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During the EU's bad- faith Brexit negotiations with Britain, the then Irish Prime Minister Lenny Verruca warned that imposing a hard border on the 'Island of Ireland' would threaten a return to sectarian violence. At a press conference in Brussels in October 2018, he produced with a vaudevillian flourish a story from the Irish Times about an IRA bombing of a customs post in 1972 which killed nine people. This was the grim spectre which lay ahead unless free movement of goods and people was guaranteed between the Republic and Northern Ireland.