Breaking the Peace
After the UK voted to leave Europe, Northern Ireland’s fragile relationship with both its past and its neighbour is once again to the fore.
The imperfect but generally stable peace process in Northern Ireland has trundled on since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and Islamic fundamentalism and right-wing extremism are now usually regarded as more serious threats to British security than Irish republicanism. It has thus been quite easy over the past few years to forget just how devastating the conflict we still euphemistically refer to as ‘the Troubles’ actually was. In strictly military terms, the war in Northern Ireland could accurately be regarded as a low-intensity conflict, yet between 1969 and the Provisional IRA ceasefire of 1994, over 3,500 people lost their lives as a direct result of violence in Northern Ireland or emanating from the region.