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“It is the decade for the reunification referendum”

Sinn Féin, the former political wing of the now inactive IRA, made history in the last May elections in Northern Ireland by becoming, for the first time, the party with the most votes since the partition of the island in 1921. The Agreement of Good Friday of 1998, which sealed peace between Catholics and Protestants – the same one that this year marks its 25th anniversary – dictates that both communities must govern in coalition. However, the DUP unionists have refused again this week to make a move by extending the institutional paralysis of Belfast. Protestants are not willing to do anything until the Irish Protocol, a key piece of the Brexit agreement, is changed. London and Brussels are immersed in new negotiations to relax the new customs controls that must be applied in the region. In any case, the European divorce has left the British province with a different status from the rest of the United Kingdom, which gives impetus to the historical objective that the nationalists have always had: a referendum for the reunification of the island. Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin, 1969) analyzes this historic moment.

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