Good Friday Agreement

The Good Friday Agreement, or Belfast Agreement, is a pair of agreements signed on 10 April 1998 that ended most of the violence of the Troubles, the ethnic and national conflict in Northern Ireland since the late 1960s, and was a major development in the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s. It comprises the Multi-Party Agreement between most of Northern Ireland's political parties and the British-Irish Agreement between the British and Irish governments, and restored self-government to Northern Ireland on the basis of power sharing, including commitments to civil and political rights, police reform, and paramilitary disarmament. The Agreement was approved by voters across the island of Ireland in referendums held on 22 May 1998, and the British-Irish Agreement came into force on 2 December 1999; the Democratic Unionist Party was the only major Northern Ireland political group to oppose it.