As a real life Derry girl, this is what the Good Friday Agreement means to me

Hello, my name is Clare, and I am a child of the Good Friday Agreement. I am 34 years old.

An odd thing happens when you occupy the space between adulthood and childhood. A tension is formed between the fact that you are grown, with the life experience that you’ve garnered along the way, and the fact you are still thought of as a child and are therefore less informed than the “real adults” in the room.

When I was asked to write about what the Good Friday Agreement meant to me, I immediately got stuck. My generation has no ownership over any of this. We didn’t really experience The Troubles – at least, not in the way our parents and grandparents did – and it feels borderline disrespectful to stake any claim to it. We didn’t live through Bloody Sunday, or the Hunger Strikes, for example. Most significantly, we didn’t get to vote for the Good Friday Agreement.

There have been a lot of lofty discussions this weekend about the significance of collective memory – or lack thereof – in relation to The Troubles, and the negotiations, and the referendum.

Five minutes on the internet will also show you that a whole lot of people who are neither from here nor have ever lived here are telling people in my age group that a) our opinions are wrong, b) we are not entitled to an opinion, or c) both. A lot of these people should know better. We weren’t old enough to vote, but that doesn’t mean that the intervening years just didn’t happen to us.

The BBCNI podcast Year ’98: The Making of the Good Friday Agreement described the process of establishing the agreement as feeling almost glacial; and they aren’t wrong.

Here are some fun facts; Stormont, the devolved government for Northern Ireland, has been in crisis or collapse for 40 per cent of its existence. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was reformed as the PSNI 2001. Decommissioning wasn’t completed until 2005, after I had completed my GCSEs. I voted in my first Assembly Election in 2007 and finished my A-levels that June.

Operation Banner, the British army’s longest continuous military operation which stationed the army in active duty in Northern Ireland, ended in July 2007. The soldiers used to come out and watch us walk home from school. Hell, I left before they did.

I was working a minimum wage retail job at 17, getting taught how to recognise incendiary devices: “Here’s how to upsell Object A. Also, if it’s hissing, fizzing or ticking, don’t touch it, but do keep the customers away from it.” I’ve driven past bombs, I’ve been in the middle of hoax bomb threats, I’ve been in the middle of real bomb threats, and on one very memorable occasion was evacuated because the bomb actually went off that time.

And here’s the real kicker; my experience is not unique. I’m not here trying to imply that I am some ultimate authority on the millennial experience of life after the Good Friday Agreement. Everyone born between, say, 1985 and 1995, will have had very similar experiences to me, religious or political orientation be damned. We were all just wains with parents who wanted to make things better for us, and we’d cross each bridge as we came to it. There have been a lot of bridges.

However, and I say this wholeheartedly, it was the right call. I could never have dreamed of the life I have without the agreement. I’ve held British and Irish citizenship, I’ve worked, lived, or trained all over the UK and Ireland. I went all through Europe as part of a cross-community orchestra and the only time someone thought I was a terrorist was when I was stopped in Dublin Airport because security saw my bassoon and thought it was a rocket launcher.

And sure, you can’t blame them for that. The growth and prosperity have been slow to arrive, but life changed when it finally did. Derry City Centre is unrecognisably different even to when I was a teenager. It was nominated as UK City of Culture in 2013, it hosted the All-Ireland Fleadh (the Traditional Irish Music festival), and it is home to the round-the-world Clipper race every two years. Derry was voted even the world’s best Halloween destination. In the whole world! And it is, too.

In the season finale of Derry Girls, Erin asked Grandpa Joe how to vote for the agreement, because it might not work. “What if it does?” was the rebuttal. “What if no one else has to die? What if this all becomes a ghost story you tell your wains one day?”

We have faced new challenges in recent years, and a lot of old wounds have been brought back to the foreground. Our ghosts are more like poltergeists; violent, intrusive, and able to mess everything up in the blink of an eye. Trauma and unresolved history can do that to a people, especially when the weight of external influences and the additional pressures they create come into play.

There have been some incredibly dark days, with the Omagh Bombing being the most significant. Things also seem pretty bleak at the minute: we’re in a massive financial deficit and Stormont is, once again, down for the count. The security threat level is at “severe” and the threat from paramilitary and dissident groups is more prevalent than it’s been in recent memory. It all feels a bit dire, to be perfectly honest.

But, 25 years ago, John Hume and David Trimble, with significant input from Mo Mowlam, convinced a whole bunch of people to maybe try something different. The Good Friday Agreement was a choice, made by the people of Northern Ireland, and supported by the people of the Republic of Ireland.

That day, 71.1 per cent of our parents and grandparents decided that no one else had to die. It wasn’t a full stop; it was a declaration of intent. A declaration that has had to be made and remade every day since, and will have to be continuously made going forward.

So, hello, my name is Clare, and I am a child of the Good Friday Agreement. It’s not been perfect, but it is ours. We need to look after it now.