The Road to the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement

The six documents selected within this package reveal the difficulties of making peace at two selected snapshots of time in the peace process in Northern Ireland: June 1996 and June 1997, as well as how and when progress was made at these points.

Although this is ‘packaged’ as a single lesson, it is likely to take at least two lesson periods of learning time to complete if all students use all the sources. Alternatively the sources could be shared within small groups with each student working on a single source and feeding back.

Students are encouraged to analyse each document, looking for:

• any evidence that the talks are going well or that progress is being made;
• any evidence that there are still challenges or barriers to peace; and the reasons why making peace was difficult

Learning objectives

By the end of the session, students will:

• know two of the key moments on the road towards the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement;
• understand why it was so difficult to make peace; and
• be able to use contemporary documents to deepen their understanding of the peace process.

Please note, the transcripts of the resources retain any typographical errors included in the original documents.