For nineteen years, British media ignored one of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom. From 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, until 2017, when the Democratic Unionist Party were given the balance of power in Westminster, coverage of Northern Ireland was sporadic at best.
Senior political journalists would confuse the DUP and the Ulster Unionist Party, few had any understanding of why Sinn Féin wouldn’t take their seats at Westminster and little effort went into helping British audiences understand the post-conflict Northern Ireland. Talk to most people in England about the place and those who knew it was part of the UK would usually assume it had gone back to something called ‘normal’, whatever that means.
In reality, Northern Irish politics never returned to anything you could call normal.
