On the second day of the Conservative Party’s general election campaign, Rishi Sunak delivered a speech in Belfast on a site previously occupied by the Harland and Wolff shipyard. The company – once the soul of Northern Irish industry and the most prolific builder of ocean liners in the world – is most famous for the RMS Titanic. Considering the disastrous trajectory of the Conservative campaign, burdened by the D-Day gaffe and the ongoing betting scandal, it was a clairvoyant opening.
Northern Ireland is the stone in the shoe of the United Kingdom. Its border with the Republic of Ireland upended the logic of Brexit. The Northern Irish state drains the Treasury of resources. Its peace was hard won but is frequently on the brink of falling apart. And the sensibilities of the electorate – which is still deeply divided along sectarian lines – are foreign and difficult to grasp for the mainland. Now that power sharing has been restored in the devolved administration of Stormont, the calculation made by the Conservatives and Labour is cautious and sensible: leave the fragile region be.
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