Does Boris Johnson even care about what’s happening in Northern Ireland?

The echoes from the 30 years of Northern Ireland’s Troubles are loud. On Wednesday night, seven police officers were reported injured in Belfast, a bus was torched and its driver and a journalist were attacked. At least one of the city’s so-called “peace gates” was breached, and there was violence elsewhere in the province, too. The  UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, put out a statement on Twitter, saying he was “deeply concerned” and piously prescribing “dialogue, not violence or criminality” as “the way to resolve differences”.

Quite so. A week before, though, when the violence first erupted, you would have been hard put to find anything much being said in the worlds of politics or the media beyond Northern Ireland itself. Having heard a brief mention on, I think, London’s LBC early last Saturday, I switched to the BBC for some detail – but nothing. On the BBC News website, I had to burrow as far as the Northern Ireland section to find any mention of the disturbances. On that night’s News at Ten, the BBC reported that there was now “more rioting” in west Belfast. More? Where was the news the first time around?

It was not until Monday and even Tuesday that the rest of the UK was being given more than an inkling of what was happening, and why, in what is – still – an integral part of the United Kingdom. A report from Sima Kotecha on BBC’s Newsnight on Tuesday finally made a decent stab at it. By now the violence was into its fifth day. And still, the politicians were holding back.

Nor was I alone in questioning especially the BBC coverage (or lack of it); social media commentators asked why single-issue “Kill the Bill” and anti-lockdown protests in Cardiff, London and Bristol were getting all the attention, while events in Belfast seemed to be getting none. This, despite the fact that any trouble in Northern Ireland, still more at this time of year – Good Friday Agreement, Easter Rising, anyone? – was likely to have much deeper roots and be potentially far more destabilising in its effects.

It was also what some on both sides of the Irish Sea had been gloomily forecasting, as arrangements for Northern Ireland proved time and again the stumbling block to any Brexit agreement. Whether it was the Brexit treaty agreed by Theresa May, its chequered passage through parliament, or the trade deal eventually concluded by Boris Johnson at the eleventh hour, time and again the nail-biting moment turned on Northern Ireland.

Theresa May’s need for support after her ill-judged 2017 election gave Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party an effective veto over any settlement they opposed – a veto that it did not hesitate to use, even though Northern Ireland as a whole had voted against Brexit at the referendum. The on-off compromise on a “backstop” was May’s solution, but one she could not, in the end, get through the House of Commons.

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Taking over in the summer of 2019, Johnson took another tack; he ditched the DUP and the Tory Remainers to get the agreement through parliament, and the size of his subsequent electoral victory allowed him to finalise a trade deal that set the customs border with the EU down the Irish Sea. The unrest that has erupted now – orchestrated (as some claim) or not – is the logical, perhaps inevitable, consequence of that decision.

The choice was contested at the time, and it will be contested again, but choice there had to be. The UK’s membership of the EU, and with it of the single market,  facilitated a fudge – and it was a fudge – that all but eliminated the land border between the two parts of Ireland. Brexit spelled the end of that fudge. There would have to be a customs border; the only question was where it would run. Johnson regarded a land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic as the greater evil, as did the Republic of Ireland, the Remain majority in Northern Ireland, and many of us watching from the other side of the Irish Sea.

But the sea border has consequences, just different consequences. In avoiding a “hard” land border, the new arrangements could not but alienate Northern Ireland’s Protestant unionists. Just a month after the agreement came into force, threats were reported against officials at Northern Ireland ports checking goods arriving from mainland Britain. As of last week, actual violence has erupted in some of the very same flashpoints so familiar to those of us growing up and reporting when the Troubles in Northern Ireland seemed to be an interminable and immutable fact of life.

It has also revealed what many knew, but preferred not to say. For all the benefits of peace over the past 23 years, and for all that the Good Friday Agreement is lauded the world over as a model of conflict resolution, reconciliation is another matter. Those so-called “peace gates” permit controlled passage between walled enclaves that have left Belfast’s Protestants and Catholics more secure, but as divided residentially as ever. For a “peace gate” to have been torn down is a breach as symbolic as it is real.

One question now is how far, even whether, the current violence can be curbed without a severe clampdown or even a return to direct rule. It is being put down to causes as various as resentment over an allegedly rules-busting Sinn Fein funeral last summer for which no one was punished, to the shortages of certain imported goods earlier this year because of new customs red tape, to the new arrangements at ports, and a wider sense among Protestants that they have been let down by London.

Uncertainty may be one reason why Westminster politicians have been as reluctant as the media to pronounce. How profound is the breakdown of law and order? Can it be “switched off” as readily as it seems to have been “switched on”? Will saying too much risk making a bad, but limited, situation worse?

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I wonder, though, whether there are not two other considerations. In the first instance, Boris Johnson appears to have delegated responsibility for what happens next to Northern Ireland’s devolved government and its current first minister, Arlene Foster. Foster, I feel, carries considerable blame for the current situation. Had she not thwarted Theresa May’s “backstop”, that “softer” Brexit might have passed. And why Foster then seemingly acquiesced in Johnson’s trade deal leaves me as flummoxed now as it did at the time. Now, it seems, Foster is being given a chance to sort out the mess she, some might say, has largely created. It is a gamble that may or may not pay off.

The second – and related – consideration is that politics in the rest of the UK and in Westminster has moved on. Interest in Northern Ireland’s fractious politics has waned since the 1990s and how far even the Conservative Party can be called unionist any more must be in doubt. A 2019 poll showed a majority of party members would choose Brexit above preserving the union – with Northern Ireland the devolved nation they cared least about. Boris Johnson, for his part, seems far more concerned about the possible loss of Scotland than he does about Northern Ireland.

Will Belfast get the message that Westminster really does not care about keeping Northern Ireland in the union and that it would not be averse – perhaps less averse than Dublin? – to a border poll on a united Ireland? Northern Ireland’s unionists, of course, would see that as a betrayal. But to what lengths would they, could they, go to stop it? It should not be excluded that a border poll becomes the final act of the Good Friday Agreement.