Good Friday disagreement

The relationship between the UK and the Republic of Ireland has ‘reached a hunger-strike low’, says a new study by an academic from Trinity College, Dublin. ‘Relations have not been as tense since the early 1980s and political rhetoric that had vanished by the 1990s has re-emerged,’ the paper grimly concludes.

The fragility of relations between Britain and Ireland is hard-wired into me. Having grown up ‘London-Irish’ in the 1970s and 1980s, all I ever wanted was for the two countries that define my ethnicity to get on.

The Maze Prison hunger strikes of 1981 and subsequent Republican bombings in London and Brighton — where, lest we forget, the British prime minister was almost assassinated — were intensely distressing for this bookish, news-obsessed Catholic boy.

By the early 1990s, I’d learned to handle the name-calling and argue my corner, but as the ‘mainland operation’ ramped up, so did the anguish. That’s why the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and subsequent Anglo-Irish rapprochement means so much — not just to those in Northern Ireland freed from the threat of daily violence, but to millions of exiles like me, Irish people born and raised elsewhere in the UK.

I don’t need an academic study to tell me Brexit threatens all that. As someone who physically embodies the binding blood and cultural ties between Britain and Ireland, I’m regularly attacked in the Irish media for having voted to leave.

I understand, to my fingertips, that Brexit is a serious irritation in the land of my fathers. The UK accounts for €1 billion of Irish trade each week. Around half of the Republic’s beef, timber and construction material exports are sold in the UK. More than two-thirds of exported goods use Britain as a ‘land bridge’, crossing the Irish Sea, then travelling by road before leaving southern and eastern UK ports, headed for the EU and global markets.