On 22 May 1998, voters in Northern Ireland approved the Belfast Agreement, better known as the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement had been signed the previous month. The referendum gave it democratic force.

The vote came after decades of violence, failed political efforts and mistrust. The Troubles had left Northern Ireland with bombings, shootings, funerals, military presence and security checks as part of public life. Politics had repeatedly broken down, and many people had grown used to agreements failing before they could make much of a difference.

The Good Friday Agreement offered a different route. It did not ask people to forget what had happened or pretend that the main arguments had disappeared. It set out a political framework built around consent, shared government and changed relationships within Northern Ireland, across Ireland and between the British and Irish governments.

Consent sat at the centre of it. Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom unless a majority there voted otherwise. That mattered to unionists because it recognised the place of the majority in Northern Ireland. It mattered to nationalists because it kept constitutional change open while tying it to democratic support.

Power-sharing was just as central. The agreement created new institutions in which unionists and nationalists would have to govern together. That was the hard part. It meant moving away from politics built around exclusion, majority control and refusal. It also meant accepting that the other side could not simply be defeated or ignored.

The agreement reached beyond Stormont. It included north-south bodies linking Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, as well as British-Irish structures involving the two governments. That reflected the shape of the conflict itself. It had never neatly belonged to one parliament or one border.

The compromise was difficult. Prisoner releases, decommissioning, policing reform and constitutional language all carried weight. For many voters, support for the agreement meant accepting parts of it they disliked because the alternative looked worse.

The result was clear. More than 71 per cent voted in favour, on a turnout of 82 per cent. The agreement had moved beyond negotiation between leaders and parties. It had been put to the public, and the public had given it a mandate.

The vote did not settle every problem. Implementation would be slow, disputed and often fragile. Opposition remained. Trust still had to be built by people with little reason to offer it freely.

Even so, 22 May 1998 marked a major turn. After years in which violence had broken politics again and again, voters approved a framework that gave politics another chance.