The Consent Vote and Omagh – Emerald Archives

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For Ireland, 1998 was a year in which constitutional argument, electoral choice and ordinary grief were compressed into a few extraordinary months. The Belfast or Good Friday Agreement of 10 April offered a new political framework for Northern Ireland and a new relationship between the Irish and British states. Its authority, however, rested on popular endorsement and on institutions that still had to be made real. The overwhelming votes of May gave the settlement democratic force; the Omagh bombing in August showed with terrible clarity that agreement had not ended the capacity for violence. By December, international recognition of John Hume and David Trimble suggested both the achievement of the year and the precariousness of the peace it sought to secure.

An Agreement Built on Consent

Multi-party negotiations at Stormont had been under way for almost two years when their final phase reached its conclusion on Good Friday, 10 April. The resulting agreement was the work of the British and Irish governments and most of Northern Ireland’s principal political parties, facilitated by the former United States senator George Mitchell. It did not require nationalists or unionists to abandon their aspirations. Instead, it set out rules by which those aspirations could be pursued peacefully and democratically.

At its centre was the principle that Northern Ireland would remain within the United Kingdom unless a majority there freely chose otherwise, while Irish unity could come about only with concurrent consent north and south of the border. The agreement also recognised the right of people in Northern Ireland to identify as Irish, British or both, and to hold both citizenships. These provisions were not merely formulae for diplomats. They attempted to give equal public legitimacy to identities which many people had believed the state, or violence, required them to choose between.

The institutional design was equally ambitious. A 108-member Northern Ireland Assembly, elected by proportional representation, was to sustain an inclusive Executive. A North/South Ministerial Council was intended to bring ministers from Belfast and Dublin into structured co-operation, while a British-Irish Council and a strengthened British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference located the settlement in a wider network of relationships. Commitments on rights, equality, policing, prisoner releases, security normalisation and the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons meant that the document reached deeply into public life. Its parts depended upon one another; none was easily detachable without unsettling the whole bargain.

The agreement was not universally welcomed. The Democratic Unionist Party and the UK Unionist Party opposed it, and unease also existed among supporters of the Ulster Unionist Party. Republican and loyalist prisoners, weapons and policing were subjects of profound dispute. Yet the talks had produced something more concrete than a declaration of goodwill: a programme for constitutional change in both jurisdictions and a timetable requiring voters to decide.

Two Referendums, One Mandate

On Friday, 22 May, people in Northern Ireland voted directly on the multi-party agreement, while voters in the Republic considered the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution. The Republic also held its referendum on the Treaty of Amsterdam that day, linking two different but important questions of Ireland’s place in Europe and its place within these islands.

The endorsement of the peace settlement was emphatic. In Northern Ireland, on an 81.1 per cent turnout, 71.1 per cent voted Yes. In the Republic, 1,442,583 people voted in favour of the constitutional proposal and 85,748 against it: 94.4 per cent of valid votes cast. The contrast in the margins should not conceal the importance of both results. Northern Ireland’s vote demonstrated majority approval in the territory whose status was at issue; the Republic’s vote accepted a constitutional accommodation that previous generations of Irish nationalists would have found exceptionally difficult.

The Nineteenth Amendment was signed into law on 3 June. It enabled the State to consent to the British-Irish Agreement and provided for new Articles 2 and 3 when that agreement entered into force. Thus 1998 did not itself bring the revised territorial provisions fully into operation; it established the constitutional mechanism by which that later change could occur. The distinction mattered. The electorate had approved a settlement, but its legal architecture still required reciprocal implementation by the two governments.

For the Republic, the vote expressed more than support for a negotiating success by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s government. It accepted that Irish national self-determination and a united Ireland, if it were ever to occur, must rest on consent rather than an assertion of jurisdiction over Northern Ireland. The constitutional language changed, but the national connection was not abandoned: the proposed new Article 2 affirmed the entitlement of people born on the island to be part of the Irish nation and acknowledged the Irish diaspora.

The Assembly’s Difficult Beginning

Northern Ireland elected its first Assembly under the agreement on 25 June. Each of the eighteen Westminster constituencies returned six members by the single transferable vote. The result gave the Ulster Unionist Party 28 seats, the Social Democratic and Labour Party 24, the Democratic Unionist Party 20 and Sinn Féin 18. The Alliance Party won six seats, while smaller parties including the Progressive Unionist Party, the UK Unionist Party and the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition also secured representation. The latter’s two seats were a notable reminder that the new chamber was more varied than the familiar constitutional blocs alone.

The election supplied representatives, but not immediate ease. David Trimble became First Minister designate and Seamus Mallon Deputy First Minister designate; the Assembly’s work was repeatedly entangled with disagreement over the sequencing of decommissioning and the formation of an Executive. A first face-to-face meeting between Trimble and Gerry Adams at Stormont in September was symbolically important, yet it did not dissolve the central argument. The Assembly existed, but the full power-sharing Executive envisaged by the agreement was not established during 1998.

Westminster nonetheless translated the settlement into law. The Northern Ireland Act received Royal Assent on 19 November, providing the statutory basis for devolved institutions and embedding duties concerning equality of opportunity on public authorities. Across the border, the Oireachtas passed the Criminal Justice (Release of Prisoners) Act, making provision for the early-release scheme promised in the agreement. Such legislation was contentious, particularly for victims and families bereaved during the conflict, but it demonstrated that implementation involved politically painful obligations as well as celebrated ceremonies.

Omagh’s Devastation

On 15 August, a car bomb planted by the Real IRA exploded in Omagh, County Tyrone. Twenty-nine people died as a result of the attack, including a woman pregnant with twins, and hundreds were injured. It was the deadliest single incident of the Troubles. The victims included local residents and visitors; the attack’s effects travelled immediately through families and communities across Northern Ireland, the Republic and beyond.

Omagh was an assault on people going about a Saturday afternoon in a market town, but it was also a direct challenge to the democratic settlement endorsed only weeks earlier. The Real IRA was a dissident republican organisation opposed to the political direction represented by the agreement. Its bomb did not reverse the referendum result, but it exposed the continuing threat from organisations outside the ceasefire and negotiating structures. Public revulsion was widespread, and the atrocity intensified pressure on armed groups that had not accepted the new political path.

The Irish and British governments responded with closer security co-operation and emergency legislation. In the Republic, the Offences against the State (Amendment) Act 1998 created further offences and powers aimed at terrorism, including provisions relating to directing unlawful organisations, training, information and the drawing of inferences from a failure to answer certain questions. The laws reflected an urgent security response, but also the enduring difficulty of protecting a peace process without eroding the legal safeguards it was meant to uphold.

Recognition, Reconciliation and Everyday Change

The year’s public symbolism extended beyond Stormont. On 16 October the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to John Hume and David Trimble for their efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland. They received it in Oslo on 10 December. Hume’s long advocacy of non-violence, civil rights and European partnership, and Trimble’s decision to lead the Ulster Unionists into an agreement opposed by many fellow unionists, represented different traditions taking risks for a shared political future.

On 11 November, President Mary McAleese attended the inauguration of the Island of Ireland Peace Park and its Peace Tower at Messines in Belgium. The memorial honoured Irishmen who had died in the First World War, including men from traditions long separated in Irish public memory. McAleese’s presence, while the Good Friday Agreement was still in its first fragile year, fitted the reconciliatory language of her ‘Building Bridges’ presidency. It also showed how 1998 encouraged a more inclusive public remembrance of Irish experience.

Meanwhile, life in the Republic was being altered by rapid economic expansion. Later Central Statistics Office estimates recorded real GDP growth of 8.9 per cent and real GNP growth of 8.1 per cent in 1998, the fifth successive year of strong growth. Consumer spending and investment grew sharply, while long-term unemployment fell markedly between November 1997 and November 1998. These figures describe the accelerating ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy, though prosperity was not a single experience shared evenly by every household, locality or occupation.

The State was also building institutions for an economy and society in transition. Enterprise Ireland was launched in July, bringing together Forbairt, the Irish Trade Board and parts of FÁS to support Irish-based firms, exports and employment. The Employment Equality Act 1998 strengthened the legal framework against discrimination in work. The Housing (Traveller Accommodation) Act required local authorities to prepare programmes addressing Traveller accommodation needs, while the Food Safety Authority of Ireland Act provided for a new national authority. These measures did not solve entrenched inequalities, but they marked a growing readiness to use national institutions to address them.

By the end of 1998, Ireland had not reached a settled destination. The Executive remained unrealised, weapons had not been decommissioned, and Omagh had made bereavement inseparable from hope. Yet the year had altered the terms on which constitutional disagreement could be conducted. Voters had authorised a consent-based settlement; new representative bodies and laws had begun to take shape; and the language of reconciliation reached from Omagh to Oslo and Messines. The achievement was not peace completed, but a public decision to make peaceful politics the indispensable route forward.

Primary Sources

Tags: Bertie Ahern, David Trimble, Employment Equality Act 1998, Enterprise Ireland, Good Friday Agreement, Ireland Year by Year