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. The folks for whom the jeer ‘Get a Life!’ might have been specifically coined, members of the New IRA — aka the Real IRA, the Not Those Guys, the Other Guys IRA or the Truly, No Foolin’, This Time We Mean It IRA — persist in sufficiently low numbers as to be downgraded to a mental health problem. The holdouts might best be exiled to some Butlins-style holiday camp on an island where long-lived Samurais are still fighting the second world war. For the fifth-largest economy in the world to design its whole trade policy around the appeasement of this delusional riffraff beggars belief.
Yet, executing a dizzying 180 meant to strike horror in the British heart, the chief spin doctor for Jean-Claude Juncker announced last week that, with no deal, the EU would indeed insist on an Irish border with infrastructure.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in