Why reawaken the IRA?

When politics goes round in circles, the columnist inevitably revisits issues that would have been sorted if only everyone read The Spectator. So: back to the Irish border — a demarcation that takes up no geographical space, but has still mysteriously dominated a dozen years of my life. Oh, well. What’s one more afternoon, then?

Derry’s recent car bomb underscores a curious omission in all the Brexit argy-bargy about a ‘hard border’. Throughout, neither May, nor Barnier, nor even Varadkar ever utters the letters I, R and A. Yet the scummy residue of this vanquished potato blight lies at the heart of the hysteria about hypothetical border infrastructure that could present a ‘target’. Decorously, no one ever says target for whom.

Today’s vestigial Republican militants comprise drug dealers, petty criminals, Provisional lifers miffed that a career in terrorism doesn’t pay a pension, and wannabe hikikomori holed up in bedrooms over spittle-flecked computers.