BELFAST — A car bomb on the streets of most British cities would be big news. National TV reporters would be rushed to the scene. Front pages would carry dramatic images. Politicians would be pressured to tighten security.

But that didn't happen following the bomb on Saturday evening in Derry (also known as Londonderry), close to the western border of Northern Ireland. Instead, British and European media treated it, for the most part, with something of a shrug. "These things happen in Northern Ireland," the TV strap-line might have read.

Meanwhile, few people are asking in the aftermath of the attack whether the long-running political crisis that has brought the Stormont assembly to a standstill and the Westminster impasse over Brexit have anything to do with it. They should be.

The past 72 hours have seen one of the worst outbreaks of violence in Northern Ireland’s second city in two decades. The car bomb exploded outside a courthouse in the city center, narrowly missing a group of young people who walked past the vehicle before it exploded. The bomb, which police blame on militant group the New IRA, was followed by two hijackings of vans by masked men, raising fears of a new campaign by dissident republicans to bring about a united Ireland by force.

Such car bombs are a rarity since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (the BBC records the last one as happening in February 2017), which largely brought an end to a decades-long conflict between mostly Protestant unionists and largely Catholic nationalists over Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom.

Today, Derry remains an outlier in unemployment and poverty in the United Kingdom.

But old divisions and tensions remain below the surface and minor security alerts are frequent. Dissident paramilitaries from both sides of the conflict, both Irish republicans and pro-British loyalists, remain active and are still recruiting. Particularly in Derry, some of the elements that first set the stage for conflict remain in place. In this context, Brexit is not a direct cause of the violence, but could serve as an accelerant.

Split city

Even the name of the city divides its residents. To nationalists it is just Derry, from the Irish word doire, meaning oak grove. Unionists use Londonderry, the prefix being added when London livery companies organized its rebuilding as a settler town in the 17th century.

The same stone walls that were first built to protect Protestant settlers have been added to year upon year, and are now topped with layers of modern tall fencing and wire mesh to form a barrier against inter-community violence.

This was the city where the conflict in Northern Ireland first broke out, beginning in the 1960s with civil rights marches that demanded equal voting rights, housing, jobs and education for Catholics, who faced systemic discrimination by the unionist-dominated administration. Police reacted violently and unrest spiraled, spreading to Belfast. The government in Westminster sent in British troops who met resistance from a revived Provisional Irish Republican Army, beginning a conflict that would kill over 3,500 and injure tens of thousands.

Today, Derry remains an outlier in unemployment and poverty in the United Kingdom. It was economically isolated by Irish partition in 1921, which cut it off from its natural hinterland in County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. And it has suffered chronic under-investment, lacking a motorway connection to Belfast and a university — both are often seen as the legacy of discrimination toward the Catholic-majority city.

In a prelude to the current violence, there were several nights of rioting in the city last summer in the buildup to July 12, a celebration of a 17th century Protestant military victory that can be a flashpoint for violence. Mobs of young people in the catholic Bogside area launched petrol bomb attacks on police and the Protestant enclave of the Fountain. They also hijacked and burned a van in an apparent attempt to goad police into a confrontation.

Violence also broke out not long after for separate reasons in loyalist areas in and around Belfast. In both cases, dissident paramilitaries are believed to have orchestrated violence mostly carried out by teenagers, showing the ability of militant groups to influence a younger generation with no memory of "the Troubles."

Brexit divide

Where does Brexit feature in all this? Its effect is indirect, but important.

The referendum in Northern Ireland was split along ethno-religious lines. The majority of voters rejected Brexit. Yet among Catholics and Irish-identifying voters, opposition to Brexit was overwhelming, while a majority of those identifying as Protestants and unionists backed Leave, according to a Queen's University Belfast survey.

The uncertainty of the negotiations, combined with the alliance between the Conservative Party and the hard-line Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party in Westminster, has prevented the reestablishment of a power-sharing government in Stormont. This arrangement, a key part of the peace deal that forces unionists and nationalists to rule together, has now been defunct for two years.

The issue of rights and inequality between communities has also been reopened by Brexit.

In its absence, the governance of Northern Ireland is in stasis at a time of urgent need. Communities lack a political route for redress, particularly nationalists, as Northern Ireland’s seven Sinn Féin MPs do not take up their Westminster seats (as they refuse to recognize the U.K. parliament's right to legislate in Northern Ireland).

Nationalists feel that Brexit and its political aftermath have only confirmed their opinion that Westminster has little regard for their interests. Despite the high stakes for Northern Ireland, as a delicate post-conflict society where any change to the border would cause real risks to peace, the impact on the region hardly featured in the referendum campaign.

Its relevance only seemed to be accepted by senior members of the British Cabinet very late on in the Brexit negotations, and with much bafflement and reluctance.

That sense of a casual disregard in Westminster was compounded by a report on the front page of the Telegraph two days after the Derry bomb claiming that ministers searching for a way out of the Brexit impasse have considered reopening the Good Friday Agreement. (The bomb itself received four sentences of coverage on Page 4.)

The idea behind the plan (since denied by Downing Street) was reportedly to renegotiate the peace deal in order to remove the need for a Northern Ireland backstop in the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. To many in Northern Ireland, the idea of reopening a deal that is widely viewed as a near-miraculous achievement to fix a Brexit that people there didn't vote for displays a callous recklessness.

The issue of rights and inequality between communities has also been reopened by Brexit. The peace deal allowed those born in Northern Ireland to choose British nationality, Irish nationality or both.

It is unclear whether Irish citizens in the jurisdiction after Brexit will retain the identical rights they have now, in being able to freely work and study throughout the EU. They will lose their political representation by MEPs, and there is concern about the U.K. government’s ambitions to throw off the jurisdiction of the European courts, which have been a last recourse to justice for people in Northern Ireland in the past.

In short, it is inevitable that Brexit will create inequity between those with British and Irish nationality, as one group will be EU citizens and one will not. It is as yet unclear how, but it is almost certain to be politically destabilizing.

Naomi O'Leary is a journalist who hosts The Irish Passport Podcast.