On your bike | Protect the GFA

ON YOUR BIKE. I have given my good bike away. This marks a defining moment in my life. My good bike sat in the backyard for almost a year. That’s the last time I was out on it. A year ago. It was dawning on me that my cycling days were over except for occassional sorties on a Greenway in some secluded place. But I was reluctant to face up to that. It seemed to me that as long as I held on to my good bike I held on to the possibility of venturing forth on it. Once  it was gone that possibility was gone also. So I hung on. And on. And on. Onus on Irish government to protect GFAHuman rights abuses and inequality were at the core of the Unionist Stormont Regime. Discrimination in employment and housing, the gerrymandering of electoral boundaries under the Unionist One Party state, were embedded in the DNA of Britain’s colonial outpost in Ireland.Consequently, when the Good Friday Agreement came to be negotiated the issues of equality and human rights were central to its provisions. Under these there was to be a Bill of Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was to be incorporated into the law of the North. However, 25 years later there is still no Bill of Rights and the British Tory government has repeatedly said that it intends to get rid of the Human Rights Act which reflects many of the rights provisions made in the GFA.