Oh, and "Blair ended the war in Ireland"?
Northern Ireland is an odd place. I was recently at an anniversary ceremony at which a Northern Irish bishop was speaking. She was maundering on about the "two communities" (Protestant and Catholic), stared at with bored bafflement by the mainly Dublin listeners. I was puzzled too. When I said this to people from the Republic of Ireland - from Dublin, Kerry, Cork, Galway, Monaghan, Tipperary, Carlow - they said "Wha?" Here - in the Republic of Ireland - there are no "two communities". As one man said to me, "I didn't even know my friend was Presbyterian until I was invited to his wedding - it never occurred to me to ask."
Northerners are under the impression that Protestants face discrimination in "the South". Absolutely untrue. Nobody has a bull's notion what religion anyone is.
But in Northern Ireland - those six counties still under the jurisdiction of the UK - religion is all-important, and there literally are "two communities", to the extent that this bishop, who has been living and serving in the Republic of Ireland for two years, and studied in Trinity College, Dublin, assumes that Protestants and Catholics are as separate here as in the north.
Is "the war" over in Northern Ireland? I hope so, but I don't know so. In a place with such separation over something so private as religion - a place where (I recently discovered) Catholic and Protestant children do separate exams to qualify for a good secondary school - Protestants and Catholics are as separate as Serbs and Croats. And both are extreme in their thinking; it is normal for Northern Protestant politicians to fulminate against such abominations as gay marriage as forbidden in the Bible.
The shooting war has stopped, for now, but where you have "two communities" there's always the danger of a new outbreak.