Free Adventures in Correspondentland by Nick Bryant Page A

others to bring Northern Ireland to this point – of ‘taking a leap of faith out of the past and into the future’, as Bono put it.
    Two more unfashionable politicians it was hard to imagine than the highly strung David Trimble or the podgy John Hume, but they made their awkward entrances from either side of the stage and then clasped hands in the middle. To appear more up-to-the-minute, both men had discarded their suit jackets, though not their ties, while David Trimble even cracked a smile. Bono had also made his own sartorial adjustment. Normally, he appeared in rose-tinted spectacles, but this time he came on stage without any sunglasses. Predicting a bright and brilliant future, he presumably wanted everyone to see his eyes.
    The ‘No’ campaign was quick to condemn the concert, complaining that U2 was trying to buy the votes of young people with a free concert. Ian Paisley also claimed that, during one concert in America, Bono had set fire to the Union Flag – an accusation that the singer rejected vehemently. Yet, at a time when the late momentum was with opponents of the Good Friday Agreement, this south-of-the-border superstar gave the ‘Yes’ campaign the fillip it desperately needed: a late reminder that peace was hip and trendy, and that it meant Bono more than Michael Stone.
    Just three days later, in the highest attended poll since partition, 71 per cent of people in Northern Ireland voted ‘Yes’ to the Good Friday Agreement. In the Irish Republic, where the country’s constitution penned by Éamon De Valera would soon be rewritten to drop its claim on the north, over 94 per cent voted in favour. When Ian Paisley arrived at King’s Hall in Belfast – the agricultural showground where the result was announced – he was met by Loyalist chants of ‘Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio’. Paisley represented the sectarian politics of ‘No’. For once, Ulster had said ‘Yes’.
    Later that night, the ‘Yes’ campaign hosted a strangely lifeless victory party in a rooftop bar with mauve lighting, panoramic views of the city and lukewarm Pinot Gris. But there was much better craic to be had at the BBC Club, just over the way from the newsroom, which was the scene of an almighty booze-up. Whatever they thought of the agreement, journalists celebrated the simple joy of having, for the first time in 30 years, a much more hopeful storyline to impart.
    With Guinness, Harp lager and whisky – Bushmills for the Protestants and Jameson for the Catholics, not that it seemed to matter so much any more – we partied all night, and then, when dawn came, partied some more. Less than three months later, these same journalists would cover the massacre at Omagh, when dissident Republicans killed 29 people, many of them Catholic, after detonating a car bomb in a street packed with shoppers. It was Northern Ireland’s worst single atrocity. Yet so strong was the sense of public revulsion that the hope also was that Omagh would become the last. For once, the Real IRA was even humiliated into an apology.
    In the BBC Club, perhaps the home-town journalists hadanother cause for celebration: their newsroom would no longer have to accommodate over-ambitious blow-ins from London who had been heading to Belfast since the late-1960s in the hope of making a name for themselves. One of the biggest changes during my time in the BBC is also one of the most welcome: young tyro reporters are no longer blooded in Northern Ireland. Admittedly, it had taken longer than that gentle landlady had predicted, but comfort had come, by and large, to the streets of Belfast.
    The end of the Troubles; the sudden death of England’s most glorious rose; the assassination of Israel’s favourite son: at a time when the requirements of continuous news turned big stories into mega-stories, I had the good fortune to cover three of them very early on. And, as if in a game