How I named the Good Friday Agreement

Here’s a little-known fact: I named the Good Friday Agreement. Or to be more strictly accurate, I was one of the people initially involved in naming it.

The 1998 Northern Ireland peace deal - claimed to have saved more than 2400 lives - has been in the news recently because of its influence on the new 'Windsor framework', the post-Brexit deal which sets Northern Ireland's trade rules.

Here’s the story.

Back in those days, I was working as a duty editor at Teletext, and I was on duty that Easter weekend. At that time, before the explosion of the internet, Teletext was a big deal. Our service on ITV and Channel 4 had more than 25 million viewers, relying on us for news, sport, weather, TV listings, travel news, lottery numbers and all kinds of entertainment.

Press newsrooms in London and around the country usually had a TV which was tuned to Teletext continuously, knowing that we'd alert them to any big, breaking stories.

(Note for younger readers: teletext was a sort of prequel to the internet, a service made up of pages of electronic text which you could access on your TV. There were services in many countries, but the UK had two: our commercial one and Ceefax on the BBC.)

One of our features was a viewers’ telephone poll on a news issue of the day. And on this day there could only be one poll question: “Do you back the Stormont agreement?”

Because that’s what it was called just then: the Stormont Agreement.

The poll was all set up and just about to go to air when I took a call from a viewer. I don’t know his name – I seem to remember that it was a man who phoned fairly frequently, but who never gave his name. ( Marcus Man might know it, though?)

This chap suggested that since we all wanted peace – and indeed, we did – we should think of a better name for the deal.

After all, did 'storm-mont' really suggest the best chance of peace for a generation? Nowadays the research is clear that when people hear a word, at some level they process all the possible meanings it could have. Back then, we just knew that metaphors made meaning, and that they really, really mattered. 'Storm' didn't sound like a great place to start a lasting peace deal.

There were a couple of other factors, too. And would connecting this deal to the fairly chequered history of Stormont itself make the locals look favourably on it in their forthcoming referendum? And did it really work as a name: there had been previous Stormont Agreements about other things, hadn’t there?

Once the obvious alternative name struck us, with its embedded hint that the deal was 'good', the decision made itself.

So up on the service the poll question went: 'Do you back the Good Friday Agreement?'

That name instantly appeared on TV screens. It was picked up by the Press Association, who operated Teletext’s news service as well as providing copy to national, international and regional news organisations.

And the rest, as they say, is history.