The situation is not entirely normal in Northern Ireland.

Sligo, Irish Republic ... 1985.

"Parliament Buildings, often referred to as Stormont because of its location in the Stormont Estate area of Belfast, is the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the devolved legislature for the region."

Forced remarriage: Northern Ireland gets a government again, at The Economist

Both big parties fear the alternative even more than they dislike each other

NORTHERN IRELAND’S devolved government has been reborn. After many months of hard-fought negotiations, the biggest unionist and republican parties agreed on January 10th to go back into government together, creating a new element of hope in the often unforgiving politics of Belfast. Under heavy pressure from both the government in London and their own voters, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein have agreed to revive the Belfast assembly, Stormont, which has been inactive for three full years.

I suspect that insofar as Americans think at all about the outside world, which is seldom, "divisions" pop into the conversation only with considerations of North and South Korea, and maybe vague recollections of East and West Germany.

Islands can be divided, too, as with the existence of two governments on Cyprus, one Greek (internationally recognized) and the other Turkish. Somehow I haven't heard this topic arise at the pub lately.

Or, in Ireland, where Irish independence a century ago came at the cost of losing Ulster, one of four traditional Irish provinces as well as the one dominated by Protestants rather than Catholics, and which has remained under British control.

I'm not sure that many Americans, even Irish-Americans, are fully aware of the potential for unexpected consequences from Brexit, one of which is the British effectively reneging on decades of promises of eternal support for the Protestants in Ulster.

The most alarming development, from the DUP’s point of view, is that Northern Ireland’s union with Britain looks increasingly insecure. Mr Johnson’s withdrawal bill, which returned to Parliament on January 7th, draws a dotted line between the province and the rest of the country by providing for different customs arrangements in the two areas. The latest poll in Northern Ireland showed a tiny majority in favour of the reunification of Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to the province, mandates a referendum on reunification when it is clear that a majority in the province wants one.

Social, economic and political conditions are weird everywhere, not only here in the USA. Is this why the planet is burning, or is the causation the other way around?

UK election 2019: Is the scene set for a return to Scottish independence?

Thursday's UK election brought a huge majority to the Tories amid Labour's cataclysmic defeat, which makes Brexit a prospective fact after three and a half years of political gridlock. Brexit will be a long, drawn-out process, but now it will happen.

Interestingly, leaving the European Union might set into motion the dissolution of the United Kingdom.

It isn't easy to explain the election's implications for perpetually fragile Northern Ireland, although it should suffice to use the word "destabilizing" -- to say the least.

DUP and Sinn Féin under pressure to restore power sharing, by Rory Carroll (The Guardian)

DUP loses big name as voters punish parties for Northern Ireland’s political dysfunction

... Boris Johnson’s election victory, which has liberated him from dependence on DUP votes in Westminster, has added to the sense of urgency. He is expected to push through a Brexit deal that will create checks and inspections on trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Mike Nesbitt, a former leader of the Ulster Unionist party, told the BBC the election’s great irony was that for decades, unionists had feared Irish nationalism as the main threat to the union. “Then more recently it was Scottish nationalists, but it’s actually English nationalism which is posing the existential threat to the future of the union,” he said.

Lots of eggshells and tightropes in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile in Scotland, things have become very interesting. The previous Scottish independence referendum in 2014 didn't favor detachment. It might a second time, given a general pro-EU opinion.

Scottish independence vote a 'democratic right', says Sturgeon, by Severin Carrell and Libby Brooks (The Guardian)

Boris Johnson rejects first minister’s call as his spokesman says result of 2014 vote ‘should be respected’

Nicola Sturgeon is to publish a blueprint next week for a new Scottish independence referendum but Boris Johnson has rejected any moves towards a fresh vote.

The first minister said the Scottish National party’s “overwhelming” election victory in Scotland, where it won 47 of the country’s 59 Westminster seats with 1.2m votes, gave her a clear and undeniable mandate to hold one.

Sturgeon said she would publish the “detailed democratic case” for the transfer of the legal powers from Johnson’s new Conservative government, which has to authorise the Scottish parliament to stage any referendum that changes the UK’s constitutional structures.

“This isn’t about asking Boris Johnson or any other Westminster politician for permission. This is instead an assertion of the democratic right of the people of Scotland to determine our own future,” she said in a short victory speech in Edinburgh, where she declined to take questions.

snip

Sturgeon said the scale of the victory proved again that a large majority of Scots wanted to remain in the EU, three years after the country voted against Brexit by 62% to 38%. The election was a “watershed moment”, she said.

“Westminster has ignored the people of Scotland for more than three years. Last night, the people of Scotland said enough,” Sturgeon said. “It’s time for Boris Johnson to start listening. I accept, regretfully, that he has a mandate for Brexit in England but he has no mandate whatsoever to take Scotland out of the EU.”

She made a direct appeal to EU citizens – a group expected to be given a vote in any independence referendum, saying the SNP would protect and champion their interests. “I will fight with everything I have to protect your right to call Scotland your home.”

THE BEER BEAT: "Why Brexit could mean a pricier pint of Guinness."

Sligo, 1985.

It's worth remembering that the distance from Dublin to Belfast is a scant hundred miles, less than the drive from New Albany to Indianapolis.

Note also: The Brexit article (below) refers to cans and bottles, not kegs. Clarification is necessary, as I hope to return to the business of selling Guinness, sooner rather than later.

First, from January, 2017:

After a 63-year absence, Guinness Brewery will once again have a working brewery in the United States.

The Diageo-owned brand will be creating a version of its Dublin-based Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Relay, Maryland.

While the iconic Guinness Draught, Guinness Foreign Extra and Guinness Extra stouts will still be brewed in Dublin and exported to the U.S., the new brewery will focus on new Guinness beers created for the U.S. market.

About that Brexit thingy ...

Why Brexit could mean a pricier pint of Guinness at The Economist

IT MIGHT just be Ireland’s most famous product. And indeed, all of the Guinness that is drunk in the world is brewed at the St James’s Gate brewery in east Dublin. But the dark beer is then transported north, in tankers that have become known as “silver bullets”, to be canned and bottled in east Belfast before returning to Dublin for export. Diageo, the multinational company that owns Guinness, says that its silver bullets make some 13,000 border crossings a year. It estimates that even a short delay of 30 minutes to an hour for customs checks would add about €100 ($115) to the expense of each trip, costing the firm some €1.3m a year. If that happened, the price of Guinness might have to rise.

Family planning: the unsung human right.

International Planned Parenthood Federation

Then there is this.

Pro-choice activists have delivered abortion pills to women in Northern Ireland using a drone. The stunt aimed to highlight the strict laws around terminations on both sides of the Irish border.

It is the impetus for an editorial.

EDITORIAL: the Guardian view on family planning: the unsung human right 

Millions of women are barred either by cultural taboo, cost or availability from being able to decide for themselves when they have children. Empowering them to take control should be a basic objective of every human health project.

Anthony McCann.

Though we have several mutual friends, I've never met Anthony McCann.  A scholar, teacher, coach, consultant, poet, and musician in Belfast, he occasionally "likes" articles I post to Facebook. I apparently like a majority of his life's work. He's the guy, after all, in describing a workshop he facilitates, who said, "What happens if we link conversations about heritage to conversations about social innovation? Make heritage less a thing of the past, and more a conversation about possible futures and future possibilities." My kind of thinker.

A trip to Belfast during a cease-fire in the mid-nineties still shapes my thinking about cities and towns and the way people actually use them. Some barricades had been removed owing to the then temporary peace but others remained. Residents would start down a road or path they hadn't been able to use in quite a while, somewhat surprised to find them open. Often, though, they'd end up having to turn another direction at some point anyway, a direction they didn't necessarily want to go, but one they were in some cases more used to.

As I wandered around trying to learn all I could about The Troubles and the people impacted, my accidental informants ranged from an IRA member to a group of nuns. More than anything, though, I remember a group of kids I encountered on the street. Those kids seemed to know the exact location of every hole in every fence and how to get their quickly. I watched them for as long I could until I, too, became suspicious. I wondered what else they could tell me.

McCann has recently started blogging. In this essay, he considers storytelling within the context of post-Troubles Northern Ireland and makes some fine points I think relevant to anyone who has experienced trauma.

Other Stories, by Anthony McCann

Maureen Heatherington has written, “Within the field of peace building in Northern Ireland, it has become apparent that the ‘healing work’ has not been adequately dealt with” (2008:51). Even though different groups have competing versions of history in Northern Ireland, it could be argued that those competing narratives have in themselves become our “single story”, “… the conflict-saturated relationship narrative in which people are often stuck” (Winslade and Monk 2008:8).This is understandable. In Northern Ireland, between 100,000-140,000 people live in households where someone has been injured or killed in a Troubles-related incident (Fay et al., 1998, p. 59).

It has been suggested that 12% of the Northern Ireland population may be diagnosable with PTSD (Healey 2008:59). A more recent study suggests that figures may be higher, and that Northern Ireland may have the highest levels of PTSD in the world: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-16028713. Personally, I feel this is playing very fast and loose with the notion of PTSD, which, as my wife Emma reminds me, is a complex clinical diagnosis, and one which even a psychiatrist would be loathe to label someone with too readily.

People often speak of the last forty years in Northern Ireland as ‘The Troubles’ or ‘The Conflict’, characterising this time as a continuous experience of intense conflict. Most recently, this was highlighted by the opening of “The Troubles Gallery” at the Ulster Museum. For me, this easy shorthand influences us with a subtle gravity that often leads us, in our retellings and characterisations of life in Northern Ireland, to frequently and predominantly place the emphasis on hostility, trauma, and on incidents and contexts of violence. By doing this I would suggest that we pay the high price of effacing many other aspects of our lives. More helpful aspects of everyday life over the past forty years have been rendered discursively invisible.