Why is the fragile Unionist support for the Good Friday Agreement on the decline?

If, as the saying goes, the devil really is in the detail; then for Unionists, the detail contained within the Good Friday Agreement was the devil.

Unionism and Loyalism in Northern Ireland have always been fractured. So no real surprise that unionist and loyalist support for the 1998 peace deal has always been fragile.

But why is there such disenchantment with the agreement that was reached a quarter of a century ago?

Stacey Graham is a loyalist activist and community worker on Belfast's Shankill Road. She believes the Good Friday Agreement has resulted in a sense of abandonment within her community and a feeling that they have been left behind.

"Nothing has really changed since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement other than we have stopped killing each other. And if that's a measure of success, then that's really, really poor on us."

The Irish identity afforded to Stacey through the Agreement, means nothing whatsoever. She is unashamedly British to the core. But she feels her Loyalty to the Crown has been taken for granted.

"Whenever there's a faction of the community that is not feeling that they're freely participating in society, and we saw that with nationalism and Republicanism, and there was a real effort to get those people on board, to get those communities on board. Why are we not seeing the same effort paid into the unionist and loyalist community here?"

Concession or compromise? Even as the deal was being done, unionists had real concern at the sacrifices that would be required.

TUV Leader, Jim Allister, was a practicing barrister when the agreement was reached.

"I think my gut feeling was one of abhorrence at the fact that some of the most bloodthirsty terrorists in Europe were to be released onto our streets and then were to be ushered into government."

Dublin dropped its territorial claim over Northern Ireland and changed its constitution accordingly. But even that didn't calm their fears for the future.

But Mr Allister says "the only referendum you can ever have under the Belfast Agreement is one which effectively says to you, Are you yet ready to join the Irish Republic? And so I don't find anything to cheer in the Belfast Agreement."

1998, Unionists held a majority at Stormont, and a majority of them voted in favour of the Agreement. 57% voted yes, 43% voted no.

But fast forward 25 years and both those majorities are gone.

Unionism is no longer the largest designation at Stormont while a recent LucidTalk Poll puts unionist support for the agreement now at just 34%.

Billy Hutchinson is the leader of the PUP and has mixed feelings about the deal.

"I'm not happy about where we are now, and how we got here. But we're in a better place than we were."

His unhappiness lies with how things have panned out.

"We wanted this to be about how we share power. That's not what it's about. It's about the two largest parties, and that's the problem" says Mr Hutchinson.

On one hand, Unionists and loyalists know and accept that a lot more people are alive today than would be if the violence had been allowed to continue pre-1998 levels.

But on the other, many feel - rightly or wrongly - that the sacrifices required, the prisoner release scheme, the changes to policing, the decommissioning process delays, they have created a disenchantment that has grown over the last quarter of a century.

That's now turning to anger on the back of the Northern Ireland Protocol and more recently the Windsor Framework.

All of this doesn't bode well for the next 25 years.

On Thursday, April 6, UTV broadcast a special programme on the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. You can also watch it on catch up.

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