For well over two years now, the shadow of Brexit has loomed like a hydra-headed monster over virtually everything we think, say and do. And that’s just here in Ireland.

Since Article 50 was triggered – most commentators now say prematurely – by Theresa May’s government, to begin the countdown to B-Day, we knew that the day of reckoning would come in the perilous Spring of 2019. But there was no clarity as to what shape the withdrawal agreement between the EU and the UK might ultimately take – nor how deep the wounds it would inevitably inflict might finally be.

That it would be messy seemed probable. Almost no one would have forecast, however, that we would collectively be as utterly in the dark as to where the battered and painfully slow-moving Brexit express – a pathetically old fashioned train, it turns out, spewing bitterly toxic smoke into a deeply offended sky – would be taking us, and more worryingly the British people, with just 60 days to go. It is surely time for the old GUBU word to be dusted down. To outside observers what has been happening in British politics, has indeed been Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented. What’s more nerve-shredding, perhaps, is that the crazy, and enormously unedifying, farrago is not over yet.