Northern Ireland: Campbell (St Mary’s Univ.), “election, an epoch-marking moment. But Brexit could reopen old wounds”

Born in Northern Ireland, just close to that border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, Francis Campbell, a Catholic, a former British ambassador to the Holy See and the deputy principal of St Mary’s University in Twickenham – London, believes that, after last weekend’s election, his country is now experiencing an epoch-making moment. “The next three weeks’ negotiations aiming to find a new independent government for Northern Ireland will be very difficult”, he explains to SIR. “Brexit is affecting the nationalist public opinion, that part of the Northern Irish population that would like to join the Republic of Ireland more than one might think. Even during the ‘Troubles’, the violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants that lasted from the late Seventies to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, there were no border checks on immigrants and, after Brexit, people will very likely be stopped for the first time”. That border laid down in 1921 could reopen old wounds, and this explains the “electoral success of Sinn Fein, the most extreme Republican party that fights to reunify the Irish island under Dublin and that for the very first time has become the relative majority party, and the decline of Sdlp, the other, more moderate Catholic party to which we owe today’s peace”.