Leanna’s Reviews > We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland > Status Update

…The basic gesture of the Belfast Agreement was to accept that Northern Ireland’s future was unknown, that it could not be fixed in advance - and that this was, for most people, okay.

Certitude was what you killed and died for. Doubt was what you could live with.

The vast majority of Irish people had made it clear which option they preferred. “

End of ch. 36:
For once, though, fictions, ambiguities, the capacity to believe opposite things at the same time, had played a benign part in Irish history. Peace was about accepting uncertainty, blurring hard definitions, allowing a fruitful double-mindedness to take the place of a murderous single mindedness.….

“Ours was a society that had developed an extraordinary capacity for cognitive disjunction – a genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time”