Threats? What threats? That is the question on a lot of minds as scepticism continues to grow about recent claims of intimidation against local officials in the port of Larne and the city of Belfast who were working, however tangentially, on administrating the so-called Irish Sea border between Ireland and the post-Brexit United Kingdom. As the well-informed political correspondent Sam McBride notes for the regional News Letter, a decidedly hardline pro-union publication, most of the allegations of imminent violence directed at UK and European Union employees seems to have come from the Democratic Unionist Party. The chief opponent of the regulatory frontier agreed between Brussels and London under the so-called Northern Ireland Protocol.

[On Monday] news emerged that Mid and East Antrim Borough Council – on which the DUP is the largest party – had suddenly withdrawn its staff from the border post in Larne because of graffiti describing…