 So I just wanted to finish with a couple of points, sort of ironic points about Brexit, as I see them anyway, and I've mentioned these in the book. Brexit was all about taking back control. One of the ironies of Brexit was that it was never really anything to do with Europe. If it had been to do with being a member of the European Union, there would have been a proper debate about what it was like being in the European Union, but it wasn't. Brexit was about immigration, and Brexit was about the internal politics of the Conservative Party. That's essentially what Brexit was, why Brexit was called the way it was, when it was, and why the debates happened the way it did. Brexit gets real on New Year's Eve in just a couple of weeks. The UK leaves the European Union on December 31st this year. And here's another date. Next year in 2021, Northern Ireland will mark its centenary, a big round number. Brexit has jeopardized Northern Ireland's very existence. The Brexit process has complicated political relationships within Northern Ireland and helped destabilize the institutions set up in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. So always more than just a line on a map, the border has become really an existential marker of identity, as well as a reminder of the dark days of violent conflict in the past. Fergal Cochran argues that Brexit is actually the most significant event for Northern Ireland since the partition, and that Brexit is breaking peace in Northern Ireland. Friends, welcome to November's chat and chat at World Boston with Breaking Peace, Brexit and Northern Ireland by Fergal Cochran. I'm Mary Eintema, the president of World Boston. I am pleased to introduce Fergal Cochran, our speaker. He was born and educated in Belfast and has been publishing and teaching on Northern Ireland and wider themes of violent political conflict and peace building for 30 years. He's the author of 10 books and numerous other publications including articles in international peer review journals and chapters in edited book collections. His Northern Ireland, the reluctant piece published by Yale University Press in 2013 was shortlisted for the UART Bigs Memorial Book Prize in 2015, and the second edition of that book, Northern Ireland, the Fragile Piece, will be published by Yale in 2021. Fergal was professor of international conflict analysis at the University of Kent and director of the Conflict Analysis Research Center, or CARK, within the School of Politics and International Relations from 2012 to 2019. He's also held academic appointments at Lancaster University, Ulster University and Queens University Belfast. He's now a senior research fellow of CARK and professor emeritus at the University of Kent. And it's really late, late o'clock where he is past 10, so we're particularly pleased to have him with us tonight. Fergal, welcome to World Boston. Thanks very much, Mary. I'd just like to thank World Boston and for facilitating this and to yourself, Mary, and Elise as well, for all the work that's gone into it. And everybody who has registered to listen to this. So as Mary said, the title of the book is Breaking Piece, Brexit in Northern Ireland. And I just wanted to rather than give you a summary of the whole book, which would exhaust me and you watching, I'm sure. I just picked out some of the main themes from it. Talk a little bit about, I suppose, the arguments surrounding Brexit and why it's particularly important for the peace process in Northern Ireland and for the Good Friday agreement slash Belfast agreement of 1998. I'll also try to connect it in with the recent presidential election and president elected Joe Biden's forthcoming administration. And hopefully I can answer some questions around the edges of all of that as we go along. So the origins of the book were actually on the 23rd of June, 2016, that was the day of the referendum in the United Kingdom, the in-out referendum. So it was a very binary choice. Didn't really ask you for any complexity. Referendums are like that. So is it in or is it out? Are we to leave the European Union or are we to remain? And that was the very blunt choice that people were faced with. And on the 23rd of June, I was actually running or I was going over to Northern Ireland to run a workshop on devolved governments because Northern Ireland was doing a very good job of breaking peace on its own without Brexit. But when Brexit arrived, it was a whole other set of problems. And the picture that you can see in the screen, there's a storm in parliament in Belfast, open in the 1930s. And this was sort of the seat of government from 1921, or not 21, it wasn't created in 1921, but when it was open right up until 1972. And for a lot of people in Northern Ireland from the Catholic nationalist side, it was seen as a venue for their own subjugation and disenfranchisements because they lost every election that was held between 1921 and 1972. And for the Unionist community, it was their seat of government. You know, it was the focus of attention and it was a majority rule of parliament. And the figure that you can see in the foreground there is Sir Edward Carson, very well-known Unionist leader from the origins of the homeroom movement. So we went over on the 23rd of June after we voted, we flew over to Belfast and we had this, we talked about our program the next day and we were a bit worried about, we had a session on Brexit in the afternoon but we thought it's probably going to be a Romanian outcome. So, you know, what's there gonna be to talk about? It's gonna be the status quo, you know, on you go. So we didn't get worried because the next morning at breakfast, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom had resigned, the UK had voted to leave the EU. And this is when for me sitting there in the workshop, I realized what a meteor had just landed on us because it hit Northern Ireland like a bolt from the blue. Everybody really expected Remain to win and that was the same in Great Britain as well. So once it was a lead vote, it was a bit like a horror film when you see the camera director sort of suddenly, the camera suddenly pulls away, you know, when you sort of the screechy music starts it was a bit like that because all of a sudden the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic became something else. It became the frontier of the European Union with the United Kingdom. So in other words, the Irish Republic wasn't just the Irish Republic anymore, it was a frontier of the EU to or it would be the frontier of the EU to a non-member state of the European Union. And of course borders in Northern Ireland had been a major issue. Which side of the border are you on? Which side of the border are you living on? So that was immediately recognized as a problem with the people who were living in Northern Ireland. And so in some ways Brexit actually happened in Northern Ireland on the 24th of June and there was a lot of the sort of discussions in Great Britain about when will Brexit happen? But for a lot of people living in Northern Ireland it happened on the 24th of June, 2016 because they immediately provided it pushed identity politics back on to the front of the agenda. Are you British or are you Irish? Are you in the EU or are you living it? These sorts of binary absolutes were once again back on the agenda and the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process and sort of muddied the waters. It allowed us to agree to differ about where we're actually going and say, well, it's the people of Northern Ireland can decide that in the future. The consent of the people of Northern Ireland can determine that down the line. But the problem was that the ambiguities that surrounded the peace process, referendums are very bad at ambiguities and peace processes and diplomacy and negotiations all about ambiguities. If you try and get an absolute win, you're gonna feel. And peace agreements and negotiations are all about trying to massage that zero sum equation of your identity. Where is the sovereignty lying? Are you Irish? Are you British? And of course the Good Friday Agreement allowed us to be both. It allowed us to be Irish and it allowed us to be British and it allowed us to be Irish and British. And of course the referendum sort of drove a wedge through that thing. So I think that this date, the Brexit date the 23rd of June, 2016 is up there as one of these iconic dates in the chronology of Northern Ireland. And I think it bookends partition very nicely and we're having the centenary next year which has again become an issue some people want to celebrate 100 years of Northern Ireland. Some people don't want to celebrate that at all. So it's certainly up there with 1921 when Northern Ireland was created, 1972 when this majority rule parliament was suspended by London. 1998 when we established a power sharing administration between Nationalist Union. So that building that you can see in the slide there there's no power sharing administration with both Unionists and Nationalists taking part in it. And then we've got 2016 and of course we've got 2021 next year. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about the past because in Northern Ireland as you probably know if you know anything about Northern Ireland the past and the present are intertwined indelibly. We can never quite get away from our history. Somebody once said that our history is always in front of us in Northern Ireland which is quite a good way of putting it. You should never quite get away from it or at least people use using history for their own political ends. So I grew up in Belfast in the 1970s and this is a place where territoriality and borders were very clear. When you went into Belfast at the centre you didn't just sort of drift in you had to go through a turnstile. You had to be searched. Your bag would be searched. There were soldiers with weapons there for security purposes asking you what your name was, where you were going, why you were going there. But in the context of the sort of masking COVID debate in the United States where people are talking about their freedom you imagine sort of saying well you can't actually walk down that street tell me why you're going down that street nevermind whether you've got a mask on or not or I won't let you down that street because I've decided that I don't want to let you go down there because you have security risk. These sorts of issues were very visceral in the 1970s when I was growing up. But of course these wire meshes, searches, questions were there to try and catch the people who were bombing the city and put a ring of steel around Belfast and so on. But you didn't just drift along you knew very well where you were and you had to explain why you were there quite frequently and you felt you were lucky to actually get down the street and there wouldn't be a bomb explosion or a bomb scare going on. And of course the border was part of that whole infrastructure. And this was in 1970, this is just outside Newry and just outside the border between Newry and Dundalk. And you can see there from the image that you didn't cross the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland accidentally or quickly or without some sense of tense angst. It was, you had to wait to do it. You had to answer questions about why you were crossing the border. You might have to get out of your car, open the trunk of your car, show a soldier what was inside the car. It was a whole big palaver about getting from one part of the island of Ireland to the other part. And yes, of course that had costs and that had inconveniences but it also had a sort of existential factor as well which is that it created a chill between the North and the South. Now, when I was growing up you quite often didn't see a car from the South in the North, it was quite rare to see it. So there was almost like an invisible apartheid created by the border being there. Now that was the sort of previous situation and the peace process and the Good Friday agreement helped mitigate this, helped us make the border invisible. And I spoke to a journalist when I was writing the reluctant piece book that Mary referred to. And I said, what's the best thing about the peace process? Is it the North-South bodies? Is it the par-sharing executive? And this journalist said, it's the motorway between Dublin and Belfast because that's the reality. That's what allows you to live in one state and work in another state. You know, you could live in Dublin, work in Belfast or vice versa. And it took all the heat out of it. You didn't have to get out of your car. You didn't even know where the border was. And so it was that organic growth really allowed people to connect, reconnect together again. So that was the before and this is the after. Now, I took this photograph myself. This is separate, this is the border now. This is two little towns. One is a town called Belcu in County Fermanagh. And the other side of the road is in the Irish Republic. And it's a town called Black Lion in County Cavern. And the border is in the river underneath that bridge. And I thought it was interesting that, you know, I didn't know where the border was. You can't really see it physically at all. And the only way I was able to work it out was my sat-in avenue in the car where the border was more than I knew. Just being in the physical space. And you can see there, I took a picture of it because I thought it was quite ironic that the sat-in avenue where the Irish border was and I'd been born in a rare darned into where it was. Now, the worry of course is that with Brexit, the border is going to be back and it's going to be physical. This was the worry for several years during the Brexit negotiations that the border would come back, you would see it. It would be sort of a hard border back in Ireland with all the security issues that would raise again. And so a lot of the worry was that it was going to be a hard border in Ireland. That's going to confront us with being on the wrong side of the border, one way or the other. I mean, they're on the British side or on the Irish side and I know which side's which. But of course the peace process allowed us to muddy that border, not really know in here and now. At the precise point of where the border was at any given time. So just to say a couple of things about the title, a bit of provocative title I suppose. Initially I had a question mark at the end of it and I just gave up on that during the writing process. I want to give you a couple of reasons why. One is because the cement and the peace process was a relationship between Britain and Ireland. It's not a very sexy thing probably, you know, to talk about intergovernmental relationships. It doesn't really make a lot of headlines, but the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, they really jointly managed the peace process during the 1990s. They're co-signatories of the Good Friday Agreement and supposedly joint guarantors of it as an international treaty. So the Good Friday Agreement's an international treaty. And the two sovereign governments are signatories to it. And they very much spoke as one publicly. Lots of joint communiques been given during the peace process and certainly 1990 and onward. It's been very, very few joint communiques since 2016. Very much being now opposite sides of the liberal searing table over Brexit. And Northern Ireland has sort of fallen in between the two. So Ireland and Irish relations have dipped quite substantially since 2016, and Northern Ireland can only suffer as a result of that in the long term. It was not helped by the fact that in 2017, the British government lost its majority in parliament, was trying to negotiate Brexit when it was very weak internally. And it relied on the Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley's former party, to keep itself in government. And so it raised lots of serious questions about how the British government could be a co-garrantor of a power sharing system, when it was in fact beholden to the DUP, who was one of the parties in that system. So there was an accusations of bad faith over that. The other issue, I think, was that the whole peace process was based on the consent of the people who lived there, that it was up to the people of Northern Ireland to decide on their future. Now, the people of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. They didn't vote to leave. And so what Brexit did was it really shrink-wrapped a sense of Britishness into more of an Englishness and more of a right-wing English project. The Scottish suffered the same as the Irish to this extent, in that Scotland also was probably known as Scotland, voted to remain in the EU as well, Northern Ireland, voted to remain quite significantly, by 56, 42, or 44. So quite a significant margin. So two of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom voted to remain. But a day after, or certainly when Theresa May became British Prime Minister, she said Britain has spoken. The people of Britain have spoken. The people of Britain have decided to leave the EU. But of course, that was a misnomer. 17 million people voted to leave the EU. But 16 million voted to remain in the EU. And two of the constituent countries or regimes in the United Kingdom voted to remain in the European Union. So this immediately then raised the issue of what country do you live in? So once you say, well, our country has decided to leave. Our sovereign country has decided to leave. The DUP were quite keen on that idea, because they wanted to leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of their country. But of course, for Irish nationalists, they had another country, which was Ireland. And they may or may not have adhered to a connection with the United Kingdom. But to some degree, it pushed nationalists further towards the Irish Republic. It forced them to choose between an Irishness and a Britishness when the whole Good Friday agreement was not choosing without having to choose. So that's why it really increased tensions. Other thing I wanted to say was that, yes, 56% of North Ireland voted to remain in the EU. But that hides a big difference between the nationalist Catholic population and the Protestant Unionist population. So between 88% and 90% of Catholic nationalists voted to remain in the EU. And only about 35% to 38% of Protestant Unionists voted to remain in the EU. So in other words, Brexit did not complicate the ethnic national problem. It reinforced it. And that also was a major issue in terms of the political dynamics that were existing there. And it was very difficult for Sinn Fein and the DUP to reach any working relationship because of the Brexit situation. And so really, Brexit has stress tested the agreement. Since 1998, this has been the document that we've all been focused on and several iterations of it since. But it's based on the notion of consent that is up to the people of Northern Ireland to decide on their futures. And of course, what it really did was it pulled the rug from under these devolved institutions, not just in Belfast, but in Scotland as well. Because essentially, London was saying, it's the United Kingdom that's sovereign, really. It's not the devolved administrations. And we will be leaving the European Union as one unit. And so it really stress tested them. So I just wanted to get on to the president-elect, Biden, and the Biden-Harris administration. Because I think this is really fascinating in terms of the impact that it's going to have on the United Kingdom and on Brexit itself. As you probably know, Joe Biden has got strong connections with Ireland. And he's very aware of them and has visited Ireland several times. It was skeptical at best about the whole Brexit project, was had a front row seat during eight years of the Obama administration. Certainly, I'm sure the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is going to be perfect accordion. But Biden has already come out and said that if there's any damage to the Good Friday agreement or any damage to the peace process, then his administration would not look kindly on that. And his priorities are not going to be a trade deal with the United Kingdom. They're going to be looking to the United Kingdom as an ally over America's role in NATO and the whole role of NATO generally. He is a sort of multilateralist. He is going to want to establish international partnerships. And I'm sure the United Kingdom is going to be a very important player in that. But the problem for Boris Johnson, the prime minister, is that when Donald Trump was president, a free trade deal with America seemed to be in the context of no deal with the EU, looked like it was a feasible option. But a deal with the Biden presidency with a no deal Brexit looks like an impossibility. So that will not be lost on Boris Johnson. And I'm sure we'll have to see how that plays out in the next couple of weeks. But we're now really up against it in terms of a deal. There are days, there's a ticking clock, as Mary said, going to the end of December. And on the 1st of January, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland is going to be the hot seat of the economic fallout of Brexit. Just to give you a little example, a practical example of that. I don't know if any of you like Cottage Pie as a thing to eat, but apparently Cottage Pie, I don't know who actually did who worked this out, but Cottage Pie goes through nine border changes before it actually gets from production to consumption. So in other words, products go backwards and forwards. They're going to be needing export licenses. Costs and delays are going to go up significantly if there's no deal Brexit. Supermarkets have already talked about contingency planning, product reduction. There are worries of food shortages in Northern Ireland because of the fact that delays over just-in-time deliveries are going to be accentuated in the context of a no-deal outcome. So this is getting very real very quickly for people in Northern Ireland. And really, those issues are not making the media headlines at all, hardly at all. And this is one of the interesting ironies of Brexit. Northern Ireland didn't figure. The biggest problem for the United Kingdom has been Northern Ireland in its prosecution of Brexit, getting Brexit done. But Northern Ireland was not an issue in the referendum at all. It was only really afterwards. It was an afterthought. And similarly now, the practical implications of a no-deal Brexit are pretty much an afterthought in terms of the Britain agenda. And this has been one of its problems. It's never really seen Brexit through an Irish lens. Maybe it was never capable of doing that. So the Biden-Harris administration, I think, has got a soft power leverage over the British government, over how Brexit evolves from here. It's interesting that Boris Johnson is making a lot of noise about climate change recently. He hadn't really been saying an awful lot about that in my knowledge, up until Joe Biden won the election. It'll be interesting to see how that factors into the final days of the negotiations. But I would be prepared to put a good, if I were you, a couple of dollars on the fact that if there is a no-deal Brexit, that there will not be a free trade deal with America. And that Dublin, if Dublin makes representations to the Biden presidency over the damage to the good Friday agreement, that they'll be listened to. And that certainly behind the scenes that there will be communications going from Washington to London about that. Even if it isn't in a greater scheme of things, publicly stated. So I just wanted to finish with a couple of points, sort of ironic points about Brexit, as I see them anyway. And I've mentioned these in the book. Brexit was all about taking back control. One of the ironies of Brexit was that it was never really anything to do with Europe. If it had been to do with being a member of the European Union, there would have been a proper debate about what it was like being in the European Union. But it wasn't. Brexit was about immigration. And Brexit was about the internal politics of the Conservative Party. That's essentially what Brexit was, why Brexit was called the way it was, when it was, and why the debates happened the way it did. Another irony is that Sinn Feim, who for a century, pretty much, have denied the legitimacy of Northern Ireland as a legitimate entity. As far as they're concerned, it's a partitioned state from the rest of Ireland. And for many generations, they had not sat in legislative parliaments in Northern Ireland because they didn't sit in Stormont. They wouldn't sit in local councils and so on. And they changed that in the 1980s and through the 90s. And now there are no better defenders of the self-determination of Northern Ireland than Sinn Feim, who were, of course, originally very Eurosceptic, seeing it as sort of a rich person's club. And now they are tub thumpers for the European Union and for the self-determination of Northern Ireland, which is quite an ironic turnaround in some ways. Equally ironic, if not more ironic, and probably the biggest headline of all, is that Irish unity has probably never been as close as it is now. And the reason for that is because of the DUP, the Democratic Unionist Party, who were pro-Brexit, who had major influence with Theresa May's government after the 2017 general election, and who prevented Theresa May from getting her Brexit legislation through the House of Commons because they had the votes to stop it. And what they've delivered is a border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the Great Britain. And they're now having to be their own dealers, setting up customs posts in Belfast and Lawn with Great Britain when they were the party who said that we must leave as one country with the rest of the United Kingdom. And what they've ended up with is Boris Johnson calling them loose when he had to last year, signing the withdrawal agreement on Northern Ireland protocol that effectively is going to put a border, not have a border on the island of Ireland, but put the border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, which then raises questions about, I suppose, whether Northern Ireland is now in a different status within the United Kingdom. What we're effectively going to see is a border within the United Kingdom, de facto. It's not going to be called that, that's what it's going to be. One last point maybe to mention is that, as Mary said there, I've got a revised version of my Yale University Press book coming out next year to Marcus and Tina, we have Northern Ireland. And one of the questions I ask in that book is how far into its next century is Northern Ireland going to actually get? And I think it really depends on how hard Brexit lands on Northern Ireland. Because, of course, Northern Ireland was based on the union being economically strong. And if we're faced with a United Kingdom outside the EU, a United Kingdom smaller internationally as far as countries like the United States are concerned, where they're more concerned with the EU than they are with the UK, where doubling in the Irish Republic is a secular, modern, industrialized country. Then the equation over whether you would vote for reunification changes. And the idea of a border poll was pretty much a thought experiment for academics up until Brexit. And it's now on the front burner of political debate, both in the North and the South. Not sure if we call it the front burner of political debate, but certainly there. And it won't be the DUP, and it won't be Sinn Fein who decide on that. It will be the sort of middle, 15 to 20% of the population of Northern Ireland, the undecided voters, the swing states in American, the Pennsylvanians and the Mexicans and so on. It'll be those groups. And they're there to be convinced. And it really all depends on how Brexit lands on us from January onwards. If it's a soft Brexit, if there's a deal between Britain and the EU, and if Anglo-Irish relations improve, then the status quo is gonna be much more tenable. If it's a no deal of Brexit, a crash landing, economic difficulties, then the arguments for coming back into the EU, through a reunified Ireland, becomes much more viable. And I could see that being discussed over the next decade or so. But anyway, that book's gonna be out next March with Yale. And just finally, because my time's up, thank you very much for listening. I think I have just a minute left. Yeah, so I'll wind up there. I've got a website on the slide there. If you wanna read any more, you can read it there. So, thanks very much. Oh, fantastic. Okay, and we can probably put that website into chat as well so that people can pick that up. Thank you so much, Burgl. I'm sure that we have some questions. Yes, we do. Okay, and I actually, well, I'll save my question. I'll let our distinguished members go first. Yeah, actually, let's go to Ursula, our wonderful colleague from the British American Business Council of New England, great Royal Boston friend. Ursula, what's your question? We'll pull you in. Okay, my question is, since the Brexit vote was so close, why didn't David Cameron just declare the results to be interesting information? Yes, well, that's a very good question. I think the reason he did that was probably because he was too weak then to say that. I think Cameron was probably pushed into the referendum by UKIPP, and if he had then denied the majority vote, which he could have done constitutionally, of course, then he would have been attacked by UKIPP and probably his own party as well. And of course, the Conservative Party has been torn apart by Europe for a generation, if not more. So, yeah, he could have said this is an advisory, but after the referendum, I'm not sure what your view of that Ursula would be, but my view is probably because he was too weak to do anything else by that point. And I think what he should have done was say, because he nearly, of course, lost the Scottish referendum a couple of years previously in 2014. And of course, when the opinion polls turned against, he also rushed back up to Scotland and said how much they loved the Scottish. And what he should have said, I think, about Brexit would have been to preserve the union, we'll have to have a majority in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England to have Brexit. And if he'd been strong enough to do that, which he wasn't, then the result would have been a foregone conclusion. And he could have had his referendum, said he'd given his referendum, and not had to deliver it. Let's see, I'm not sure if my colleague has got people ready to go here. Ruel, are you with us? My question has to do with what happens if in fact Scotland does have another referendum and decide to secede? Well, now you'll have a UK that's breaking apart. Will that affect Northern Ireland, perhaps even renew ideas about joining with Ireland again? Will it result in violence again? Yeah, well, there's two questions in there, I think. So that's a really great question. I'd say that the odds of another Scottish referendum are very high over the next five years, certainly. Particularly once Brexit happens, and it happens in Scotland, it happens for Scotland, the opinion polls in Scotland are pretty much showing an acceleration of a desire for independence. And I think COVID is also part of this because the experience of the Scottish has been, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, been seen to have done a pretty good job over COVID in a way that maybe the Scottish view of Boris Johnson hasn't been quite so positive. So I think that raises interesting questions for unionists. What do you do when the union disappears behind your back? How do you then have a, who is your union with? And it doesn't technically damage Northern Ireland's position within the United Kingdom or the Disunited Kingdom. It doesn't technically change that. But it would certainly take one of the pillars away, I think, of the equation, which was a lot of the unionist view is a connection with Scotland, and they see their unionism as similar to the Scottish unionism within the United Kingdom. So if Scotland go independent, I think unionists, one of the major pillars of their political allegiance will be certainly dented. And I also think that on the other side of it, it gives a stronger push from the Irish nationalist side to say that you're putting your money on a slow horse here. Why not rejoin the European Union? And to sell the idea of Irish reunification, if they're sensible, it'll all be about being in the European Union as much as it will be about being in some sort of Irish entity, whatever that might end up as. On the point about violence, I certainly think there will be smuggling post Brexit. Once you've got a border with different tariffs, you're going to have smuggling, you're going to have criminality. And you may well have, depending on the type of border, you may well have politically motivated criminality, which is where it gets slightly more interesting. I don't think you're going to get large scale violence the way we had it in the 1960s and 70s though. I think that the underlying drivers for that aren't there anymore, but the organisations are still there. And they're economic drivers for that paramilitary activism is still there and the people are still there. So, yeah, I think the potential for violence is still there, but I don't see it getting to the levels that it was in the 70s and 80s. Actually, Frugal, can I ask you to round that out? Because I think many of us think of those days of violence, as you mentioned, why are those drivers not present now? What were they? Okay, so really what you had in the 60s, this brings us back to the United States, of course, because what you had in the 1960s was the emergence of a civil rights movement, particularly amongst the Catholic national side of the population who lost all these elections. They eventually got fed up with it and thought, well, there's no point in the formal political system isn't delivering. So we'll have to take civil disobedience measures. We'll have to take the streets and they were inspired by the American civil rights movement by the arrival of television as well and by the French riots in the 60s and so on. So, and by an educated middle class who had come through the university system and free education from the post-war, ironically from the post-war British sort of 1940 Butler Education Act. So they've come through, let's sort of say, well, this is clearly unfair and they've started protesting peacefully. But as these protests got more violent with stone throwing, and of course once you ban a march, once you say your march is illegal and the police will remove you, then you can guarantee that more people will come the next week. And then it gets political. And then once the stone throwing starts, the political analysis disappears and it becomes much more of a sectarian battle. And so it evolved from a civil rights agitation over electoral gerrymandering over the allocation, it was all right, you know, all politics is local. So it was all about the allocation of public housing, about unemployment levels amongst the Catholic population. There was no, I mean, back in those days, your religious affiliation could be used as a reason not to employ you. And in fact, again, it was America that played a big role in fair employment legislation in Northern Ireland, back in the early 90s with the Clinton administration. So the drivers were discrimination, security, you know, the police were pretty much made up of 90% of one side of the population, which was the Protestant Unionist population. So it was a non-transparent armed police force policing a recalcitrant disenfranchised minority who felt that the political system could not deliver for them, but also you had a lot of discrimination, a lot of poverty amongst the Unionist population as well. And they couldn't understand why the Catholics were saying that they were second class citizens with a lot of working class Protestants felt that they were second class citizens. But nonetheless, an attempt to reform went too slowly, misdiagnosed the problem, rioting pogroms, people getting burnt out of their houses, rampant sectarianism. British army arrived as supposedly peacekeepers, but were controlled by this Unionist government. And of course, then became peace enforcers very quickly. And then you had the old IRA re-arming itself and then taking on an undeclared war with the British state. And of course, that escalated. And that became internationalized through things like Bloody Sunday in 1972. And America gave a lot of dollars for the armed struggle or terrorism, as Margaret Thatcher would define it, or would have defined, or did define it. But also the internationalization brought sucked in people like Colonel Gaddafi and Libya, who provided Semtex and sophisticated weaponry and so on. And so the whole thing became a sort of escalating arms race between a guerrilla movement and the British state and ended up in a stalemate. And so the drivers were economic, they were security, legal arguments about the administration of justice, the lack of justice. Those issues are not there now. There is firm employment legislation. Catholic population does not feel that it is second class in the way that it did in the 1960s. That's probably a, I'll probably give you a long lecture on this somewhere. But you know, today, yes, there are grievances over identity politics, but the underlying disparity and even the numbers are different. So back in the 60s, you know, you had a dominant, unionist community, but it's very 50-50 now in terms of population split. So even if you were to see it as sort of Catholics on one side, Protestants on the other, it was much more complicated than that. But let's even take that. You're not looking at a 60-40 permanent majority, permanent minority problem. It's much more even Steven. And again, that, I think, helps the whole power sharing type of model. And, you know, so I think the reasons for the emergence of violence are not there at the moment. That's really helpful for outsiders. I wanted to go back to actually something that you said when we were in the virtual green room, Fergal, you mentioned this, but I just think it was so compelling if you could round this out a little bit. You mentioned that the, we're talking obviously about the virus. That's what everyone does these days. And you said that from, you know, your perspective across the pond are conflicts and tension around masking. All the emotion that comes with that reminded you very much of growing up in the 70s in Northern Ireland and kind of that tension. And you said a fascinating thing that it's not about science anymore. It's about identity. So help us understand how those things are similar to you. Yeah. So it's a classic conflict mentality, really, which is that you don't need to listen to what somebody says to you because you already know what they think. Right. So the mask and non-mask debate, to me, watching it, it seems to be it's not really about the mask. It's about what the mask represents. It's a more existential issue. I mean, it is about the mask and it's about public health. But from the people who are reluctant to wear masks, they feel that, you know, the mask is a thin end of the wedge to their other rights-based constitutional thing. I mean, gun control could be another dimension of it. I don't know whether there's a correlation between mask wearing, non-mask wearing and gun control and, you know, wanting sort of M60 machine guns. But I think that it's so and for a lot of people in conflicts, this sort of it's the symbolism of the thing. And it's the fact that it's a sectarianize, a sectarianization, if you like, of relatively mundane things because the mask is an emblem of other things. And so if you see somebody talking about wearing a mask, your mentality jumps to extrapolate that across a whole range of different dimensions. It could be Democrat versus Republican. I mean, I may be speaking out of turn here in terms of American politics, but it could be rural versus urban. It could be an age demographic going on there as well. But the emblem of the symbol, in the case of Northern Ireland, it could be, for instance, the sports that you play. It doesn't really matter if you say you're a Catholic or a Protestant. It's about whether you're, that's just a badge of ethnicity and that's a badge of whether you are one of us or one of the other or whether you believe in the whole sort of iconography of that I believe in or whether you are on the other side of that fence. And to me, with the Trump presidency, I can see a very sort of sectarian, and you can see it with the vote, you know, nearly 80 million people voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and 70 odd million voting for Donald Trump. And the votes come out in both sides. It's a very divided country, clearly. And there is very little middle way, you know, and I think that the mask versus non-mask debate is sort of almost emblematic of that sectarianized situation. And in Northern Ireland, you know, if you play one sport like Gaelic football or hurling, you would be perceived as a Catholic and a whole extrapolation of your political viewpoints would follow. This is certainly what I was growing up. I mean, it would be enough to get you beaten up in a bus stop to carry a hurling stick or to carry a rugby ball on the other side because our education systems are very divided. And so Catholics go to Catholic schools, learn Catholic sports, Protestants go to state schools, learn other sports. So you carry a cricket bat, it's emblematic of the fact that you're British. You carry a hurling stick, it's emblematic of the fact that you're Irish. And so those very objects become sectarianized. And it doesn't really matter if you think, well, I'm currently a hurling stick, but, you know, I've got a very cosmopolitan outlook on events. It doesn't really matter. There's a reductionism that happens in conflicts. And to me, in the States, from the outside, I think the mask debate is sort of emblematic of that sectarian scenario, you know, and we'll have to see where that goes, I'm sure. Fascinating. All right, so Ed, are you okay? Can you come on? Is your mic working? If not, we'll go over to Brian. Okay, looks like we can't get Ed. Maybe he'll join us in the post chat chat. Brian, what's your question? Go right ahead. What about Johnson's internal market bill? What's the impact and will the EU ratify any agreement if he keeps pushing that bill through? Good question. On the second part of that note, EU will not ratify any deal with the internal market bill there. And the reason for that is because it gives, just for people who are not OFA with the internal market bill, effectively what this does is it supersedes an international treaty that the United Kingdom has signed. And so it gives the United Kingdom, it almost allows it to supersede its international obligations and its agreements with the European Union. So you would never, I hope nobody has to go through a divorce or has ever done, but if you had a divorce lawyer, and the two divorce lawyers were having a chat, and one divorce lawyer said the other divorce lawyer, just leave it with me. I'm sure I'll decide no divorce lawyer in their right mind would say, okay, I'll give you unilateral choice over working this thing out, you can decide it. That's not the way it works. So the internal market bill allows the United Kingdom to unilaterally dispense with aspects of the withdrawal agreement that it's made with the EU. So there's no way the EU is going to let that happen. There's also no way that the American government, the incoming American government's going to, I mean, Joe Biden's already come out and against the internal market bill for that very reason, because how can you, and members of the Conservative Party, including Theresa May, as you probably know, have also come out and said that, you know, we would be an international laughing stock. The next time we sign an international treaty with anybody, when we've said in Parliament, and I don't know if this has ever happened before, but a serving Minister has said, we will break the law in certain unspecified and limited ways when it suits us to do so. So would you ever sign a deal with somebody who said that? Probably not. So it will be interesting to see how the internal market bill gets adjusted, if it does get adjusted. But I think it probably will need to be, even though Johnson said he is not going to. I can't see a deal with the EU unless that is significantly revised. Okay. Thank you very much. I really fear that our time is winding down. Yeah, I'm afraid we're going to have to wind this up. I am sorry that we did not get to all the questions, but boy, Fergal, you have raised many questions in our mind and also answered a bunch of very fascinating topic that I think nobody could have imagined a few years ago that we would be talking about Ireland, Northern Ireland in this way. Fergal, thanks for joining us from all the way over there late at night. I hope many of you will join us in our informal post chat chat. And Fergal, once again, thank you and good night, everybody. Hope to see you again soon. Pleasure.