I’ve been listening to some Irish Republican songs recently (Come Out Ye Black and Tans, Men Behind the Wire, etc) and filling the kiddos in on bits of the history and violence that filled the news when I grew up. (On that note, Stan Rogers, always a surprising source of excellent music, has “House of Orange” which I think is a right song for The Troubles). So I was interested to see this line from a reader of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball “Because the UK includes Northern Ireland, which has an open border with the Republic of Ireland, and the RoI is part of the EU, and the border MUST remain open for historical reasons, …“. What are those historic reasons? Hundreds of years of bloody guerilla civil war. Anyway, I don’t have a big point to make here - I’m not an expert in Irish Republican history and pointing out the U2 sang Bloody Sunday and also ended up in another notweorthy Apple News story years ago is pretty irrelevant, but also that throwaway sentence (which was probably intentional understatement, this isn’t a critique of either Daring Firreball or the commenter) triggered a few other thoughts and an educational moment with my kids, and frankly the fact that Apple packaging is being determined by risings hundreds of years ago and the different fights that have been etched in history ever since actually does seem relevant in various ways today. At the very least, it’s an argument for the ways in which history continues to haunt us for a very long time, and people who act without considering historical precedent are likely to find themselves re-learning some lessons at some point. And that, in and of itself, is a useful lesson, or reminder.