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.