A new deal for Northern Ireland?

When the Good Friday Agreement aka Belfast Agreement was negotiated in April 1998 the emphasis was on getting the various paramilitary organizations to give up their weapons in exchange for a share of power in provincial and local government in Northern Ireland. Small parties, like the loyalist Ulster Democratic Party and the Progressive Unionist Party that represented the loyalist paramilitaries UDA and UVF respectively, were over-represented in the 1996 election that served to create the parties to the talks. The idea was to be as inclusive as possible. Now five years after the agreement was finally bedded down in 2007, many residents of Northern Ireland think that the agreement created an inefficient monster. The only real changes to the agreement were made in late 2006 at the resort of St. Andrews in eastern Scotland in order to allow the Democratic Unionist Party to claim it was signing up to a new agreement, but this was mere tinkering.