A sad day for Northern Ireland - and the world

It's hard not to heave a wistful sigh at the recent news out of Northern Ireland. 

It really did seem like one of the world's heretofore intractable political quagmires managed to get itself resolved with the Good Friday agreement of 1998 (yes, it really was 23 years ago!) It gave us some hope that other intractable political quagmires - Israel vs Palestine, Catalonia vs Spain, India vs Pakistan, you list them - could also one day be resolved. It hasn't been completely without its challenges, but it has been a reasonably robust accord that has, in the main, put a stop to decades of unrest, violence and acrimony.

Until, that is, Brexit. Yes, a selfish act of chauvinism and hubris on the part of half of the British people (or a few self-indulgent politicians, depending on how you look at it) has thrust Northern Ireland right back into the stone-throwing and Molotov cocktails of the 1970s, except that these are the kids, and even grandkids, of the disaffected youth of the original "Troubles".

Northern Ireland was always going to be a sticking point for Brexit, and the agreed "solution" was never going to be acceptable to all. The best solution Boris Johnson and his Brexit henchmen could negotiate with Europe was to allow free movement of goods across the border with southern Ireland, while conducting checks on goods coming in from the rest of Britain, a solution that, obviously, smacks of betrayal to the Protestant unionists of Northern Ireland. It's less about religion now (possibly a good thing, I supposed) and more about tribal warfare and saving face (definitely not a good thing).

So, like a returning bad penny, here come the criminal gangs and paramilitaries, and the hell-raisers who just like a good fight, all over again. People will say that it was always an intractable political quagmire, and something was always going to re-awaken it. But to think that a totally inadvisable and unnecessary decision to leave Europe was the catalyst... A sad day indeed. I hope David Cameron is turning in his political grave.