The consequences of Boris Johnson’s careless Brexit are playing out in Belfast

The most powerful arguments against Brexit were never about trade and tariffs. They were about peace and war, about life and death. One was a general argument centred on the true, founding purpose of the European Union: to ensure that a continent mired in blood for centuries would not descend into conflict again. The other was more specific, peculiar to these islands: that shared membership of the EU had proved to be the key that unlocked peace in Northern Ireland after three decades of murderous pain.

The logic was simple enough. So long as both the UK and Ireland were in the same EU club, the border between them could be blurred, allowing people in the north to identify as British or Irish or both without too much friction. That was the foundation on which the Good Friday agreement, signed 23 years ago tomorrow, was built – a foundation that would be broken if either country were to break from Brussels. Taken together, these were the life-and-death arguments for continued UK membership of the EU, and some tried valiantly to make them. But they were barely heard.

Now, in the hurled petrol bombs and burning buses of west Belfast, comes ominous evidence that the warnings of 2016 were not exaggerated. Of course, violence has many fathers. Some of the areas now in flames are among the most deprived in the UK, with levels of educational attainment especially low. Loyalist communities have long felt left behind and, since the early death of the much-respected David Ervine, lack heavyweight political representation. Jonathan Powell, the former Downing Street chief of staff who was a key broker of the 1998 accord, says that the Democratic Unionist party “may use [the loyalists], but they don’t really care about them”.

There are more immediate causes too. Last month’s decision not to prosecute Sinn Féin officials who had broken Covid restrictions to turn out for the mass funeral of a senior IRA commander looked like a double standard that favoured republicans and therefore – given the zero-sum mindset that lingers in places of conflict – automatically injured loyalists. Add that together with the Easter weekend, the arrival of “white night” longer evenings, kids bored by lockdown and easily egged on by loyalist gang leaders, many of them akin to local mafia bosses up to their neck in organised crime, and the tinder was dry.

Still, that kindling had been in place in years past. The incendiary difference this time is Brexit. From January, Brit