Northern Ireland Offers a Warning That Few Are Hearing
BELFAST—I’m driving across Europe’s most divided city, where politics is existential and fear often only a few streets away.
We’re heading west toward the River Lagan from the largely Protestant east, the flags of illegal paramilitary groups hanging limply from lampposts. Sitting beside me in the car is someone who describes himself as “an active loyalist”—loyal to the British Crown and state and opposed to a united Ireland—but, like other unionists I spoke with, asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. He is a member of the city’s Protestant working class, which has united in anger at Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s prospective Brexit deal with the European Union, principally because of the de facto customs border that it proposes between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, in order to avoid one with the Republic of Ireland.
Johnson called a general election seeking a mandate to deliver his deal. In loyalist parts of Belfast, they are determined to show he has no mandate from them.
To my passenger and every other Protestant unionist I met, in Belfast first and then in rural Fermanagh, near the Irish border, Johnson’s plan was a betrayal. Not just any betrayal, in fact, but a betrayal of the very issue most fundamental to them: the union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, whose preservation had been the source of a decades-long civil war before the
