Far from protecting the Belfast Agreement, Dublin wants to change parts of the accord — which will undermine it

But it is more likely to be deliberate: that they are throwing their weight around, in protest over Brexit and unionist support for it.

Think what has happened this week alone. Simon Coveney and Leo Varadkar have both made clear their support for the legal and political campaign of Emma De Souza to get citizenship law changed.

As numerous commentators and politicians have tried to explain on these pages, citizenship and identity are not the same thing. No-one is born stateless, and thus in Northern Ireland, as part of the UK, they are born British citizens.

Their right to be Irish, to have an Irish passport, to cherish their Irishness, and indeed to change to Irish citizenship is not in doubt. Yet the implication is that it is, and now Dublin is implying that the law needs to be changed to reflect that perception. Unionists would never have agreed this in 1998, but that is no matter as far as Ireland is concerned.

Then, yesterday, adding to tensions, Mr Varadkar called for the petition of concern to be modified.

This is a contemptible demand.

He would never have suggested such a thing if he had thought nationalists were in the minority, but now that unionists are so in Stormont, he is suddenly concerned.

It is deeply worrying that the British government always stays mute in the face of relentless, indeed increasingly aggressive, partisan conduct by Dublin on behalf of nationalist grievances.

There is no indication whatsoever that Julian Smith is either inclined or capable of standing up to this onslaught.

Instead of rebuttal, London allows Ireland to present itself as the guardian of a Belfast Agreement that it actually wants to change, when parts of the deal are not to Dublin’s liking.