Mike Vickers' Blog

You may enjoy the Derry Girls on Channel Four and there’s a good article in the Guardian at:

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/mar/17/saoirse-monica-jackson-derry-girls-interview-series-two

But there are two sides to Derry and Londonderry, which are the same place.

Ireland North and South are at the centre of the Brexit ‘debate’ and the border which currently separates them. Of course, this was always going to be so and how Cameron ignored it (or apparently ignored it) when choosing to hold the Brexit Referendum only he can answer. The ‘Troubles’ were with us for thirty years only ending with The Good Friday Agreement. Since then the North and the South have started to work together and the physical border between them has largely been removed; but there remains simmering at the community level; a journey across the North would reveal Union Jacks fluttering on the lampposts in the North.

So Brexit, even though there was a majority vote in Northern Ireland to remain, was going to be ‘a cause of concern’ .  Wolud the border be reesatblished and what would the effect beon the separation North and South; would te catholicts in the North want to be united with the South. Only last week the Bloody Sunday enquiry recommended that only on solder be prosecuted for the shooting in Londonderry in 1972.

For a good exposition on the collision between Brexit and Ireland read Patrick Cockburn in this week’s Independent.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-bloody-sunday-boris-johnson-dup-theresa-may-northern-ireland-a8825286.html#comments

Cockburn is scathing of the interference by such fools as Boris Johnson leading to the possibility of further Bloody Sunday’s in the future.

The casual reader may thing this is a ‘local’ matter within the UK and possibly Southern Ireland (Eire) but the Bloody Sunday report this week has been taken up by the New York Times and the Washington Post.