Maintaining the solidarity of the EU at all costs has become an end in itself, even if it leads to a no-deal Brexit and a hard border, which is the very outcome it was meant to avoid.

Politically speaking, the Taoiseach remains fortunate. His party is behind him all the way; his bullish stance has proved popular in the polls; the Irish media is pretty much united in scorn against the UK’s decision to leave the EU; and opposition parties have wrapped themselves in the green flag, rather than risk charges of disloyalty by daring to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Ireland should not have been so gung ho about pursuing a path with the potential to go so badly wrong.

It would be easy to blame the EU for pushing Ireland down this blind alley, using the threat of a hard border as leverage against Britain. Worryingly, however, the current mood of rancour towards the UK that has been stirred up by Brexit is more deeply embedded than that.

The Britain which the Irish are now set on repelling to the bitter end is one that exists in the collective consciousness as a folk memory of oppression; a synonym for historic ill‑treatment. That old trope had faded so much in recent times that it was tempting to hope it had gone for good. Now it’s back, and what’s troubling is how this rising tide of Anglophobia is flourishing among the educated, middle-class Irish who would have been aghast until lately to think they still had it in them.

They’ve been given permission to indulge in an old tribal animus, while being assured by their own government that this atavistic backlash is all the fault of the British themselves.

Even if Brussels were to perform one of its traditional “EU-turns” and put pressure on an unsuspecting Dublin to back down on the backstop, Irish opinion right now would still place the blame at Britain’s door.

What’s being forgotten is that it is not Britain which will have to deal with the consequences of any fall‑out from the raking up of ancient hostilities, but Ireland itself. Even moderate unionists in Northern Ireland are being treated again as hostile and alien as an old pan‑nationalist front reasserts itself under the sheltering wing of the EU.