Good Friday Agreement - Decommissioning and "normalisation"

Decommissioning and "normalisation"

Against the background of political violence during the Troubles, the Agreement committed the participants to "exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving differences on political issues". This took two aspects:

• decommissioning of weapons held by paramilitary groups;
• the "normalisation" of security arrangements in Northern Ireland.

The participants to the Agreement comprised two sovereign states (the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland) with armed and police forces involved in the Troubles. Two political parties, Sinn Féin and the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) were linked to paramilitary organisations: the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) respectively. The Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), which was linked to the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), had withdrawn from the talks three months previously.

The multi-party agreement committed the parties to "use any influence they may have" to bring about the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years of the referendums approving the Agreement. The process of "normalisation", committed the British government to the reduction in the number and role of its armed forces in Northern Ireland "to levels compatible with a normal peaceful society". This included the removal of security installations and the removal of special emergency powers in Northern Ireland. The Irish government committed to a "wide-ranging review" of its Offences against the State legislation relating to the suppression of terrorism.

The Agreement called for the establishment of an independent commission to review policing arrangements in Northern Ireland "including means of encouraging widespread community support" for those arrangements. The British government also committed to a "wide-ranging review" of the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland.

Both the British and Irish governments committed to the early release of prisoners serving sentences in connection with the activities of paramilitary groups, provided that those groups continued to maintain "a complete and unequivocal ceasefire".

A date of May 2000 was set for total disarming of all paramilitary groups. This was not achieved leading the Assembly to be suspended on a number of occasions as a consequence of Unionist objections. A series of rounds of decommissioning by the IRA took place (in October 2001, April 2002 and October 2003) and in July 2005 the IRA announced the formal end of its campaign. Loyalist decommissioning did not follow immediately in kind. In June 2009, the UVF announced they had completed decommissioning and the UDA confirmed it had started to decommission its arsenal.