It is no longer possible to deny the scale of the border in the Irish Sea

There is a simple reason that the disastrous Irish Sea border came into law with very little protest — it is all so complex.

Very few people are involved in ordering or overseeing regular business movements between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

Very few people understand high level trade.

Very few people are constitutional lawyers.

Most of us have rarely had to think about such things. And so when Boris Johnson and his government tried to bamboozle us as to the supposedly trivial nature of the barrier we did not know the extent to which we could believe them.

But it only took a small amount of knowledge to know that the talk about slight increases in existing livestock and sanitary checks was wrong.

Northern Ireland under the 2019 Brexit deal was staying to all intents and purposes in the EU single market, which by definition meant it largely leaving the UK internal market —a massive disruption and change to our place in the nation.

It was a remarkable imposition by a Conservative and Unionist prime minister, let alone one who came to Northern Ireland in 2018 to explain to the DUP why such checks would be completely unacceptable to his strain of Toryism.

Now the scale of the border becomes ever clearer.

This newspaper has been reporting on the emerging and expanding list of things that can no longer be done, or easily done, including our report yesterday on British soil being brought to Northern Ireland. And as Jim Allister reports on page 18, this was waved through by MLAs.

Today we report on convenience stores losing 400 items from their shelves (see link below). This is on top of the huge looming problem with chilled meats and the multiple other barriers such as on pet movements.

How best to respond to this is not yet clear. It is not going to be easy. But denying the scale of the problem is not helpful, and in any event is no longer possible.

• Irish Sea border sees hundreds of items disappear from corner shops

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