Brexit and Britain’s Northern Ireland Déjà Vu

An ostensibly intractable problem in Northern Ireland. Historic grievances bubbling to the surface. Peace on the line. Leaps of faith required. Trust in short supply.

With Britain and Ireland now at loggerheads over the terms of the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, with Brexit causing seemingly unending chaos in the British Parliament, and with the main political actors insisting they will brook no compromise, it’s worth remembering: We’ve been here before.

In the final months and weeks before the finalizing, in April 1998, of the Good Friday Agreement—a political settlement that effectively ended the three-decade conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles—key compromises had yet to be made. Political passions were running high; American intermediaries were shuttling between rooms, passing notes to opposing factions that refused to sit together; and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was ready to resume its war against Britain should everything collapse.

Twenty-one years on, some of those involved then and now—current and former officials, politicians, and diplomats—insist that the success of 1998 proves that a Brexit deal mutually acceptable to London and Dublin can still be salvaged from the growing wreckage of Britain’s exit from the EU. If unsolvable problems once became solvable in the right conditions, why can’t they again?

This was the backdrop to Boris Johnson’s yesterday, during which the British prime minister held talks with his Irish counterpart, Leo Varadkar, in the hope of finding a way through the Brexit impasse that has crippled his government and threatens