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Northern Ireland's unfinished business
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Northern Ireland's unfinished business

NORTHERN Ireland remains a horrifically divided society almost thirty years after the power sharing agreement on Good Friday 1998.

Then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who drove that agreement forward and preserved it against stresses afterwards, once provided a simple analysis of the problem at the heart of that division.

There were two communities in Northern Ireland, one of which identified as Irish and one which identified as British.

If you could provide a framework within which each identity was recognised and facilitated then that could be the solution.

There were two communities in Northern Ireland, one of which identified as Irish and one which identified as British. If you could provide a framework within which each identity was recognised and facilitated then that could be the solution.

Give them a constitutional arrangement whereby the majority would decide while, at the same time, the fullest expression of British and Irish identities would be recognised, and then everyone would be happy.

Decades of continuing friction between those communities has proven that analysis to be wrong...

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