How Boris Johnson and Brexit almost unravelled the Good Friday Agreement

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

65% : The origins of the present troubles, and the (thankfully still slight) risk of a return to The Troubles, lies in Brexit and its impact.
62% : Reconciling Brexit with the Irish peace process is a frankly insoluble problem, like a Rubik's Cube that someone has secretly sabotaged by surreptitiously adding a couple of extra tiles on one of the faces of the puzzle.
59% : Brexit is in any case a problem of British creation.
58% : The problem that has always been nascent, and became distressingly real, is that the GFA, and with it the imperceptible border, power sharing and peace, is simply incompatible with Brexit.
57% :Northern Ireland didn't figure much in the debate on Brexit in the rest of the UK in 2016, but it should have done.
53% : Like other Brexiteers, Theresa Villiers, the Northern Ireland secretary at the time, expressed a breezy confidence that there'd be no real problems - and it's all too plausible to suppose that Johnson devoted even less effort than did Villiers to seriously thinking through the consequences of Brexit on this corner of the Union (or, indeed, its equally malign impact on Scotland and its place in the UK).
50% : The reason why the border was never mentioned in the GFA, of course, is that back in 1998 everyone made the perfectly reasonable assumption that the UK and Ireland would continue to be member states of the European Union.
50% : Brexit is indeed the underlying cause.
50% : In 2018, when May was still trying to get her deal through the Commons, he even travelled to the DUP conference in Belfast to tell jokes about the Titanic and to warn them about the perils of May's doomed deal: "If we wanted to do free trade deals, if we wanted to cut tariffs or vary our regulation then we would have to leave Northern Ireland behind as an economic semi-colony of the EU and we would be damaging the fabric of the Union with regulatory checks and even customs controls between GB and NI - on top of those extra regulatory checks down the Irish Sea that are already envisaged in the Withdrawal Agreement.""
49% : It is the UK leaving the EU that has brought this tension, and there is one man who bears a heavy degree of responsibility for the fact of Brexit and its implementation - and thus the undermining of the GFA to the point of near-destruction - Boris Johnson.

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