72 Hours to the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement

The two documents selected within this package (one from the National Archives of Ireland and one from the National Archives in Kew) reveal the doubts about whether a peace agreement for Northern Ireland could be reached just days before it was finally signed by all parties. The documents also cover all the twists and turns of the final 72 hours of negotiation.

It is expected that students will already have completed ‘The Road to the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement’ lesson pack, although this is not essential. This lesson provides a contrast to that lesson: whereas the previous lesson focussed more on the barriers to peace, this centres more on how agreement was reached.

In the main activity, students are encouraged to analyse extracts from a long document, a report on the final 72 hours written by John Holmes, Principal Private Secretary (PPS) to Tony Blair. In a similar process to lessons 1- 2, they need to look for:

• any evidence that the talks are going well or that an agreement is close
• any evidence that there are still challenges or that agreement seems far away
• key turning points / actions of individuals that make breakthrough possible

They will chart the progress of the negotiations by plotting the 20 points on a graph to represent them in a visual form (teachers may wish to remove extracts in order to cut down the number students need to examine).

Learning objectives

By the end of the session, students will:

• know what barriers still stood in the way of an agreement, 7–10 April 1998
• understand how the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement was finally achieved
• be able to use contemporary documents to deepen your understanding

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