use.
Northern Ireland basked in international media attention in the 1990s, with its ‘peace process’ bracketed with those in Israel/Palestine and South Africa as carrying global political significance. An ‘historic’ agreement on Good Friday 1998 brought a forest of media satellite vans once more to encircle the Stormont estate. Yet as the 1993 Oslo accords bequeathed to still-dominated Palestinians broken-backed, divided enclaves and the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 saw its vast ethnic inequality yawn still wider, Northern Ireland faded back into a familiar history of sectarian polarisation, and the spotlight turned elsewhere.
Until 2017, that is. The most-recent collapse of the power-sharing institutions stemming from the Belfast agreement in January had hardly caused a ripple in London. But when things went horribly wrong for the Conservative party in the June Westminster election, leaving the prime minister, Theresa May, in enfeebled dependence on Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to remain in power, Queen’s University Belfast’s PR staff found themselves begging their political scientists for help with calls from around the world, along the lines of ‘Who is the DUP?’
