Will Brexit break the Good Friday Accord and bring violence back to the Emerald Isle?
Most Americans forget Northern Ireland ‘s Protestant and Catholic communities are separated by walls. The gates of which are locked at night.
Let me invite you to listen to the remarks of Jonathan Powell who was the chief negotiator for the Good Friday Accord and he says Boris Johnson’s Brexit can be expected to damage the Northern Ireland settlement.
Powell says quote, “I think they are taking big risks with the peace process, I think they’re probably doing so from a position of ignorance. Boris Johnson and the house of commons made clear that he doesn’t really understand what he has agreed for Northern Ireland, he certainly doesn’t understand the implications of that. I wish there was someone in the government making that point, but almost none of them have any real knowledge of Northern Ireland.”
Brexit as it is presently constituted if effectuated is completely illegal so why pray tell do tell isn't this issue before the courts either in the UK or in the EU? Clearly Brexit is in violation of the Good Friday Accord, as it seeks under the withdrawal agreement about 2 weeks away to put what may only be described as a hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. Therein upsetting all of the Northern Irish loyalists, who have signed on to the Good Friday Accord, to which they look to for protection. So where is the outcry of Irish America?
Where is the outcry of the Congress of the United States? Imagine for one moment that we in the United States pick a state for matters of political expedience, and decide to kick it out of the Union, say for example Maine. So that now if you are going to visit your family or friends in Maine and you are going to go there for vacation or school or any purpose at all, you now have to have a passport. And all of the businesses in Maine in order to do business in the rest of the United States will face tariffs. So many of them would be quite concerned about bankruptcy. Ah but now here comes the rub, Maine can join Canada, because after all they have had a long history of being very friendly with their neighbors in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, being inter-married and having families across border. The same thing goes for Quebec. They should be re-united with their friends and family, and that would be just fine, in fact that would be spiffy. Because after all in 1776 a large number of people in Maine were actually loyalists of the Crown which has since devolved into the dominion of Canada. Of course who were they cheering on in the war of 1812.
So the real question is why isn't the American and international press and the political structures of the Congress up in arms about this? Why is it so under-reported almost to the point of being well frankly ignored. Don' we care about democracy anymore! When we just sit by and watch and say and do nothing as people are having their US citizenship taken away.
Of course yes I almost forgot they will be hopefully gaining Canadian citizenship, but before all of this happens shouldn't we ask them if they want to leave the United States and if they want to give up their US citizenship or do we just kick them out take their US citizenship and say nothing, and go back to watching entertainment television. Surely it's been said in order for evil to triumph all that is required is for good people to do nothing. So what is it fellow Americans that we are doing. Are we discussing it? Well if so I look forward to reading your comments below, because when a major American ally who has received hundreds of billions of our tax dollars decides to kick out of its country millions of its own citizens without an election or judicial notice or anything at all, if we don't say anything, if there is no international outcry or even a thoughtful discussion then never mind the British or should I say the English, then who are we? Who have we become? Where is our press, where are our politicians on the Irish question.
Don't get me wrong, this is not an article about whether or not the island of Ireland should be united or not into one nation. There are many good articles on that subject matter both pro and con. If you are interested go read one of them. But this isn't such an article at all. This is an article instead that asks a question that no one seems to be asking and that is why aren't we in the United States and in the international community discussing this behavior that we see in Whitehall. This begs the question why are they making this decision in London, isn't this a decision that the Irish people should be making or not in their own referendum?
The Congress of the United States has voted on all kinds of symbolic political issues to make important political statements. Why don't they hold a vote on this issue taking place in Ireland. After all there are many millions of Americans who proudly from ancestry hail from the Emerald Isle. Don't get me wrong this isn't about the St Patrick Day parade and turning some river green. This is about democracy and human rights, which Brexit seems to have stepped all over, not just on the Irish question but in Scotland. There they have the opposite problem. There a very lively Scottish independence movement wants to leave the United Kingdom and stay in the European Union, but Whitehall and Boris Johnson don't seem to want to let them go. Maybe that is because they have North Sea oil do you think. No of course it couldn't be anything as garish as capitalism driving those politics, as a funny issue in greed. So they want to kick the Irish out but don't want to let the Scottish go.
They also want to step on the rights of EU citizens living in little England, who now soon won't be there under Treaty protections, and precisely the same thing can be said for 1.5 million Brits living in the EU who now are at the mercy of whatever national legislation may be promulgated next, in whatever nation state they find themselves in on the European continent. In the area that is known as the European Union, where it is now up to each individual country's immigration laws to determine what happens to these peoples' lives, their jobs, their homes. While at the same time everyone yells hooray Britannia, let's make Big Ben ring on Brexit day, as part of a celebration of what history will pen as being a day of national shame, and on that day where are we my fellow Americans?
Are we asleep, do we care about human rights? Will we say nothing, will we do nothing, and if so what does that say about us and the value we place on human rights, justice, the rule of law and the conduct of one of America's oldest allies with whom it is said we have a special relationship. It must be very special indeed to have bought our silence. Americans have a proud tradition of speaking out against human rights abuses all over the world. Well with history as our judge, what do we say now....
The fact is since the beginning of Brexit, people in Northern Ireland have been injured and killed already. No one knows what will happen next and / or how much worse this will get. What we do know is that we must learn from the sad history of the troubles, just like we must learn from all history because history has shown that those who don’t learn from it are destined to repeat it. Such it is, such it was, such it will always be.