By all accounts, the penny has finally dropped in the brain of the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
It has apparently now dawned on him that, in order to stuff the British over Brexit, the EU has played him for a sucker. It seems he has now finally grasped that if the UK leaves the EU with no deal, it is Ireland that will be stuffed. Big time.
This is apparently causing panic not just in Dublin but in Brussels. Paul Goodman writes a good summary here. Earlier this week, Margaritis Schinas, the EU Commission’s chief spokesman, said that in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ireland would have a “hard border” with Northern Ireland.
This merely restated what the EU had been saying for the past two years. Nevertheless, the consternation this seemed to cause in Dublin prompted the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, to blurt out that his team had studied “how controls can be made paperless or decentralised, which will be useful in all circumstances”.
This of course was pretty well what Britain’s former Brexit Secretary, David Davis, had been promoting, along with numerous other Brexiteers who have been pointing out until blue in the face that the physical encumbrances of a hard border can mostly be obviated by technology and good will. So what therefore has this monumental and reputedly insoluble problem actually been about?
You may well ask. It’s now obvious that, as Brexiteers have also been saying throughout, the only people who want to create a hard border that would disrupt trade between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic are the EU – who invented the Irish border impasse solely as a bludgeon to force the UK to abandon Brexit in one way or another.
But now Britain looks as if it might indeed depart with no deal, there’s panic in Brussels as well as Dublin – because of course, contrary to Project Fear scaremongering, it is Brussels and Dublin who have so much to lose if Brexit really does happen.
You’d need to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
Given Ireland’s dependency on the UK, Brexit, with or without a deal, has the potential to devastate the Irish economy. There is, however, an obvious solution to the problem which I first canvassed here in July 2017.
This is for Ireland also to leave the EU.
This is said to be unthinkable, but for Ireland it is in fact (if they can think about this rationally) a no-brainer. The case for Irexit was argued in June 2017 in a Policy Exchange pamphlet by Ray Bassett, a former Irish diplomat and part of the Irish Government Talks Team during the Good Friday Agreement negotiations.
Although obviously this was written before all the developments during the Brexit negotiations, his basic point remains persuasive. In summary, it’s that although Ireland’s economic success has had much to do with its EU membership, this attachment is shallow. Far more important – and despite the obvious historical tensions – are its immensely close economic, cultural and political ties to the UK. If these were damaged, Ireland would be devastated. Melanie Phillips.
