SOME in the Republic, largely because the new Europe might fret about the border, now voice anxiety that Brexit will endanger our scratchy peace.
Rebuilt customs posts would make a new target for dissident republicans but Brexit in itself would have nothing to do with it. Angst about renewing more major violence is no paper argument. The guns have never truly stopped. Sad evidence enough shows an apparently unstoppable current of anti-politics.
One or two gunmen shot a 43 year old called Joe Reilly dead in his own home in Poleglass last Thursday night, the second shooting in the same couple of streets inside four days, the first an apparent `punishment' attack in which a 56 year old man was shot six times.
Commenting on the Reilly killing, People Before Profit councillor Matt Collins said on Thursday night that he was "deeply disturbed by this senseless and unjustifiable attack".
Alliance MLA Trevor Lunn said evil actions had left a family without a loved one. Sinn Féin MLA Jennifer McCann and SDLP MLA Alex Attwood interviewed at the spot said, respectively, "this is a good community and there's no support for this" and that it had "brutally undermined the rule of law".
In other words public representatives went through the condemnation ritual begun decades ago that hardened almost immediately into iron convention. (It was broken once in my memory by a well-known politician, who said, through what sounded like tears, something like `use your own words, I've done this too often, I can't think'.)
Circumstances alone feed speculation that dissidents killed Joe Reilly. Neither forensics nor witnesses are needed to know that it had nothing to do with Brexit. Nor that it was pointless and cruel like all other violent, `security-related' deaths as the PSNI website calls them. Or that it hasn't brought a united Ireland a centimetre closer than the rest of the 3,700-plus death-toll.
Apart from taking a man's life and causing heartbreak what this killing does is underline what a mess the dissidents are. Joe Reilly's, as this paper noted, was the seventh violent northern death this year, all in Belfast. John Boreland loyalist paramilitary was shot by another loyalist. Adrian Ismay was a prison officer. Dissidents of one or other stripe are probably responsible for five of the deaths.
A "cold-blooded summary execution", said the PSNI officer tasked to the case, struggling to describe the scene. Decades back, and under constant criticism that the tone of reporting could help paramilitaries to justify their violence, journalism abandoned `execution' because only properly constituted states could claim the right to execute.
It was a shaky enough piece of reasoning, arrived at under considerable pressure. Today's northern police have their own pressures. Ground lost on Catholic membership, feebleness against loyalist paramilitaries, inability to close down dissidents despite arrests and infiltration and although they lack widespread support. PSNI `security-related' violence statistics leave out killings widely recognised as having been by IRA members, and indeed by dissidents; the Davison and McGuigan deaths that caused a fleeting political crisis; Paul Quinn.
Just as the IRA wrecked the argument for what eventually came to be called mainstream republicanism, the violence of a jumble of Real and other late-version IRAs have devalued their case against settling for Stormont. Whatever Stormont's feebleness, it was always going to be better than killing and maiming and blowing streets to bits.
The increasing number of at least semi-political fronts criticising the mainstream just might signal growing despair about the point of violence. Sinn Féin's big names jeer about criminal micro-groups, and it's true that their support has not grown. But the sheer messiness of the dissidents, splintering and general incoherence are a distraction.
In among those PSNI statistics, talked down in accompanying commentary that detects positive trends, is evidence enough of threat in Derry and Belfast, repeatedly regenerating; guns and explosives recovered, bombs made safe, near-misses close to causing deaths. Police successes are not deterrent enough.
Fewer security related incidents over the past 10 years as against the previous decade, say the PSNI, the fewest shootings in the past year since 1969 "which contributed to the lowest number of casualties as a result of paramilitary style shootings since 2007-8." But this year to date more people have died in security-related violence than over the previous 12 months, or in each of the previous 11 years.
The DUP-backed Dee Stitt boasts of UDA `homeland security', what the dissidents also claim to provide. Politically-inhibited police have more statistics than clout. Brexit doesn't figure.
