In February 2024, the Northern Ireland Executive was restored and Michelle O’Neill from Sinn Féin became First Minister, the first time the office had been held by a Catholic from the Nationalist community. In November 2023, a day conference was held at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement which established new structures for representative government in the six counties. We publish some of the papers here. Ashley Beck and Christopher Wylde introduced the conference.1

Brougher mountain
I want to begin with a personal story. On 9 February 1971, when I was 12 years old, five electrical contractors were killed by a landmine on Brougher mountain, near the border between counties Fermanagh and Tyrone in Northern Ireland. This was comparatively early on in the ‘Troubles’, just under a year before ‘Bloody Sunday’. One of those killed was George Beck, my uncle, the youngest brother of my father, 43 years old, married with two children; my father’s family were from Kilkeel, County Down (the others were Harry Edgar, John Eakins, Bill Thomas and Malcolm Henson). This tragedy in our family dominated the way in which I heard and saw the news over the long years after that, and cast a shadow over our family, as with so many others. I can’t speak for anyone else, but the agreement reached in 1998, bringing a sense of hope after so much despair, is something worth marking. My father’s family are Presbyterians; I was brought up as an Anglican, became an Anglican priest, and became a Catholic in 1994 and a Catholic priest in 1996.