Northern Ireland is the smallest nation of the United Kingdom: six counties in the north-east of the island of Ireland, created in 1921 when Ireland was partitioned. Its politics are unlike anywhere else in Britain and its recent history is within living memory for most of its population.
How it came to exist
Ireland was governed from London for centuries. After the War of Independence, the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty partitioned the island: twenty-six counties became the Irish Free State and eventually the Republic of Ireland, while six counties in Ulster — with a Protestant and unionist majority — remained in the UK.
The border was drawn to secure that majority, and the substantial Catholic and nationalist minority inside it did not consent to the arrangement. That is the root of everything that followed.
The Troubles
From the late 1960s to 1998, a conflict between republican paramilitaries seeking a united Ireland, loyalist paramilitaries defending the union, and British security forces killed around 3,500 people and injured tens of thousands, in a population of well under two million.
It began with a civil rights movement protesting discrimination in housing, employment and voting, and escalated after events including Bloody Sunday in 1972, when British soldiers shot dead thirteen unarmed civil rights marchers in Derry. Bombings reached the British mainland, and the conflict shaped a generation of British politics.
The Good Friday Agreement
Signed in April 1998 after long negotiation involving the British and Irish governments, the Northern Irish parties and American mediation under Senator George Mitchell. It established:
- A devolved power-sharing assembly at Stormont, where the largest unionist and nationalist parties must govern jointly — neither can rule alone.
- The principle of consent: Northern Ireland remains in the UK unless a majority there votes otherwise.
- The right to identify and hold citizenship as British, Irish, or both.
- Decommissioning of weapons, prisoner releases, and police reform.
It was approved by referendum on both sides of the border and ended the conflict. The peace has held, though the power-sharing institutions have collapsed and been restored several times.
Still divided
Belfast and Derry still have peace walls — barriers separating loyalist and nationalist neighbourhoods, some of them taller and longer than the Berlin Wall ever was, several built after 1998. Most schools remain effectively segregated by religion. Murals, kerb paint and flags mark territory openly.
Brexit
Northern Ireland voted 56% to remain in the EU, and leaving created a genuinely intractable problem: an open border with the Republic was central to the peace settlement, but the Republic remained in the EU. The solution placed a customs boundary in the Irish Sea instead, which unionists regarded as a border within their own country. It remains the most contested consequence of Brexit.
Visiting
Northern Ireland is safe, welcoming and strikingly beautiful — the Giant’s Causeway, the Antrim coast, the Mourne Mountains. Belfast and Derry both offer excellent political walking tours led by people from both communities, and they are the honest way to understand the place.