The Northern Ireland elections could break the Union

Phillip Brett was just nine years old the night a neighbour called to say his brother, Gavin, had been shot. Their father raced through the streets of their Belfast estate, arriving just in time to cradle his eldest son as he died. The teenager had been celebrating a friend’s birthday at the local Gaelic football club when he was gunned down by a loyalist gang looking for a Catholic to kill.

But they got it wrong – Gavin had been raised Protestant, their parents having married across the sectarian lines that once divided Northern Ireland, with friends from all sides of the mixed community they lived in. Standing as a candidate for the unionist DUP in next month’s assembly elections in Belfast, Brett says he got into politics ‘to ensure no family and no community has to go through what we went through’. Now though, two decades on, he fears the tension that led to his brother’s murder could once again return.

Over the past few years, the question of a border poll to determine whether Northern Ireland remains a part of the UK or joins a United Ireland has gone from a fringe pipe dream to one at the fore of political discussion.