‘That may not immediately threaten the peace process’, as Leahy observed, ‘but it certainly requires a resetting of the tri-partite relationships between Ireland, Britain and the North’. In other words, Brexit disturbs expectations which emerged over two decades about how the parts of the Agreement stand in relation. It shifts the foundation upon which things stood and raises questions about consent and political identity. Why might this be so? Brexit has brought back the ‘border in the mind’ in quite dramatic fashion, for as the head of Vote Leave in Northern Ireland, Lee Reynolds, was willing to concede, it was not so much economic issues, but ‘values’ that move voters on the EU (McBride, 2016). And one of those values was the identity, as well as the utility, of being ‘European’. Hitherto the acknowledgement of multiple identities in Northern Ireland - Irish, British and European - at least permitted, if it did not ensure, a reasonably relaxed nationalist attitude about their standing in relation to unionists and vice-versa. After the referendum, the old binary choice of British and - or versus - Irish (which had never gone away) has come back centrally into the frame of political reference. The strongest support for Leave came from within unionism while the strongest support for Remain came from within nationalism and it is no surprise, therefore, that this result was bound to be taken as a victory for one community at the expense of the other. Post-Brexit, the context will be modified yet again, raising the attendant question of consent. This question had been one subtext of the referendum campaign and once Northern Ireland became a distinctive Remain region within the UK, it was naïve to assume that there would not be corresponding pressures to acknowledge that position (as in Scotland). And so, in reflecting on the potential implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland, there are three related but distinct ‘effects’ which require examination: identity effects; (party) political effects; and constitutional effects. Identity effects
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