The desire to punish UK for Brexit remains as strong as ever

Before and after the Brexit referendum, Dublin politicians dangerously over-hyped the prospect of the UK leaving the EU somehow restarting Irish republican violence, particularly on the border.

In doing so, leading figures in parties such as Fine Gael, who should have known better, conjured up the spectre of a supposedly dormant Anglophobia in the Republic. The net effect of which was to set back, until then, ever improving relations between unionists and the Irish political classes in the south.

In recent times, there have been some attempts by Dublin political leaders, most notably the Taoiseach Micheál Martin, to tone down the Brexit-Brit-bashing rhetoric in a bid to rebuild bridges between them and the pro-Union community in Northern Ireland.

So, it is depressing to hear a senior member of the largest party in the Irish coalition, Fine Gael, issuing a bellicose warning to the UK that if the next prime minister unilaterally changes the Union-threatening protocol then Brussels will strike back with legal retaliatory action.

As DUP MP Gavin Robinson reminds Ireland South MEP Sean Kelly in this newspaper today, all unionists are opposed to the protocol and gave his party a mandate to stay out of Stormont’s devolved institutions until that post-Brexit agreement is replaced.

The bill going through Westminster gives the UK government the power to do that.

The question for Mr Kelly, Fine Gael and the administration in Dublin is: What is more important? Stability in Northern Ireland through fully functioning power-sharing government? Or the persistent need to keep punishing the British people as a whole, and the unionist population here specifically, for daring to leave the European Union?