THE BRITISH-IRISH COUNCIL SPRINGS FROM AND IS PROVIDED FOR IN the Belfast Agreement signed on Good Friday 1998. Its coming into force depends upon the implementation of the Agreement. The Council is established, however, not by the 1998 Northern Ireland Act, which gives legislative expression to the bulk of this Agreement, but by an international treaty, the British–Irish Agreement, attached to the Belfast Agreement.

The Belfast Agreement together with the legislation providing for devolution to Scotland and Wales establishes a new constitutional settlement, both among the nations which form the United Kingdom, and also between those nations and the other nation in these islands, the Irish nation. The United Kingdom itself is, as a result of the Scotland Act and the Government of Wales Act, in the process of becoming a new union of nations, each with its own identity and institutions – a multi-national state, rather than, as many of the English have traditionally seen it, a homogeneous British nation containing a variety of different people.