The Belfast Agreement is also known as the Good Friday Agreement, as it was concluded on Good Friday on 10 April 1998. It was an agreement between the British and Irish governments and most of northern Ireland`s political parties on how to govern Northern Ireland. Discussions that led to the agreement have focused on issues that have led to conflict in recent decades. The aim was to form a new de-defyed government for Northern Ireland, where unionists and nationalists would share power. The Anglo-Irish Agreement is an agreement between the British and Irish governments. The agreement was committed with the various institutions defined in the multi-party agreement. It also sets out the position agreed by the two governments on the current and future status of Northern Ireland. U.S. President Bill Clinton was a strong supporter of the peace process, and the talks were led by U.S. Senator George Mitchell. On the 20th anniversary of the agreement, they were given freedom from Belfast for their work.
The peace process has successfully achieved the violence of unrest over the past two decades. Since the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, it has been necessary to pursue a number of other political and legal agreements aimed at consolidating the peace settlement provided for by the VPA. In January 2017, Martin McGuinness resigned from his post in protest at a political scandal over the new first minister, Arlene Foster, which broke the executive. He also referred to long-term issues where the DUP is not meeting the basic equality commitments set out in its agreements. A copy of the agreement was published in every assembly in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland so that people could read before a referendum where they could vote. Unfortunately, it was not possible to reach an agreement on the implementation of the Stormont House agreement, which deals with the legacy of the past, as a time frame for discussions on the new beginning. The Irish and British governments have committed to continue work on this issue in order to create an agreed basis for the creation of a new institutional framework for the management of the past, as envisaged in the Stormont Agreement. playGerry Adams describes how he knew that the 1998 peace agreement would be accepted The idea of the agreement was to get the two parties to work together in a group called the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Assembly would take some of the decisions taken previously by the British government in London. The agreement was for Northern Ireland to be part of the United Kingdom and remain in place until a majority of the population of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland wished otherwise. If this happens, the British and Irish governments will be “obliged” to implement this decision.
The overall result of these problems was to undermine trade unionists` confidence in the agreement exploited by the anti-DUP agreement, which eventually overtook the pro-agreement Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in the 2003 general elections. UUP had already resigned from the executive in 2002 following the Stormontgate scandal, in which three men were indicted for intelligence gathering. These charges were eventually dropped in 2005 because persecution was not “in the public interest.”