Yes – I WILL keep ‘banging on’ about this. Back when Geoffrey Cox gave his speech to the house as Attorney General in regard to his opinion on May’s ‘deal’ he said to the house, in a clear nod to the DUP and their paramilitary friends, that if there were any ‘civil unrest’ that the protocol could be abandoned. And now, we see the end of the ‘grace period’ with the implementation of the protocol and the DUP ‘warns’ of ‘unrest’ only to have it happen within days. The DUP are simply the political wing of the ‘loyalist terrorists’ of course so there’s no surprise there. They did give some little advance warning. Scrawled graffiti warning individual council workers they would be physically attacked for doing their jobs and the official withdrawal of the group representing the paramilitaries from the GFA. This means, that without the Loyalist Terrorists agreement to be bound by the GFA, they have officially restarted The Troubles.

Meanwhile the Tories are messing about and not knowing what to do whilst the PSNI blames ‘criminal gangs’ Don’t get me wrong, they ARE criminals but this is terrorism, they are organised terrorist groups and they are directing terrorism on the streets of NI by orchestrating these riots in which people are being hurt. Little is ever reported on the mainland but terrorism has never gone away in NI, it only ever slowed down. But for some reason the PSNI seem willing to look the other way and even arrest republicans when we all know this is a Loyalist operation. It’s hard for the PSNI to operate in their own area, they bring their own opinions and prejudices to work, sadly this is often well seen in how they operate.

As there is literally nothing that can be done about this and the Tories will just try to lie their way out of this I fully expect this to become MUCH worse. I think only COVID is perhaps keeping a lid on it – for now.

I feel sorry for the majority in NI. For the obvious reasons (preserving the GFA) they vehemently DIDN’T want Brexit. The DUP, despite the wishes of the majority of those who actually vote for them, campaigned vigorously for it. Since Paisley Sr died there has been a disconnect between the party and those who actually got the GFA up and running (Paisley WAS against it but did commit to implementing power sharing) Ultimately their desire, this small hard core within DUP, was to have a hard border again on the island of Ireland, just as there was before GFA. They had no idea that EU, UK and ROI were never going to allow this and, in fact, they would end up with a couple of extra checks on goods coming from British mainland. It may be too simplistic but I can’t see why all checks can’t be carried out in the outgoing ports and then given seals (in the same way as was done for Channel Tunnel seals) This would remove the site of tension away from NI itself. Of course the DUP and the terrorists they speak for are far too bloody minded to compromise. They would rather bring down the other 90% of NI with them than perceive themselves as having ‘given in’

I don’t hold out much hope here..