The Good Friday Agreement is starting to come apart

As the 20th anniversary of the peace deal approaches, everyone is out for themselves – and those old battle lines are being redrawn

Nothing that Leo Varadkar said in the White House was as important as his Washington DC remarks earlier in the week, aimed at the unionist people of the North. The context was the collapsed Stormont institutions, the Brexit loggerheads between the British and Irish governments and the imminent 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. His emollient and carefully chosen words were necessary, and designed to reassure unionists troubled by recent developments.

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