A LEADING Irish journalist is the latest figure to highlight how the pressure of leaving the European Union may lead to the break up of the United Kingdom.
Denis Murray, the veteran BBC correspondent who reported from the frontline of the Troubles and covered the long road of the peace process, said it is “beginning to become received wisdom that Brexit will drive Scotland out of the Union”.
READ MORE: Denis Murray: Scots and Irish nationalists need to be ready for what comes next
Writing in The National today, he argued Scottish independence would heighten the question over the prospect of Irish unity.
“What both Scots and the Northern Irish are asking themselves is this – do we really want to go on having our future decided by a) the English electorate; and b) by the English toffs baying loudest for Brexit. The corollary is – would we prefer to be in the European Union, or the British one?
“We voted Remain, we cry. Tough, say the leavers – it was a UK vote. Which in direct consequence, and inevitably, puts the UK at serious risk.”
He added: “A vote in Scotland to leave the Union would undoubtedly have a knock-on effect for Ireland, and it’s border. “
Murray hit out at the Democratic Unionist Party for believing Brexit would strengthen the Union.
Theresa May’s minority Conservative government is propped up by the 10 DUP MPs after the two parties agreed to a confidence and supply arrangement and a controversial £1 billion additional funding package for Northern Ireland following the 2017 general election.
Murray wrote: “What the [Good Friday Agreement] did was to make the issue irrelevant – you could be whatever you wanted. Many began to identify themselves as “Northern Irish”, a unique, and completely new tag.
“What Brexit has done is to destroy that ... The united Ireland issue, the ‘national question’, was off the table. Now it is front and centre.
“It almost defies belief that the main unionist party, the DUP, thought Brexit would strengthen the Union. It makes one wonder if they ever understood the agreement. Twenty years of peace and consensus thrown away, on a whim.”
After working for the Belfast Telegraph and RTE, Murray, 67, joined the BBC in 1984 as Northern Ireland political correspondent before becoming Ireland correspondent in 1988. He retired in 2008. Among the events he reported on were the Omagh bombing in August 1998 in which 29 people were killed, including a woman pregnant with twins.
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