In March 1999, I was sent to Northern Ireland to write a feature on the anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. It was supposed to be a hopeful piece — a look at how much progress had been made in the previous 12 months. But then solicitor Rosemary Nelson was murdered by a car bomb planted by loyalists, and all hell broke loose. Nelson had represented Portadown’s Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition in their successful attempts to prevent the annual Drumcree parade marching past their homes. That night, the Garvaghy Road went up in flames. As I walked the length of it, I saw petrol bombs thrown, hijacked buses torched and rioters clash with police in Land Rovers.

We are now almost as far from the Troubles as the Troubles lasted – as far from the events of that dreadful night as that night was from Bloody Sunday. But, as we have seen in Portadown over the last few weeks, the wounds caused by 30 years of sectarian violence run simultaneously deep and close to the surface, and can easily be reinfected by bad faith actors with malign agendas.

When I returned from Northern Ireland in 1999, I framed Nelson’s murder, and the havoc it unleashed, as a dark week for the peace process and an indicator of how much work was still required. And that was true. But I think it’s clear, with hindsight, that the atrocities committed in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement – such as the Omagh bombing and the murder, in an arson attack, of the three young Quinn brothers – were the death throes of a conflict that was more or less spent.

Terrible though these events were, the overarching trajectory was towards community cohesion. It’s what the politicians wanted; it’s what the former leaders of (most) of the terrorist groups wanted; it’s what the grassroots wanted. This is not to underestimate the cost of compromise to those who had suffered loss. The violence would not have ended without swallowed pride, humiliating concessions and a willingness to tolerate terrorists walking free from jail.

But the 1990s was the decade of the Oslo Accord; it was the decade of the Dayton Agreement; it was the decade of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation........

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