weetabix sorry, it is a bit more complicated than that.
I am from a solidly unionist background and I completely understand Sinn Féin’s position.
I think you’re overlooking the fact that many people in Northern Ireland consider themselves to be under occupation from a hostile nation that has treated them badly for hundreds of years. Obviously if that is the case anywhere, you will get civil unrest on a wide spectrum ranging from political resistance to wild card protest. It’s really important to recognise the ‘violence’ has not been one way. For example, the people of Derry, who almost entirely consider themselves Irish, have a border with Donegal, are Irish citizens, had years of very fraught army presence with door to doors - army knocking on your door in the middle of the night and kicking you all out on the street. Patrols watching your kids go to school.
Imagine in this negotiation, that France said, well, we don’t agree with brexit. So now we’re going to take Kent, Sussex, Suffolk and Norfolk. And all the people in those four counties said ‘WTF???!? We never wanted to be part of France! We hate France!’
But it happened anyway. Your granny and aunts live in one of those counties, now you have to cross an army patrol with your passport to be ‘allowed’ to go and see them. Furthermore, the French army moves in, clearly loathing the local community, treating them badly, harassing them. The French government doesn’t really care, because having got the counties, it doesn’t care about them anymore, they don’t have huge influence, lots of French sort of hate the English anyway. The new four county region is underfunded, pushed from being one of the most economically successful areas of the U.K. to being a basket-case backwater. Then France decides to do something that you all think is CRAZY and frantically vote against, that shreds the unity you’ve managed to build across the borders, that will make your granny and your aunts harder to reach or to help. But they are led by ideologues who could not care less about you, who make the most shameless of ignorant mistakes about you. No matter, those four counties are gone now, nothing you can do about it.
Now, if you resisted this forced takeover that was destroying a land you loved, would you consider yourself entitled to do so? Can you see how the rage it produced could easily tip into violence, which while not condonable, is understandable?
I’m from solid east Belfast and half my family are called billy and even I understand and have huge sympathy for the republican point of view. But I also identify as British AND Irish, as the result of several hundred years of British rule, and I don’t want to give my British citizenship up either.
You say the GFA held a fragile peace like it’s a bad thing! It’s an amazing thing! It’s a highly successful political work of art! It allows people like me to support and sympathise with the opposite side, and listen to them, without it threatening my rights. It allowed us to edge gently into ever greater integration at a scale that was palatable to all, because hey, we’re all EU citizens anyway!
Imagine how you would feel at that arbitrary line running through your part of the U.K., hugely affecting every area of your life, and see how you would feel about people being so shruggy about it.