The Good Friday Agreement only came about through a heroic effort by so many people. A tremendous amount of forgiveness and forbearance was needed on both sides to even sit in the same room as each other after all that had been done to their people. But there they sat, eventually, and they talked, and they agreed.

Peace once seemed to be impossible in Northern Ireland. It wasn't. We've been at peace for 28 years now.

It wasn't easy. But it reminds you of what can be possible.

@dave Yeah, I can do a sort of back-of-the-envelope comparative calculation here. If we look at casualties of the Troubles as a proportion of overall population, the modern US equivalent would see almost 700k people dead. And that's just the deaths.

Obviously there's severe limitations to doing that sort of calculation but it does bring home how much of an impact on our small society it had.

@astronomerritt @dave Honestly, as one of the people who grew up in England who *did* have some awareness of the Troubles (via left-wing parents etc), I'm always astonished how various modern British politicians have been cavalier about what a tremendous (but also fragile) achievement it was.

(One of the reasons I was furious about Brexit was that it was clear it made the GFA slightly weaker, given it really only works if we can "pretend" that the border between NI and Eire sort-of-doesn't-exist. )

@aoanla Oh trust me we were RAGING about Brexit here, and absolutely spitting furious at the usual parade of shits who campaigned for it. (The DUP were the only party against the GFA in the first place, they would have LOVED to see it dismantled... though maybe not now they're the only the second-biggest party in government as ironically, the power-sharing agreement has kept them in power.)

But yeah. I wasn't surprised at the British politicians being so cavalier about Northern Ireland and the GFA. They've never given a shit, not really. We're an annoyance and an inconvenience to them and they'd usually rather pretend we don't exist.