it is the British who have changed the question. Just when relations between Ireland and Britain had reached an unprecedented equilibrium, Brexit makes everything deeply unsettled again. When James Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus claims in Ulysses that ‘History… is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, it is surely Irish history he has in mind. But now the Irish have to awake to the living nightmare of British – perhaps we should say English – history.6
o`toole
