There was a time once, or so the fantasy went, when “The Irish Question” — as the real landed gentry of two centuries ago liked to refer to the problem of, well, us — seemed more or less resolved. Sure, there were occasional moments of idiocy, like when I made a mistake at work and a colleague responded by putting on a comic Irish accent and doing a bumbling-peasant impression. Sure, the English still loved to make the occasional potato joke. (You know the one: Ha-ha, you guys love potatoes — remember, the things that all rotted before a million of you died of starvation?) And yes, it was consistently surprising how many English people were shocked and offended to discover that an Irish person might feel some animosity toward their country.

But there was an idea not so long ago, even among many Irish, that it was time to move on. We were all going to be European together forever, after all, and we ought to at least try to smooth over our differences.

Post-Brexit, however, this relatively recent sense of equanimity is being put to the test.

The extent to which many English people are ignorant about Ireland has become painfully clear. Crucial questions about how to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic — a border abolished in the Good Friday Agreement, the reintroduction of which would be inextricably associated with the preceding decades of violence and unrest — remain unresolved, months before Brexit is slated to become official. (Perhaps that’s in part because they were being dismissed as “this Irish stuff” by the likes of the former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith as late as last winter, even as people on both sides of the border pleaded for a solution.) The secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Karen Bradley, recently admitted with startling candor that she didn’t know basic facts about the politics of the region where she is in charge: that nationalists — those who seek a united Ireland — won’t vote for unionist parties, and vice versa. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the arcane M.P. who looks as though he has been extracted from the nightmare of a Victorian child, has suggested bringing back border checks “as we had during the Troubles.”

In the midst of all this, I’ve noticed a tonal shift in the way I and other Irish people speak about the English. Our anger is more sincere. We are more ready to call them out on all those centuries of excess, more likely to object to those pink-trousered, pink-faced dinosaurs who still perceive us as their inferiors. I found myself genuinely breathless with anger when I read the Conservative M.P. Andrew Bridgen’s recent comments assuming he would be entitled to an Irish passport post-Brexit. How can it be possible that a member of Parliament in 2018 still believes that Ireland is nothing but a resource to be drawn from and discarded at will? I once laughed at their cluelessness. But I don’t find it funny anymore, how they think of us — or often, how they don’t bother to think of us at all.