https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/square-haunting-by-francesca-wade-review

A Belfast writer provides an undogmatic, wry and wise portrait of Northern Ireland as Britain prepares to leave the EU

A spectre is haunting the imaginations of liberal left commentators on both sides of the Irish Sea – the spectre of BBHS. The acronym stands for “Border Brexit Hyperbole Syndrome”. Those who suffer from it are prone to wild, outlandish, apocryphal predictions. “Victims” of BBHS see rivers of blood flowing from the 300-mile-plus frontier on the island of Ireland once the UK exits the EU; a newly reinstalled “hard border” provokes civil war and fills the ranks of republican dissident terror groups.

The acclaimed Irish novelist Glenn Patterson hasn’t succumbed to BBHS, however – perhaps because he is closer to the ground than many of the commentariat from Dublin or London. Although a remainer – like most of those in Northern Ireland who voted to stay in the EU three years ago – Patterson is honest enough to admit that the New IRA and all the other alphabet soup factions of anti-ceasefire Irish republicanism didn’t need Brexit as an excuse to kill people. They were doing that anyway long before England and Wales voted to take all of the UK out of the EU, he notes.