The statesmen are coming to town. On Tuesday, the UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, will meet Joe Biden in Belfast. On Wednesday, the US president will speak at the new Belfast campus at the University of Ulster. There may be a plaque, ribbons and some speeches. The Good Friday agreement is 25-years-old.
There could not be a more apt place to examine the aftermath of the peace process. The new campus sits jarringly alongside Belfast city centre. The modern glass roof juts out against empty shop fronts and crumbling brownfield sites. The inner-city community of Carrick Hill sits close to the campus, their houses dwarfed by new student housing blocks. Homeless people and drug users are known to frequent the area, some sleeping rough in corners and on benches. Many buildings around the campus are dilapidated and dangerous. A few years ago, a nearby hostel was closed to make way for “Tribeca Belfast”, a development project that has languished for years.
The University of Ulster campus should have been built in Derry. Derry, which has been crying out for a university since the 1960s. Derry, which has the highest levels of poverty in Northern Ireland. The city is in the news again. On Monday, the official 25th anniversary of the GFA, images of young people throwing petrol bombs at the police flashed across the news. Dissident republicans marked the anniversary by marching through the streets.
Sunak has said very little about the violence. He has also said nothing about violence in Newtownards over the past few weeks. Rival loyalist drug gangs are feuding. Masked men have marched through the streets with abandon. Families have been terrified to leave their homes.
Thirteen years of Tory austerity have allowed paramilitary groups to flourish in deprived areas. Local community groups that operate in areas such as the Creggan lost half their funding a few weeks ago after the British government failed to fully replicate the European social fund. These groups are the backbone of Northern Ireland. They provide support, education and training to local communities, often stepping in when the government withdraws.
When Joe Biden opens the campus, he will be able to see the new student apartments that loom across Belfast’s skyline. These apartments are being built in areas of high housing demand such as Carrick Hill and Sandy Row. They are being built instead of social housing. Rates (Northern Ireland’s equivalent to council tax) across the city have gone up but the student developments are exempt.
Housing, ironically, was one of the many reasons why the Troubles started. The housing system was unfair and discriminatory against Catholics; both communities lived in poor, shoddy housing. Now thousands of people are languishing on social housing waiting lists, while some companies report receiving 55-60 inquiries for every private property they advertise. Greedy landlords have raised rents to extract money from desperate applicants.
Through all of this, the Northern Irish assembly – ostensibly the seat of devolved government – lies dormant. Its frequent collapses hamper policymaking and the ability to tackle systemic problems. The DUP has not endorsed Sunak’s Windsor framework. The party collapsed the assembly to have leverage over the European Union and the government to get changes to the protocol. In reality, the leverage in question is the people of Northern Ireland, its marginalised communities and its public services.
To punish the DUP, the Northern Ireland secretary is bringing forward a cruel budget. Stormont departments are facing devastating cuts as Chris Heaton-Harris uses a stick to get unionists back into government. Grants to help low-income families with food over the school holidays have been gutted. Funding for voluntary organisations has been removed.
Public services, including the health service, will be affected by the cuts. When Sinn Féin collapsed the institutions in 2017, the NHS nosedived. Now it is close to collapse. Waiting lists are the highest in the UK. People are borrowing money they don’t have to get private healthcare. Northern Ireland has the highest rates of mental ill health in the UK. Services, particularly for young people, are on their knees.
Some will point out that Northern Ireland gets more public funding than the rest of the UK. There shouldn’t be a race to the bottom. You break it, you buy it. The Tories shouldn’t be allowed to further entrench inequality.
It’s said that Biden will sit down with Northern Ireland’s political parties. There’s some hope that he can help bash heads together and help to bring Stormont back. But Biden is not an impartial broker. He reportedly voiced support for the Northern Ireland protocol when unionists voiced opposition. Twenty-five years ago, the US played its part in securing peace. It may have to sit this one out.
Sunak has spoken of the importance of peace in Northern Ireland, but his party spent the past seven years furthering the divide in Northern Ireland by pushing for a hard Brexit. The Tories are about to pass a legacy bill giving an effective amnesty to the army, loyalist paramilitaries and IRA. The bill is opposed by all victims’ groups, but the Tories don’t care.
Presidents and prime ministers have never been responsible for peace in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday agreement happened because communities sat around a table and worked things out. If the government continues to drive Northern Ireland into the ground, peace will not survive.
Sarah Creighton is a lawyer, writer and political commentator from Northern Ireland
