Winston Churchill called the train that smuggled Vladimir Lenin into Russia, “a sealed truck” carrying “a plague bacillus”. By contrast, the plane carrying Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson to Belfast this week was a bit more like a Tupperware container filled with norovirus.

Conveyed at separate ends of a single private jet, Schrödinger’s leadership candidates took the roadshow of milky promises and hedged half-truths to Northern Ireland for a strange, and quietly pointless, Conservative party hustings in Belfast.

To a less-than-enthused crowd of several dozen, they set out their case for leadership of a party for whom only a miniscule percentage of the local population has ever voted. In all my time growing up in Northern Ireland I never once met someone who had. Just five weeks ago, the country’s sole Tory candidate, Amandeep Singh Bhogal, acquired a desultory count of 662 votes in the European elections which, even accounting for low turnout, is the kind of tally you’d manage if you pinned a rosette to a jar of wasps.

Both leadership contenders were uninspiring. Hunt was slick in the neutered, tedious way of a hotshot sales executive giving the keynote at a conference for people who sell lanyards. Johnson did that shaggy-dog, waffling vicar act that only really works when he’s in a good mood. Here, with the life sucked from his eyes, his stumbles and prevarications seemed rote and joyless – even his tiredness seemed performative, like the showy exhaustion of a self-possessed family friend charged with talking to the media when a backpacker is arrested overseas.

What unites both is their inability to pretend they care about issues facing Northern Irish people, and more especially how those issues relate to the rest of the UK. Both reject any change to Northern Ireland’s draconian reproductive rights, just a week after legal proceedings began against a woman for procuring abortion pills, and both dismiss any suggestion that marriage equality would be extended to the entirety of the UK. Most striking of all, both offer low-fat answers to the border issue that hinge on “technical solutions” without ever getting too technical about what those solutions might actually be.

Johnson has mooted the idea of “Singapore style” tax-free zone, essentially a revenue cheat’s paradise where imports wouldn’t be subject to checks. He has declined to address how this haven would interface with the Republic of Ireland, which would be entitled – in fact obliged – to institute such checks themselves.

‘Boris Johnson did that waffling vicar act that only really works when he’s in a good mood. Here, with the life sucked from his eyes, his stumbles and prevarications seemed rote and joyless.’ Photograph: Pool/Reuters

The problem is, for decades Northern Irish people have been sidelined, annexed to our own tiny corner of news coverage that paints us as a one-issue flank of flighty, tribal simpletons: people for whom even the slightest provocation might cause us to protest, bomb, or daub a truly awful mural on the side of our own home. Like almost everyone from Northern Ireland, I too enjoy lampooning the place, and the fossils and madmen that litter its political sphere. It’s just that it’s frankly odd to see us now being the ones talking sense while no one else listens.

Even the more sympathetic organs of the mainstream British media have a tendency to report on the region through a reductive and patrician lens, and it’s rare to hear Northern Irish commentators articulating their position on TV or in newspapers. The lack of invested and informed coverage of our concerns may go some way to explaining why the border issue – understood by the farmers and petrol station attendants who grew up beside me in rural Derry – appears to have taken so many seasoned politicians and commentators by surprise. I once thought Brexiters were downplaying the threat of a hard border out of callous indifference. This was an unfair assessment, since I now know they had simply never realised that the UK had a 300-mile border with the EU, and the callous indifference only kicked in once this was explained to them.

And this disregard has only grown, since it is much more expedient for them to ignore the issue than admit it exists. Accountability has collapsed and, uncoupled from any responsibility toward telling the truth, or even making sense, the Conservative party is locked in a nonsensical debate about how best to navigate the flat earth they’ve mapped for themselves. It allows them to toss off placeholder text like “technical solution”, where once policy would have been demanded.

And it works, since the messaging is effective within the fact-vacuum of home counties conservatism, where non-negotiable withdrawal agreements can, in fact, be renegotiated and huge, lasting damage to the UK’s economy is a price worth paying for the right to be poorer for decades afterwards. More worrying for the party’s Ulster supporters – and their fellow travellers within the DUP – is when asked to accept the premise that a hard border would pose an existential threat to either Brexit or the union, a clear majority of leavers now say they would happily help their Ulster cousins pack their bags.

For Northern Irish people, this failure to acknowledge what a border is, and how every border on Earth has ever worked, was Brexit’s original sin – the first dead canary in the caved-in coalmine of nonsense British politics has since become. Northern Ireland has long been regarded as a dribbling basket case with a retrograde polity of cranks and dinosaurs, so dysfunctional that it is currently in its 906th day of suspended government. It’s miraculous that Westminster has debased itself so fully that we now appear to be the adults in the room, presenting stubborn facts and inconvenient truths, that have been studiously, and perilously, ignored.

• Séamas O’Reilly is a writer from Derry