“Why isn’t he called Murphy like all the rest of them?” asked Boris Johnson, referring to An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, and in a morbid sort of way we should appreciate his honesty. A British Parliamentarian, particularly of the Conservative Party, revealing some profound stupidity about Ireland has been an annual event for the last three years. Whether Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Karen Bradley. Yet few have expressed their ignorance with such honesty, which is about the only thing Johnson is honest about.

One primary legacy of the Brexit saga has been to return Anglo-Irish relations to its default position, which, for most of the last millennium, was defined by contention, hostility, and outright war.  The period immediately after the Good Friday Agreement, up until the referendum on the UK membership of the EU was very much the exception to the rule.

The island of Ireland and Britain have always formed shared close economic ties, as much as and for much the same reason as Britain shares such ties with continental Europe. The foremost reason the Republic of Ireland joined the EEC was because its largest trading partner had already done so.

Yet this will also change, as Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Simon Conveney has already announced that an office within his Department has been established in order to seek closer relations with France, once the UK has left the EU.

This should strike historical parallels in the minds of the inclined, as it was the fear that the island of Ireland could be used as a launchpad for French invasion of Britain which served as a primary reason for British domination over the country. The last time that the Irish sought better relations with France also served as the precursor to the Act of Union 1800.

As conflicts fall through time, along with those who lived them, they are demoted from life to a historical event, which is only really considered in an arbitrary and philosophical sense. Such is the case for the United Irish rebellion, as well as the War of Independence.

The 1798 rebellion is now a subject for poetry and song, forever in our universal mind in a word cloud consisting of the good and noble concepts of ‘liberté, egalité, and fraternité’. However, it is estimated that as a result of the few months of fighting somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 people were killed.

The political effect of the rebellion was that militant republicanism would not be seriously considered until the end of the century. The language of violence, which was effectively utilised by Daniel O’Connell for political effect, had never gone away (you know). It was not until the long period of Westminster inertia over Home Rule that violence itself would make a comeback.

There seems to a consensus that takes peace for granted, in much the same way that people took economic prosperity prior to the 2007 crash for granted. In the same way economists believed they new better than their forbearers of 1929, we are slowly putting the Troubles back into the same mental filing cabinet in which we keep Napoléon, the Black Death, and video recorders.

Were we for a moment to take a step back and take a look at the full view of human history, more than the mere microcosm our own lives contain, a realist could not help but argue it is only a matter of time before the next conflict.

It may not be in our lifetimes, but it will more than likely be in the lifetimes of our children, especially if we continue to drink down the unhealthy concoction of inertia and incompetence which Stormont and Westminster currently brew.

There are, of course, signs that the uncertain peace of 1998 has already begun to fray around the edges, with deadlock at Stormont and the resulting “political endgame,” as Alex Kane described it, where moderates of both traditions seem to be retreating into the further field camps of Sinn Féin and the DUP.  One small, anecdotal, example came from a recent drive through the Meada in Newry in which I noticed that “IRA: Unfinished Revolution” had been stencilled onto a wall. When I was a child, that same wall read “Free Tracey Barlow.”

This is purely speculative, but a healthy mix of historical realism and precursory imagination are deftly needed and sorely lacking from public life.

As politicians today continue to debate how to deal with the legacy of the Troubles, they should cast an eye a head of them and wonder how the public figures and historians of the future will analyse come to analyse the next conflict, and chiefly what their own role in it was.

It could be said that the divisive strategies of partitionists such as Craig and de Valera played a hand in what came to pass in 1969, which we remember the fiftieth anniversary of this year.

Today, who have taken their place?