Why was Northern Ireland such a tricky issue in the Brexit discussions?

Devoir d’Anglais :

Why was Northern Ireland such a tricky issue in the Brexit discussions?

Northern Ireland has been for decades a tricky issue between Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Ireland, even when the region was governed by the United Kingdom, wanted autonomy and independence, due to the fact that most people in Ireland are Catholics, unlike the Protestant majority in Great Britain. In 1914, just before World War One, a law was passed to allow Ireland to govern itself, but after the war, tensions came back with the Irish War of Independence that ended in 1921 with the creation of the Irish Free State. The country was considered like Dominion until 1937, which is a state of semi-independency, like Canada or Australia nowadays.

The Irish Civil War starts in 1922 betweens the Anti-Treaty Force, also known as the IRA, Irish Republican Army, and the Pro-Treaty Force, the military supported by the British Army. In Northern Ireland, where most people were Pro-Treaty and descendants of Protestants colons but with a big minority of Catholics and Anti Treaty, the situation took more time to calm down than the rest of Ireland, where the Civil War ended in 1923. Indeed, some troubles occurred long after 1923, like the event of Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, where the British Army killed 14 civilians protesting against the internment in Derry.

With the integration of Ireland and the United Kingdom in the European Community in 1973, and then the creation of the European Single Market in 1993, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland became a flexible space between the two countries, as they share a lot of economical and market agreements.

In 2016, a referendum asked Britain people if they wanted their country to leave the European Union. 51,9% of them said yes, and the divorce (still not done) sounded like a threat of a new civil war in Northern Island. Indeed, the Britain Parliament didn’t decide yet of the new form of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, made a plan that could cut Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK with an economic border in the Irish Sea. As the decision is not yet made, this uncertainty caused a lot of troubles in the region: a journalist was killed in Derry in April 2019 and the police intercepted a bomb in Craigavon, Northern Ireland.

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