French Perspectives on the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement

Abstract

Although the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement is often described as the peace accord which ended thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, it was one of many on the path to peace. This article proposes to return to the negotiations for peace from a transnational perspective, exploring how the peace process which culminated in the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement was reported in France. It focuses on the four main national daily newspapers: the conservative paper, Le Figaro, the organ of the French Communist Party, L’Humanité, the left-wing daily, Libération, and the newspaper of record, Le Monde.

As this study shows, not all French daily newspapers supported the first peace attempts in Northern Ireland. Indeed, the two left-wing publications, L’Humanité and Libération, showed a clear antipathy towards the different reconciliation projects until the early 1990s. These newspapers appeared to be prisoners of their own ideology: Libération defended the idea of a fight for freedom, and supported the Republicans rather than peace, considering that any initiative that did not include the Republicans would fail. L’Humanité, which always saw the Northern Irish conflict as a colonial war, would only support the withdrawal of the British government from Northern Ireland. From the moment Sinn Féin was allowed to participate in the peace process and the British government stated it did not have any strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland, both newspapers supported the British initiatives to find a solution to the conflict. All French publications reported on the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998 and welcomed the ‘historical accord’.