Good Friday Agreement

The Good Friday Agreement, also called the Belfast Agreement, is a pair of linked agreements signed on 10 April 1998 that brought an end to most of the violence of the Troubles, the ethnic and political conflict that had gripped Northern Ireland since the late 1960s. It combines a Multi-Party Agreement among most of Northern Ireland's political parties with a British-Irish Agreement between the British and Irish governments, and it was reached as the culmination of the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s. The agreement established Northern Ireland's present system of devolved government, sharing power between unionist and nationalist parties, and set out new arrangements for relations between Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. It remains the foundation of Northern Ireland's constitutional and political settlement today.