I haven't yet seen "Agreement" at the Lyric (I'm going tonight), and I couldn't manage to carve out enough time in Holy Week to get up to see Damian Gorman and Brian O’Doherty's "Beyond Belief" - the musical drama about the life and work of John Hume in Derry's Guildhall... both of which have received critical acclaim. But I did get to see Barney Rowan's "25 Pieces" at the Lyric on Good Friday after our circuit's Passion Prayer Pilgrimage through sourh Belfast, and Andrew Irvine and I dashed up to Derry to see the superb "Walled City Passion" on Holy Saturday. On top of that Sally and I just finished binge-watching Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson's gut-wrenching "Bue Lights" last night (thankfully it was no "Bloodlands") and I'm currently reading Jan Carson's "The Fire Starters."
All of these, in very different ways, offer dramatic commentary on the momentous events of Good Friday 1998, 25 years ago yesterday, and the frustrations of the last quarter century. The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, was NOT a settlement, as self-interested interferers like Ben Habib have been describing it in recent days. It was a starting pistol for a race that too many have been reluctant to run. At that point so many things remained unresolved/agreed/settled, not least policing, paramilitary weapons and activity, victims and "The past" - not to mention bread and butter issues such as education, health, housing and others, all of which are tainted by our divisions.
So since everyone else is saying their bit and President Joe is flying in for a £7 million pound photo op, here are a few of my thoughts launched out into the void:
“It is finished!”
But no, it had only just begun.
Politicians and religious leaders
may have sighed with relief
When the deed was done,
But the story was far from over
So much remained unresolved
We can at least agree on that.
Eventually the international visitors
Went back home, with their own
Accounts of what went on:
Good news of peace on earth.
The world powers deliberately washed
Their hands of ongoing responsibility,
Leaving the blood to fall upon us
And upon our unborn children.
Those who stood outside
The seat of power for fear
Of being sullied by the process,
Still stand outside, yet dictate
What can and cannot happen.
Men (and women) of violence
Are set at liberty, while innocent
Victims remain nailed to their crosses.
For how many more quarter centuries
Will we re-enact with passion
The drama of those days?
Too many of the original actors
Have departed the stage,
Their understudies merely echoing
Words without having walked
The Via Dolorosa in preparation.
It is beyond time for the second act;
To cast off the grave clothes
Of the bloody past, and
Roll away the sizeable stones
To allow grieving women (and men)
To lead the rest of us,
Cowering behind locked doors,
Into the possibility of new life.
Selah
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