Peace in Northern Ireland now feels more fragile than ever – but Brexit risks losing it altogether

It took the murder of a journalist, Lyra McKee, and the public shaming of the political classes at her funeral to re-establish even the most tentative dialogue about securing peace in Northern Ireland.

It should not have been this way, and it is a grim indictment of politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea that the political institutions that delivered peace were so badly neglected for so long. For the disturbances in the Creggan, in which McKee lost her life to a gunman, the recent letter bomb campaign and other thwarted terror plots serve as a warning that a new generation of hardline Republican men of violence are ready and willing to resume the Troubles. Some were not even born when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, with the firsthand memories of three decades of murder and mayhem fading for a younger generation.

The end of the power sharing arrangements the Good Friday Agreement established has created a vacuum into which some old political doctrines have swarmed. There are plenty of historical grievances to yield fresh hatred. The collapse of the Stormont administration is used by dissident armed Republicans to prove that democratic politics in the six counties are at best a sham. As before, Republican terror will provoke Loyalist retaliation.

So here we are again, back to “talks about talks”, as so often in Northern Ireland’s unstable past. The tensions between Sinn Fein and the DUP, which ended the 20 year experiment in power sharing, remain. Recognition of the Irish language, LGBT+ rights, the personal position of former first minister Arlene Foster after a financial scandal – all still intractable. But, in themselves, politics more or less as usual.

What has made the atmosphere far more toxic is Brexit. For during the last two years it has become apparent that Brexit is incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement and peace in Ireland. The variations of Brexit – hard or soft – only vary the degree to which Brexit will necessitate border controls. They will, as a simple matter of political reality, beget violence. That does not give the New IRA a veto on Brexit, but it does mean that pro-Brexit parties including the DUP need to face up to what life will be like if they get their way. The EU and the Irish government have dismissed the fantasy of technological solutions to the problem. They do not exist.

So the grim truth about the future of the province is that even if Sinn Fein and the DUP went back to work at Stormont today, and settled their differences, Brexit would create a vastly more difficult issue for the parties to settle. It has raised fundamental questions about identity and revived nationalist passions that had been tranquillised by power sharing. Sinn Fein are looking towards a new border poll and Irish unity in time for the Irish independence centenary in 2022, with a gradual polling trend towards ending partition.

Never let it be forgotten either that the province voted by 56 per cent to Remain in the EU. It may then be that Brexit is incompatible with Northern Ireland remaining in the UK. Whatever the cross party talks in Belfast achieve, they are unlikely to solve the Irish border conundrum.