After the apparently historic achievement of the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement in 1998 came the reckoning of whether it could be put into practice. Efforts to implement devolution largely failed and led to a five-year period of suspension and direct UK rule. Finally, in 2007 devolution was re-established, after a new agreement at St Andrews in 2006, on the basis of a DUP–Sinn Fein led government. As Tony Blair (2010:178) put it: ‘whereas the agreement could be described as art – at least in concept – the implementation was more akin to heavy manufacturing’. This chapter reappraises these tortuous years in terms of the territorial strains that were still present in Northern Ireland, the resources available to the Republican/nationalist and Unionist party leaderships in Northern Ireland as well as to the Blair governments, and the political management approaches that they each pursued. It focuses on the political imperatives and constraints that determined the Northern Ireland Assembly's journey between intermittent existence and suspension, and eventually led to the unlikely agreement between the leaders of the extreme representatives of Republicanism and Unionism.

In addressing these issues, the chapter is informed by the proposition that both sides in Northern Ireland still recognised their resource limitations in asserting their ideal outcomes in the short term. The SDLP and Sinn Fein still pursued power-sharing devolution in the short to medium term to realise their long-term objectives of Irish unity. This was principally to be achieved through electoral success and the cultivation of the North–South institutions under strand two of the Belfast Agreement to normalise Irish governance through instrumental arguments, shared policy development and functional spillovers. Meanwhile, the UUP, as the principal Unionist party, competitively sought to use devolution as a new framework in which to sustain an intergovernmentalist approach to governing within the UK, asserting the very different long-term aim of maintaining Northern Ireland within the Union. If such were their intentions, we need to understand the factors that determined why these political elites for much of the period after the Belfast Agreement stood back from implementing them, and caused or allowed the Assembly to be suspended.