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Bear with me, but I feel like what the Brexit debacle has done is highlight how unacquainted people within UK & indeed, the South, are with Northern Ireland. Maybe I'm just being precious, but I feel that we aren't a normal society. We have paramilitaries, segregated schools 1/
We had a conflict here for 40 years (and more) and people don't talk about it. We've people who don't ever mention what happened to them. People who get nervous when alarms go off in shops. People who still close the curtains & then turn the lights on 2/
There is no collective way to talk, about the utterly unimaginable trauma and hurt or to commemorate as a whole community. We have people injured in conflict who've STILL no pension. We have paramilitaries coercing communities 3/
We've separated housing, leisure facilities. Separate schools. People who vote not for a party they think represents them, but to keep "the others" out. Where people still ask where you went to school, to you know, ascertain your religion. 4/
And what Brexit has done is torn away the fig leaf of supposed normality. What are seeing is that NI is still very much a place divided, a place unreconciled. We still don't know who we are. We stopped fighting, but we still eye each other suspiciously. 5/
We fooled some into thinking we were ok and had it sorted, so why would the UK understand the truly devastating impact of Brexit on our uneasy "getting to know" each other when we were fooling ourselves? Of course they should have known that Brexit would be damaging 6/
But, we had it all sorted, right? NI seems ok? The utter dereliction of successive UK govts towards NI is inexcusable, but we like to put on a show here that we're all friends really. We need to have serious conversations 7/
About why so few kids go to integrated schools, why we live apart, why we have paramilitaries & transgenerational trauma is taking so many lives. We need to confront our painful past and present. This pretence is doing no one any favours.Apart from those who want to keep us apart
These are difficult and painful conversations, but they won't go away in new or even continued constitutional arrangement. These issues are going nowhere. We owe it to ourselves to start dealing with them. We owe it to those who need our help.
