GFA Negotiator: Restoring Northern Ireland's Government "Single Best" Way To End Sectarianism

A key figure in the signing of the Good Friday peace deal has urged the Democratic Unionist Party to end its boycott of Stormont.

Jonathan Powell, who was chief of staff to former prime minister Tony Blair, said a functioning government in Northern Ireland was the "single best" way of moving away from sectarianism in the region.

Powell, who was a negotiator for the UK government when the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, bringing decades of violent sectarian conflict to an end, told PoliticsHome that the last few years in Northern Irish politics had been "pretty depressing".

However, he expressed cautious optimism that the DUP would soon end its near-two-year boycott of Stormont, perhaps as soon "in the next couple of weeks".

The DUP, led by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP, is the second-largest party in Northern Ireland behind nationalists Sinn Fein. The party collapsed the region's power-sharing government in early 2022 in protest against post-Brexit arrangements for trade with Great Britain across the Irish Sea negotiated by the UK government. According to the DUP, these new arrangements had fundamentally undermined Northern Ireland's place in the United Kingdom.

In February, Rishi Sunak and the European Union agreed a new deal for the region called the Windsor Framework, replacing the contentious Northern Ireland Protocol, a treaty negotiated by former prime minister Boris Johnson. The DUP said the Windsor Framework was an improvement but did not go far enough to address its concerns, and since then Donaldson has been in talks with the government about resolving these remaining issues.

Speaking to PoliticsHome, Powell said he hoped Donaldson and other politicians in Northern Ireland would look to political leaders before