Terror returns to Northern Ireland after the twenty years of peace guaranteed by the 1998 accords. Shooting starts again and the specter of attacks carried out by the IRA against the British government is once again frightening.
A XNUMX-year-old journalist, Lyra McKee, was shot and killed while covering the riots in the city of Derry. The police do not mince words and speak of a "terrorist act". "We are treating this death as a terrorist attack and have opened an investigation into the murder," Deputy Chief of Police Mark Hamilton said.
In the numerous testimonies published on social networks, a car and a van are seen burning, while hooded people throw paper bombs at the police. According to initial information, the journalist was near the police cars.
Reporter Leona O'Neill witnessed the murder. “I was standing next to this young woman when she fell next to a police Land Rover tonight. I called an ambulance for her but the police put her in the back of their Land Rover and took her to hospital where she died, aged just 29. I'm sick to my stomach tonight."
The clashes began after some searches carried out by the police, busy investigating the January car bomb, in a residential area of Londonderry, Creggan, where weapons were thought to be stored for use over the weekend, when the "Bloody Easter" celebrations will take place, the April uprising of 1916, when Northern Ireland declared independence and the British army reacted by firing cannon fire.
For some months, Violence has returned to Northern Ireland. According to the police, New IRA is behind the riots, a dissident republican group that does not recognize the Good Friday peace accords of 1998. The group, explains the Guardian, was born in 2012 thanks to “the union between various factions that oppose the peace process and has been linked to the of two prison guards and several other attacks.”
What is feared is what the so-called New Wrath could cause new violence by exploiting the very delicate situation created by Brexit on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Especially if, after the failure of the agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union, there is talk of a physical border between the two territories again.
On the other hand, at the basis of the failure of the negotiations and the triple No of the British Parliament to Brexit (at least originally) there was precisely the backstop, an emergency mechanism which according to the agreement would enter into force at the end of the transition period (2020) in the event that the UK and the EU failed to find an agreement capable of guaranteeing a non-rigid border between Ireland and Ireland of the North and which provided for the indefinite permanence of the United Kingdom in the Customs Union and special rules for Belfast, including its permanence in the single market.
La Brexit has been postponed, waiting for Westminster to finally find a majority to approve an agreement, but silence fell on the "two Irelands". No one to date knows how to fix it an issue that could not only cause huge political and economic problems, but become a real hotbed of violence in the area. The fuse, unfortunately, now seems lit.
