Hard pact to follow: the Good Friday Agreement at 25

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Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Ora Ogumbi.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

As the COVID 19 pandemic raged, one of the biggest challenges for pharmaceuticals and governments was figuring out how to safely get vaccines to all corners of the world. Finally, some new inventions are about to make that process a little bit easier.

And there are really quite a lot of works by Pablo Picasso out there. And the market for them has been frothy for decades. But that market may well be cooling, not because buyers like the art less, but because of what they think of the artists ways. First up though, President Joe Biden is on his way to Northern Ireland today to mark an anniversary that's not only close to his own heart, but that also has strong connections to his predecessor's work. 25 years ago this week, a deal known as the Good Friday Agreement at last brought a period known as the Troubles to an end. A careful power sharing agreement to accommodate unionists who were mostly Protestants and who wanted Northern Ireland to remain as a part of the United Kingdom, and the overwhelmingly Catholic nationalists who wanted it to be a part of the Republic of Ireland. For three decades, tensions between the two camps made life in Northern Ireland one of ceaseless violence. Bombs regularly went off in the streets. Thousands of people were killed, either because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or because they were targeted and gunned down.

It was in 1976 that 10 Protestant workers were murdered on their way home.

After emptying their magazines into the chapel.

The men stepped outside, reloaded, and began again.

That violence ripped apart families and left dead.

So I just followed the trail of blood around the side of the barn along here. And as I come around the corner, my father was lying dead.

Sammy Heenan was just 12 years old when his father was killed in cold blood by the Irish Republican army or the ira, a paramilitary nationalist group.

The image of My father lying dead. All that I had in life was absolutely devastating.

The Good Friday Agreement struck among the warring political parties and brokered with American help, but brought that horrific era to a close. Peter Sheridan remembers clearly how important that moment was.

Yes, well, I was a police officer in Northern Ireland at the time, and I spent 32 years in the police service at the worst of the time of the Troubles. Of course, like everybody else, every other right thinking person, there was a sense of relief that maybe the future wasn't going to be about bombs and bullets on the television every morning or in the newspapers, and that maybe for the first time, well, almost in my lifetime, that the relationship would change.

The pact brought a new government structure to Belfast. Northern Ireland would remain in the United Kingdom, but retain power over crucial policies, including health and education. The Republic of Ireland agreed to remove its territorial claim on Northern Ireland from its constitution. And the agreement, ratified on both sides of the border, specified that if a majority of the population wanted to join a united Ireland, they could do so in a referendum. It did. That is to say exactly what it set out to do. It's been used ever since as a model for statecraft. But 25 years have passed and by now that model has a few cracks in it.

There is much to be celebrated about the Good Friday Agreement. It has brought an end to 30 years of carnage. There are still a few attacks, but they're nothing like what was happening during that period. There were more than three and a half thousand people killed during the Troubles.

And Sam McBride is the Northern Ireland editor for the Belfast Telegraph and a contributor to the Economist.

But the hope of 1998 now seems pretty distant. Northern Ireland's politics are stuck, and part of that is because of the type of government which the agreement put in place.

And what type of government is that? What do you mean?

It's a system of compulsory power sharing between Unionists and Nationalists. It's a system which is replete with mutual vetoes for each of those sides. So it's like having Joe Biden and Donald Trump shackled together with no choice in the matter, forced to govern in coalition that, unsurprisingly, doesn't deliver a terribly coherent or responsive form of government. It's very inclusive, but it's also very cumbersome.

So, aside from an abatement in the violence and this cumbersome style of government, what else has the Good Friday Agreement done for Northern Ireland?

There are lots of small things that people might not notice, but taken together, they have transformed the way people live their lives. In Northern Ireland, there is, for instance, lots more glass in buildings around Belfast. There aren't bombs going off to ruin facade. The city's cuisine has been transformed. There are now 18 Belfast restaurants in the Michelin guide. It has changed who people fall in love with in Northern Ireland. People are coming into the city center. They're mixing in nightclubs, they're mixing in pubs and bars and restaurants. And so this is a society which, from top to bottom, both in terms of high politics and in terms of how people go about their daily lives, is completely changed from what went before during the Troubles.

But it's not as if those tensions from the Troubles are entirely gone either.

No, this is still a deeply sectarian society. People live mostly in very religiously divided neighborhoods. They live with people who vote like them, who go to the same church, if they still go to church. There was a time when to be Catholic was to be nationalist and to be Protestant was simply to be Unionist. These old labels are still being used, but it's no longer anything like as clear as it once was. And to this day, Britain's MI5 security service still devotes 20% of its resources to Northern Ireland. It recently raised the terror threat level in Northern Ireland, which now comes mostly from dissident Republican and loyalist groups, to severe, meaning that there is now a high likelihood of an attack. So that is the background reality of life in Northern Ireland. But people in 1998 would have taken that because it's so much better than what went before.

So we've talked about how the agreement changed the structure of the government and in turn has changed the structure of people's lives. What about Ireland's economy?

Well, in simple terms, peace obviously has been good for Northern Ireland's economy. If the place is not going up in flames, that is good for investment. There was a period during the Troubles where the ira, the Irish Republican army, was actually quite deliberately targeting businesses. They wanted to wreck the economy. They were quite open about that. And so getting rid of that is obviously good. However, it's nowhere near as good as people thought it would be. In 1998, the Northern Ireland GDP has grown by about 43%. That's quite significant. But it's behind the rest of the uk. It's also far further behind the rest of the island of Ireland. And of course, at the time of the Good Friday Agreement, both the Irish Republic and the UK were in the European Union. That meant that while there was still a border there, there was a currency border, there was a regulatory border. It was something which was increasingly being blurred. And that all changed with Brexit.

How so? What changed?

Well, the Good Friday Agreement had at its heart this really delicate equilibrium, and that was disturbed by the agreement. It meant that Northern Ireland remained British. The border was a reality. It was an international frontier. But it didn't look like one, it didn't feel like one. People traded across it, they moved across it. It was a line in the tarmac and nothing more. There were no checks. Suddenly, by leaving the European Union, that meant a border had to go somewhere. If it went at the land border, there was a concern that that could re violence, that that could lead to people from the Irish Republican side attacking it. Ultimately, Britain decided no, they would put it in the Irish Sea. They would move a border between Britain and Northern Ireland. That would make it harder for people to trade between Britain and Northern Ireland. And that eased the nationalist dismay at Brexit because there was no land border. But it meant that Unionists were then angry at what had happened. That led to Northern Ireland's devolved government collapsing more than a year ago when the dup, the Democratic Unionist, walked out in protest. Civil servants are still there. They keep public services running. There are still hospitals and schools running. But they cannot change laws. They can't take key decisions in areas such as health and education. And that's a massive problem.

And amid all of this, in this anniversary week, President Joe Biden is showing up. Why do you suppose it is that he is coming to mark the anniversary?

Well, Joe Biden has a very long affinity with Ireland. His ancestors come from the island, and during the Troubles, he took a keen interest in Northern Ireland. I was recently going through some government files which had been declassified in Belfast, and I came across a letter which Joe Biden had written as a senator in 1989, welcoming the passage of fair employment legislation. So this is someone who has been involved and has stayed involved. America more widely had a very important role in the peace process. Bill Clinton was heavily involved in trying to cajole the parties towards an agreement in 1998. And so Joe Biden will want to mark the significance of what happened 25 years ago. But the inability of the government set up by that agreement to function is now something of an embarrassment. And presidents don't tend to want to be associated with embarrassments. So that might explain why President Biden is expected to spend just a few hours in Belfast and then head south and spend several days in the Irish Republic.

And that will largely wind down this anniversary week. But what about the next 25 years of the agreement. How do you see all of this playing out in the long term?

Well, perhaps the most significant change over the last 25 years in structural terms is that there has been this dramatic growth of voters moving from Unionist or Nationalist parties to parties that are centrist, that are not defined by those old labels. There's also a quite concerning move towards romanticization of the bloodshed which happened during the Troubles. That's concerning lots of the people who lived through it. In recent years, there has been an IRA chant that has been heard in crowds of young people at concerts, in bars, even in the dressing room room of the Irish Republic's female football team. And that's something which some of those who were victims of the ira, victims of loyalist paramilitaries, it concerns them that a new generation don't realize what actually happened to human beings during the conflict. The big hope for Irish nationalists is that in 25 years time they will at last have a united Ireland. The border will have gone. What actually happens there will, however, be decided by that group of centrist voters, about 20% now. Who knows what it will be in 25 years time. They are now the constitutional swing voters who will decide the outcome of a future border poll. They didn't exist in 1921 when the border was put in place. They were almost non existent in 1998, neither decisive.

Sam, thanks very much for joining us.

You're very welcome. Thank you.

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Vaccines are one of the most successful and effective technologies ever invented, and they've saved countless lives. But they are only useful when they actually get into a patient, which means getting them to the patient first. But since the dawn of the technology, transporting vaccines across the world has been a tricky task and one that still needs some development today.

In 1796, Edward Jenner used the fresh pus from a person infected with cowpox to inoculate people against smallpox. Smallpox was a huge issue, killing lots and lots of people. And by infecting people with this less deadly variant called cowpox, he was able to protect them against the much more dangerous smallpox. And this was the birth of the first vaccine.

Abby Bertix writes about science for the Economist.

There was one problem with this vaccine though, because it was 1796, there weren't good refrigerators, there weren't good freezers. It was impossible to get this vaccine around from people to people, from country to country, to save people. And it was especially challenging to get the vaccine from Europe because back then it involved a months long boat trip because there were no refrigerators and freezers. The way that you passed vaccine on was using the fresh and infectious pustules of somebody who currently has cowpox.

So how did those all important pustules get to America?

The vaccine chain was literally arm to arm. The vaccine got from Europe to America, from pustule to pustule through a human chain. So they took 22 orphaned boys, put them on a ship and infected them pair by pair. So they would start with two boys infected with cowpox. When the pustules developed on their arms, the doctor would lance the pustules, infect the next two boys, and then so on and so on. At the very, very end, when they finally got to America, there were two boys that had fresh pustules ready to be distributed as a vaccine.

Okay, this sounds like a pretty dark method of transporting inoculations. I assume it was replaced pretty quickly.

Yeah. So today, obviously the use of orphans would not really pass any health board reviews or ethics committees, but this concept of a vaccine chain lives on. So right now, most vaccines, especially the MRNA vaccines that we used for Covid, they are preserved through a cold chain, which is basically refrigerators and freezers all the way from manufacturing to the point of delivery. This allows polio vaccines, MRNA vaccines, all of these different kind of vaccines, to get transported to where they're needed. The one issue that we have with cold chains is that often, especially for the COVID vaccines, which require temperatures like negative 60 degrees Celsius, that requires a really intense electrical grid and infrastructure. And not all countries and not all places, especially in rural and very remote regions, have the technical capacity to keep vaccines as cold as they are needed. So right now it's really, really important that we find new ways to stabilize these vaccines and make them last longer at higher temperatures.

So in short, there's no one size fits all solution for all the different vaccines.

Sadly not. There's many different types of viruses out there and there have to be many different types of vaccines to tackle them. Some of the most heat sensitive vaccines are the MRNA vaccines that we have with COVID And that's because what makes these vaccines so powerful? The little MRNA components, they're very fragile. So if they are exposed to heat, even just zero degrees Celsius, they might get damaged, they might denature, they might lose their power. And so the Pfizer vaccine, if it gets above negative 70 for a long period of time, and Moderna needs to be stored below negative 20. MRNA vaccines right now are very versatile. We can kind of print out a solution as soon as we are able to sequence the code of the virus. It's a very quick response. But the fact that they require such cold storage at the moment means that those benefits are offset by those costs, especially if we want a global rollout of vaccines. Last year, the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations, the transnational supercool corporation, put out a call to try to figure out new ways to deliver these types of vaccines.

And how's that search going? Have we finally found a way to make these vaccines more tolerant to high temperatures?

So that coalition called CEPI, they received over 70 proposals so far, and two have looked particularly promising. The first is by a company called 20 Med. The MRNA vaccines are protected using lipid nanoparticles LNP. And this 20 Med proposal is trying to make a new and improved protective shield. These new undisclosed polymers supposedly protect the RNA from degradation until it arrives at its target. And this would allow the vaccine to be stored at only 2 to 8 degrees Celsius, which is basically just a regular fridge. The second approach, it is by a company called Vaxis. And what they have is, rather than a needle, they have a patch with dried vaccine particles on it. And you just stick this patch on your arm, and it has an array of microneedles with all of this dried vaccine on it. And this puts the vaccine in your layer of skin that has a lot of immune cells that's ready to respond. And because this vaccine is dried, it means that it can be stored at room temperature, it could be refrigerated, and it could even theoretically just be shipped using the normal mail service.

Do you think these approaches will work and how important will these innovations be if they do so?

The Vaxis technology, the patch is particularly exciting because it means that we don't necessarily need as many trained vaccinators, and it removes that anxiety that comes with a lot of people from being jabbed with a needle. The 20 MET approach keeps things as they currently are, just makes it better. Both approaches are pretty new. They're still early in the stages of development, but it's very promising, and I definitely think that one of these technologies will end up working.

Abby, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Orey.

The spanish artist Pablo Picasso died 50 years ago this week. The passing of not only one of the most prominent artists of the 20th century, but also one of the most prolific and across all kinds of media, 25,000 pieces all told. That abundance led to a thriving market for his works, with far more of them changing hands in Britain and America than any other artists. But that market may be about to turn.

Since 1999, prices of Picasso's work at auction has grown twice as fast as the broader market for 20th century art. It's been enormously successful.

Diameter Rocco is the economist's culture correspondent.

The most expensive Picasso was sold for about $180 million, reportedly by a saudi collector in London to a former prime minister of Qatar. But in the midst of what one commentator calls the Picasso palooza, around the 50th anniversary of the artist's death, Dealers and auction houses around the world are very nervous that Picasso's time may be up.

Why are they nervous?

One real indication is Picasso's waning influence on creators today. A critic that I spoke to made the point that artists, more than anyone, are the people who propel the artists of the past into the future. And according to him, Picasso just isn't as popular or as influential, which may be more important as he once was. Few modern artists seem to cite Picasso as an inspiration. Perhaps his influence has been completely absorbed into art history and there's no more to be said about him. You're more likely to hear them talk about Marcel duchamp, Philip guston, or almost always now, Louise bourgeois far more than Picasso.

And so what's changed if he was on such a bull run, it's possible.

That Picasso's personal behavior has something to do with it. It just doesn't sit right with today's artists. He two timed his wives. He sired children with different women at once. He caused enormous amount of pain. He seduced maitha es Walter, for example, she who became his mistress and his muse when she was 17 and he was 45 in 1932, he painted her dreaming of sex. He depicted her left cheek and her eye as an erect penis. You don't see it at once, but if you look really carefully, suddenly that comes into focus. And having seen it, you can't unsee it. Nowadays, after metoo, people aren't as willing to separate the art from the artist, Particularly young people and you see the works of other prominent artists, including, for example, Baltus or Salvador Dali, have lost value in the eyes of critics and collectors because of how they acted in private.

At the same time, though, artists do kind of come into and go out of fashion with some irregularity. Do you reckon all this adds up to a definite peak Picasso moment?

Well, Picasso's work is still certainly making money. At one recent auction, Sotheby's offered a sculpture, an illustrated book, Cubist bronze cast, some gravure prints, and several drawings and paintings all by Picasso. The prices of these ranged from under £5,000 to more than £18 million. There was something for every collector, but how long this will go on is another question. Celebration Picasso is an exhibition which will open at the Brooklyn Museum in June, and many dealers and collectors around the world are anxiously waiting to see how it will be received. The museum says it aims to address compelling questions that young, diverse museum audiences raise all the time about the issue of misogyny, masculinity, creativity, and are these essential to genius? Picasso's work electrified the 20th century. It was sexy, it was interesting, it was daring, it was amazing to look at. But there's definitely a sense that somehow he's lost his cool, that the way he treated women, both in his personal life and in his painting, is somehow just not acceptable anymore.

Fiametta, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

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