About 18 months ago I interviewed a senior UVF man who lived through the entirety of the Troubles. He made two observations on technology that have stuck with me and may be relevant just now.

1) It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to carry out a paramilitary campaign today given the electronic surveillance tools available to the state.

2) How fortunate it is that social media didn't exist back then, given the role that rumours played in sparking trouble.

"Facts" circulated by the pre-digital 1969 jungle drums, helping raise the temperature to boiling point, included:

"Jack Lynch is ordering the Irish Army over the border to take Derry and Strabane and force UN intervention"

"There are 6000 men in the UVF, each with an automatic weapon, with arms dumps in every county!" (even otherwise sensible people - like Ivan Cooper - repeated this one)

"Every Prod rioter in a black leather jacket is actually a UVF man directing the action" (the "leather jacket men" as they were dubbed)

"The UVF/IRA have a fleet of fishing boats and are bringing in guns through Kilkeel/Bantry/etc"

Doing research on 1969 a while back, a couple of things struck me...

1) Although it appears so in retrospect, none of what happened then was inevitable...

2) To a great extent the violence was talked into existence. Militants - actually few in number - with their direct, simplistic messages, were allowed to monopolise things, destroying the middle ground, leaving the peaceable majority no room to manoeuvre.

At the moment most of the hyperbole and ill-advised shit-talk seems to be coming from outside NI. I voted against Brexit; I always believed it would weaken and destabilise the UK, but please, no more from the pop-up instant experts in GB declaring the Troubles Redux underway.

Otherwise unconcerned with NI these people are the worst pests of all, often feigning concern yet secretly filled with a gleeful masturbatory schadenfreude, and fucking ignorant with it.