The Good Friday agreement is 20 – and Britain can’t afford to forget it | Martin Kettle

The historic deal has brought Britain and Ireland closer than ever. To neglect the peace process now is a grave mistake

Like most people of my postwar generation in Britain, I started thinking about Northern Ireland only when the shooting started. I had no family connection with Ireland. We never learned about Ireland at school. I didn’t read a book about Ireland until I was at university. And I never went to Ireland, north or south, until I was in my 20s.

My guess is that most of this was pretty typical of its era. As a boy, I knew Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. But what else? George Best was about as far as it went. The Irish seemed to be like us but were not talked about with affection, the way Australians were. Later I learned why that was. But the fact that Northern Ireland was in effect a one-party state, in which half of the population was routinely discriminated against, was simply not on our radar.

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