A lot of people are sharing this today - which is fair enough since it makes some relevant points - but it doesn't apply exactly to what's happening at the moment, and the reasons it doesn't are important. https://twitter.com/shockproofbeats/status/747362070576898048

The current horror show is certainly underlined by Brexit/Irish Sea Border stuff, but it’s inseprable from the same old cycle of neglect and exploitation Northern Ireland has suffered under from both London and Belfast governments for as long as I've been alive.

Ordinary Northern Irish people again being treated as disposable batteries; faceless, futureless cyphers who can be cajoled, connived, traded and radicalised in the interests of their political leaders.

There should be no equivocation here, this is the DUP’s mess.

The DUP are geared explicitly toward generating, and harnessing, resentments within loyalist communities. It is almost their only function. They create conditions whereby people feel justifiably aggrieved, and redirect said grievances toward targets of their own choosing.

As they oversee and enact disenfranchisement, unemployment and chronic neglect, the DUP offer no blue-sky plan, not even a fake one. Their self-cast role has always been as bitter heralders of horrible foes, who spell a worse fate for loyalists, and who only they can defeat.

Forget the poverty and neglect, focus on Republicans, or even just gaelic games and the Irish language, women seeking reproductive health, the LGBT+, travelers, Muslims, foreigners on housing estates, the EU.

They're not alone in these tactics, but they don't have a Plan B.

That’s how Foster can preside over the venality and incompetence of dark money, billions in Tory bungs and every flip-flop through years of Brexit deals, and blame the EU for where the Irish Sea Border landed.

It’s how she can end a tweet condemning an attempted murder by a loyalist faction and posit Sinn Fein as “the real law breakers”.

The DUP’s gameplan has always been to provoke and rile their base into positions of unsustainable anger. If they can use it to their advantage; good. If it spills over into something unpleasant; “this is not what we meant, but remember to keep hating the people we talked about”.

It's one of the things that's most depressing about the current braindead anti-woke culture war shite that's seized British politics and huge sections of its press - it's just the same remedial divide and conquer nonsense we've seen in NI for decades. It's mortifying bollocks.

Framing all this solely in terms of Brexit is, to be honest, insulting. Name the decades' worth of tensions and grievances it springs from. The neglect, pain and provocation. Give Johnson his blame, by all means, but name his co-conspirators, and the fires they've started, first.

That thread, written a couple days after the referendum five years ago, was about how little voters considered Northern Ireland with the Brexit vote. Its main focus was on the fact that NI had a porous EU border, and how Irish-identifying citizens would react to that being shut.

The two things are connected, of course, but different in many ways. Also I wrote it very angry and it's pretty over-earnest. I have since hardened my heart into a black, calloused thing and try not to be so furious online. Same with numbering threads. It was a different time.

But my overarching point wasn't that unrest would definitely happen, it was that this was never even raised in any of the debates. It wasn't even considered, because Northern Ireland is so resolutely neglected and disdained, the UK forgot it had a land border with the EU.

It seems weird that this was the case since everyone in England proceeded to spend the next five years working on armchair doctorates on international border legislation, the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process, but none of those things had ever been raised beforehand.

So if the take away is that we tried to tell you then, listen to what we're saying now. The situation is more complex than Westminster politicking. There's plenty of blame to go around, just make sure to apportion it wisely.