For Brexit’s true believers, Ireland will always be the spoke in the wheel that set everything off course, the green tarnish that took the shine off the golden age. Without the vengeful and malicious obstructionism of the Irish, all the promises of freedom and prosperity would have been fulfilled.

To understand how nonsensical this is, it is necessary to go back five years before the referendum of 2016. Back, that is, to the sense of an ending. In May 2011, Queen Elizabeth made a four-day state visit to Ireland. This should not have been remarkable – the heads of state of neighbouring countries visit each other all the time. But no reigning British monarch had set foot in what is now the Republic for almost exactly a century.

The weight of too much history pressed on these formalities – too much condescension, too much resentment, too many raw nerves. But the queen’s visit, when it finally came, was an exquisitely choreographed exercise in statecraft. It was obvious that the British state had thought very deeply about how it would make clear that Ireland and the UK now related to each other as equals.

For many of us in Ireland, this felt like an exorcism. The ghosts of a colonial past were banished and with them went the demons of Anglophobia. The ordinary experiences of adjacent islands whose people’s lives are deeply entwined through family and friendship, through culture and commerce, could now be the political realities too.

This moment didn’t come from nowhere. Two big things had made it possible. One was the extremely close cooperation........

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