The partition of Ireland reverberates through history – and Brexit will too | Martin Kettle

Constitutional ruptures have effects that echo down the generations, as we are about to find out all over again

Arguments about difficult parts of British history have been a feature of 2020. But it is striking that something as important in its continuing consequences as the partition of Ireland, which took place 100 years ago this month, has been so widely neglected. There has been plenty of reflection on partition in Ireland itself, but there has not been much in Britain, which created the divide in the Government of Ireland Act 1920.

The closure of the British mind regarding Ireland is not new. But it remains glaringly topical in the light of Brexit. Irish partition still underpins one of the most charged dilemmas in Britain’s process of European disengagement. As recently as Monday, Michael Gove and the European commission vice-president, Maros Šefčovič, crafted a British climbdown over the future international regulatory status of Northern Ireland, one of the territories that partition created in 1920.

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