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Events during the year 1998 in Northern Ireland .
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Events during the year 1998 in Northern Ireland .
The Omagh bombing was a car bombing on 15 August 1998 in the town of Omagh in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. It was carried out by the Real Irish Republican Army, a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) splinter group who opposed the IRA's ceasefire and the Good Friday Agreement, signed earlier in the year. The bombing killed 29 people and injured about 220 others, making it the deadliest incident of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Telephoned warnings which did not specify the location had been sent almost forty minutes beforehand, and police inadvertently moved people toward the bomb.
John Hume was an Irish nationalist politician in Northern Ireland and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. A founder and leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Hume served in the Northern Ireland Parliament; the Northern Ireland Assembly including, in 1974, its first power-sharing executive; the European Parliament and the United Kingdom Parliament. Seeking an accommodation between Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism, and soliciting American support, he was both critical of British government policy in Northern Ireland and opposed to the republican embrace of "armed struggle". In their 1998 citation, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognised Hume as an architect of the Good Friday Agreement. For himself, Hume wished to be remembered as having been, in his earlier years, a pioneer of the credit union movement.
The Social Democratic and Labour Party is a social democratic and Irish nationalist political party in Northern Ireland. The SDLP currently has eight members in the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLAs) and two members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland. It was created as a separate legal entity on 3 May 1921 under the Government of Ireland Act 1920. The new autonomous Northern Ireland was formed from six of the nine counties of Ulster: four counties with unionist majorities – Antrim, Armagh, Down, and Londonderry – and two counties with slight Irish nationalist majorities – Fermanagh and Tyrone – in the 1918 General Election. The remaining three Ulster counties with larger nationalist majorities were not included. In large part unionists, at least in the north-east, supported its creation while nationalists were opposed.
William David Trimble, Baron Trimble, was a Northern Irish politician who was the inaugural First Minister of Northern Ireland from 1998 to 2002, and leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) from 1995 to 2005. He was also Member of Parliament (MP) for Upper Bann from 1990 to 2005 and Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Upper Bann from 1998 to 2007.
Seamus Frederick Mallon was an Irish politician who served as deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from 1998 to 2001 and Deputy Leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) from 1979 to 2001. He also sat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom from 1986 to 2005.
Marjorie "Mo" Mowlam was a British Labour Party politician. She was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Redcar from 1987 to 2001 and served in the Cabinet of Tony Blair as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
The 1998 Northern Ireland Assembly election took place on Thursday, 25 June 1998. This was the first election to the new devolved Northern Ireland Assembly. Six members from each of Northern Ireland's eighteen Westminster Parliamentary constituencies were elected by single transferable vote, giving a total of 108 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs).
James Martin Pacelli McGuinness was an Irish republican politician and statesman for Sinn Féin and a leader within the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) during The Troubles. He was the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from May 2007 to January 2017.
David Ervine was a Northern Irish Ulster Loyalist and politician who served as leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) from 2002 to 2007 and was also a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLA) for Belfast East from 1998 to 2007. During his youth Ervine was a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and was imprisoned for possessing bomb-making equipment. Whilst in jail he became convinced of the benefits of a more political approach for loyalism and became involved with the PUP. As a leading PUP figure, Ervine helped to deliver the loyalist ceasefire of 1994.
The Northern Ireland peace process includes the events leading up to the 1994 Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire, the end of most of the violence of the Troubles, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and subsequent political developments.
Michael Anthony Stone is a British former militant who was a member of the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland. He was convicted of three counts of murder committed at an IRA funeral in 1988. In 2000 he was released from prison on licence under the Good Friday Agreement. In November 2006, Stone was charged with attempted murder of Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, having been arrested attempting to enter the parliament buildings at Stormont while armed. He was convicted and sentenced in 2008 to a further 16 years' imprisonment, before being released on parole in 2021.
Reginald Norman Morgan Empey, Baron Empey,, best known as Reg Empey, is a Northern Irish politician who served as the acting First Minister of Northern Ireland in 2001. He was the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) from 2005 to 2010 and served as chairman of the party from 2012 to 2019. Empey was a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLA) for East Belfast from 1998 to 2011.
The Executive of the 1st Northern Ireland Assembly was, under the terms of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, a power-sharing coalition.
The first minister and deputy first minister of Northern Ireland are the joint heads of government of Northern Ireland, leading the Northern Ireland Executive and with overall responsibility for the running of the Executive Office. Despite the titles of the two offices, the two positions have the same governmental power, resulting in a duumvirate; the deputy first minister, is not subordinate to the first minister. Created under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, both were initially nominated and appointed by members of the Northern Ireland Assembly on a joint ticket by a cross-community vote, under consociational principles. That process was changed following the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, such that the first minister now is nominated by the largest party overall, and the deputy first minister is nominated by the largest party from the next largest community block.
The Good Friday Agreement (GFA) or Belfast Agreement is a pair of agreements signed on 10 April 1998 that ended most of the violence of the Troubles, an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland since the late 1960s. It was a major development in the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s. It is made up of the Multi-Party Agreement between most of Northern Ireland's political parties, and the British–Irish Agreement between the British and Irish governments. Northern Ireland's present devolved system of government is based on the agreement.
The 2005 United Kingdom general election in Northern Ireland was held on 5 May 2005 and all 18 seats in Northern Ireland were contested. 1,139,993 people were eligible to vote, down 51,016 from the 2001 general election. 63.49% of eligible voters turned out, down 5.1 percentage points from the last general election.
Raymond P Watson is a visual artist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He lives and works in Cushendall, in the Glens of Antrim. He studied Media Studies at the University of Ulster, obtaining a BA hons., and Master of Philosophy. He has worked as a Media Studies lecturer at the Belfast Metropolitan College, and worked as a group editor with a local publishing house for a number of years. He has produced artwork since the early 1990s and in 1999 stopped all other work to dedicate his energy to creating art. He has a substantial body of work influenced heavily by the recent political conflict in Northern Ireland. He is an eclectic artist who creates work in any media, commonly bronze, wood, clay, metals, paints cement, audio visual installations and most recently has produced a number of highly original soundscapes.
Local elections were held in Northern Ireland on 18 May 2023. The elections were delayed by two weeks to avoid overlapping with the coronation of King Charles III. Following the elections, Sinn Féin became the largest party in local government for the first time. It also marked the first time that nationalist parties had garnered a greater share of the vote than unionist parties, however, despite this, there were more unionist councillors elected than nationalists.