OCTOBER 2026 was a month when the political relationships on and between the islands shifted, and the Good Friday Agreement is once again centre stage.
While the Agreement's "right to freedom from sectarian harassment" was at the heart of much of the focus, the right "to pursue democratically, national and political aspirations" and "the right to seek constitutional change by peaceful and legitimate means" are in parallel motion. The coming weeks will be seismic as Irish government parties for the first time take responsibility for the national question and Irish citizens’ aspirations north of the border.
Less obvious and commented-on has been the legacy legislation pushed through Westminster. It has profound implications for the Good Friday Agreement and it exposes the lie of the British Government as a neutral guarantor.
One of the key amendments to the legislation is that responsibility for legacy prosecutions will shift to the Attorney General for England and Wales, taking it away from the independent office in the North, and placing it with a political appointee in London.
Currently that person is Ms Ellie Reeves, Labour MP for Lewisham, appointed by the King of England, on the advice of the English Prime Minister Andy Burnham. The position qualifies the holder as a full British cabinet member, though often they do not attend cabinet – a convention rather than a rule, as while they are a political appointee, a government minister, and answerable to the British parliament, they want a public semblance of aloofness.
Previous incumbents in the office were Michael Havers QC, the chief prosecuting counsel for the British state in the miscarriage of justice against the Guildford Four and the Maguire family; and Sir Patrick Mayhew, who made an extraordinary intervention in the case of UDA/British Army agent Brian Nelson, when he agreed a plea bargain which mitigated the charges which Nelson faced.
The Criminal Justice Review was one of the lesser-sung successes of the Good Friday Agreement. It formed the foundation for the devolution of justice and policing powers, and the pathway to restored institutions. While other elements have been highly contentious, and require consistent attention and repair, criminal justice has done comparatively well, and its lessons could be modelled as we determine future all-island arrangements.
To see that success undermined so fundamentally in the name of delivering to victims and survivors of conflict is breathtaking. Victims and survivors bore the worst of the bad practice of criminal justice pre-1998 and these reforms. Hundreds of bereaved families will speak of their treatment in court rooms that administered British state impunity while simultaneously casting them as criminals, disregarding their rights, let alone the rights of their loved ones.
To have the office of the Public Prosecution Service diminished and disregarded will raise the spectre of a repeat of that experience, as Whitehall once again elevates the feelings and fears of British army generals and MI5 mandarins. It is shameful and runs against the spirit and words of the Good Friday Agreement, and that it is happening under the guise of delivering to those who have actually been left behind by the Good Friday Agreement – bereaved relatives of those killed – is a dystopian warning to us all.
The British government process of introducing legacy legislation that does not repeal or replace the Legacy Act, rushing it through parliament and then quickly publishing amendments to that legislation to satisfy veterans’ “concerns”, was bad enough. To fundamentally undermine the Good Friday Agreement in the process should ring every alarm bell we have.
