Brexit and Ireland

"This is by Tony Connelly who has been RTE, the Irish TV channel’s, man in Brussels for a decade and a half now. Unlike Krastev’s book, it’s quite dry, but the reason I chose it is that Brexit and Ireland is one of the biggest and least understood issues. It’s more understood now, but, at the time of the referendum, it was hardly mentioned by anybody in the campaign. I used to do political risk analysis and I was in Northern Ireland a couple of months before the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. I spent a week in Belfast and talked to people on all sides. It was the most extraordinary place. I remember driving down the Falls Road and back up the Shankill and thinking, ‘This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’ There were these big murals and British troops and yet technically it’s our country. When I was there, a Swedish tourist was mugged in Belfast. There were people ringing him up and offering him a bed for the night and saying that it was such a shame that it had happened. Three miles away, they’re kneecapping each other but God forbid that an outsider should be involved. “The number of people on either side of the argument who actually understand the EU and what it does is pretty minimal. I include Remainers in that quite as much as Leavers.” The Good Friday Agreement has always been, to me, one of the most extraordinary achievements of modern times, a huge achievement of Tony Blair’s government at the time and John Major’s before. It was an incredibly hard-fought agreement between sides that you’d have thought would never find common ground in a million years. Anything that jeopardises that is a huge no-no for people on both sides of the Irish border. And it is hard to see how they are going to solve that because it’s a logic puzzle. The EU has to have an external hard border at a point where the EU butts up against non-EU states. And yet Northern Ireland is British, part of the Common Travel Area, and the Republic of Ireland is a republic and part of the EU. They are logistically more or less the same place now. There’s no hard border. There has to be a hard border, but they don’t want one. That’s a circle that cannot really be squared. Connolly’s book is very, very good on how this will affect people. He looks at how many people and sectors rely on the fact there is no border. It’s all very well to say, ‘Well only 30,000 people use it a day’. That’s a lot of people and a lot of businesses. So Brexit is not just a simple question of banging up more controls at Dover. Anything that risks going back to the Troubles is something that, to my mind, is to be hugely, hugely resisted. The Irish government have got their own issues to sort out on this, to be part of the EU and yet remain in this very symbiotic relationship with Britain that they have long had and hopefully will always have. It’s a recent, very evenhanded and very detailed look at the issues. Of course it’s hamstrung by the fact that this is very much an ongoing thing. It is not looking at the past in the way that for example Tim Shipman book is looking at something that has happened. His conclusions may well be out of date through no fault of his own. John Major, to his credit, did mention it as well. The other thing of course is that Northern Ireland like Scotland voted to stay in. And yet England and Wales voted to leave. But right from the start it was, ‘You all go or you all stay.’ So this impacts not just on Northern Ireland but on Scotland. The SNP can now go back to their electorate and say, ‘When you rejected independence in 2014 that was when we were all part of the EU. Now we are not part of the EU. Do you want to be part of the EU? If you do, then we can vote for independence from the UK and reapply to the EU.’ It’s this domino effect of Brexit. A simple binary Yes/No choice has so many ramifications in so many areas. And often areas people didn’t really think of. If it’s squareable, it’ll be by a fudge. But then again, most of life is a compromise and most of politics is a compromise. I have always felt—and I think I was fairly alone in this—that the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition from 2010 to 2015 was a good thing. Consensus politics is a good thing. Our system very much mitigates against it, with our first-past-the-post system. I think it’s ludicrous—and you don’t have to agree with UKIP’s policies here—that in 2015 they had 4 million votes and one seat in parliament. That’s one of the problems that Brexit threw up, that the consensus for so long had been fundamentally a liberal elite consensus that people felt marginalized. Had other parties had some kind of seat at the table, they could have said, ‘Well you know what my constituents in X Y Z, think this.’ If you have a coalition government that can bring different viewpoints to the table. Our system is set up for one party to win. Other countries, like Germany, are much more used to coalition and much more used to horse-trading and bargaining. That can be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing because it forces people to water down proposals to find common ground. And I think we’re seeing this now. Whatever Brexit we get is going to piss most people off. It just is. I do feel sorry for Theresa May. She has been handed the biggest shitstorm imaginable. You have to pick your way through this minefield, all the time being aware, like the England football manager, that 60 million people think they can do your job better than you can. I would say, like Zhou Enlai on the French Revolution , that it’s too early to tell. Actually he misunderstood the question, it was about the Paris riots four years before, but, that said, it is too early to tell. I have good friends on both sides of the divide, I’ve written a book about it and I honestly have no idea. And I think if more people admitted they had no idea, we’d all be better off."