![Karen Bradley was named secretary of state for Northern Ireland in January [File: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Media via Getty Images]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2018/9/7/5238c5269de94e6099fe4ee219b32b63_18.jpg?w=696&ssl=1)
The UK’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland has come under fire after admitting that she lacked a basic understanding of the region’s politics when she took on the role earlier this year.
In an interview to The House, a magazine for the UK Houses of Parliament, Karen Bradley acknowledged that she “didn’t understand some of the deep-seated and deep-rooted issues that there are in Northern Ireland”, including that “people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice-versa”.
Northern Ireland, which has been riven with sectarian tensions for generations, has been without a power-sharing executive – a key part of a 1998 peace deal – for 20 months.
Its government collapsed in January 2017 in the wake of a financial scandal involving the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister, resigned in protest and subsequent elections saw his Irish nationalists Sinn Fein party almost win power.
Talks to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly at the Stormont Estate near Belfast have since stalled, and the political deadlock recently saw Northern Ireland overtaking Belgium’s 589-day record of being without an elected government.
As the UK government’s ranking official on issues related to Northern Ireland, Bradley has been tasked with leading the efforts to restore power-sharing to the region. She replaced James Brokenshire in January and inherited a litany of problems, including ending the political stalemate and the future of the Irish-UK border.
On Friday, politicians in Northern Ireland reacted with dismay to Bradley’s published remarks, accusing her of adding to the troubled atmosphere of the region’s politics.
“We are not surprised that a British government minister did not understand the intricacies of politics here in the North,” Colum Eastwood, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, told Al Jazeera.
“The British and Irish governments, as co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement, need to meet urgently to agree a package of legislation to get Stormont back up and running. We cannot continue in this political…
