LISTENING to know-alls elsewhere holding forth about the Border is a pain, especially if you live on one side of it and work on the other, or cross it back and forward every day to see your mother, do your shopping or milk the cows.
Now the know-alls call it bad-minded nonsense to fret out loud that Brexit customs checks along those scores of border roads just might damage peace.
The harm is already done. This rubbishing of reasonable fears comes on top of DUP deal-denial, a masterclass in mistrust aggravation. Arguing that black is white creates acute mistrust.
Brexit negotiations may be contradictory and repetitious and childish, and that's only the British Cabinet end of them.
It has been clear from the start that the UK cannot leave the European Union without their exit affecting the Border with a capital B - as this island and even the next-door neighbour without embarrassment habitually refer to it, as though it is the only one in the world.
But then for almost a century it has been a source of pain, disadvantage, and murderous ambushes.
Unionists and politicians in Britain insisting that border traffic will scarcely be affected have the nerve to dismiss fears that any form of checks will provide targets for renewed violence.
Of course the peace process is not in danger, says Sammy Wilson - hitherto unable to even say the words 'peace process' in a neutral voice, like many others.
But those who rubbish the anxiety are Brexiteers, and this is a crusade. Most if not all of them opposed the arrangements formalised in the Good Friday Agreement as a 'reward for republican terrorism'.
Wasn't it a project generated by nationalists? The rubbisher voices are very predictable. The GFA had 'served its purpose', tweeted former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Owen Paterson.
An Irish government with little innate sense of the north, unionist or nationalist, can still smell danger in bringing a once-fortified zone back into contention, let alone dismissing the trade-off and ambiguity of April 1998.
They face ignorant British Brexiteers who have taken up the 'weaponising' slur that unionists applied to Irish.
Now it is used against the otherwise unanswerable EU argument that a 'frictionless' border is incompatible with leaving the customs union and single market.
But the 'peace process' was never a finished article. It has needed work all along. One dangerously neglected aspect is the Catholic share of the PSNI - shrinking ever since unionist lobbying succeeded in having the 50/50 recruitment policy dropped... by Owen Paterson.
Most people can screen out danger most of the time and the past can seem very far away. But this is a relative peace, not a comfortable peace.
Only the least engaged and most complacent could regard it as safe. Catholic recruits, particularly targeted by the bitter remnants of dissident republicanism, move home for safety and try to keep their occupation secret.
Policewomen and men still check under their cars. Since Good Friday '98 the PSNI count approximately 150 'security related' violent deaths. The dead include two of their own men, British soldiers, prison officers.
They list 25 bombings last year, 57 'shooting incidents' over the 12 months to January 31 2018, 72 'paramilitary style assaults' from February 2017 to January 2018. There have been many foiled attacks.
But unionist politicians dismiss police worries that renewed border checks are more than likely to provide targets.
The upheaval and uncertainty of Brexit has sharpened community divisions, north/south division, Ireland-UK division.
This is a fraught time to be demonstrating complacence, with greater nationalist confidence and assertiveness set against greater unionist insecurity, with demographics the needle that unionist bluster cannot make disappear.
David Cameron gambled and lost on the Brexit referendum, Theresa May gambled and lost the Tory majority.
But the DUP threw in their lot with her with not so much as a nod to the north's majority for Remain, with the foggiest of wishful thinking, or refusal to think, about the likely outcome for the north's already woeful economy.Plus, total disregard for the possible impact on a peace many always insisted was 'bought' at too high a price.
Devolution looks unlikely for the foreseeable future. It may have been a poor thing, but it existed after a fashion and now it does not.
Mainstream republicans turned from a military campaign to a political process and shared government. Now there is not even a pretence at a shared government.
This is a risky time, in the hands of shallow fantasists.
