OUR NEXT MOVE IS VITAL
The ramifications of Brexit for us are manifold – and we cannot remain mere spectators of this historic shift. Our role in the EU and our ties with the UK are more crucial than ever. Now we must maximise our political links with both to ensure we gain con
ON Friday a day dawned that was once unimaginable. The citizens of the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland decided to leave the European Union.
Globally, as I expected, the news will spread with unpredictable consequences in the markets and stock exchanges. For the 27 nations remaining in the European Union, the decision is of seminal significance; simultaneously confounding those who still believe in the European project and delighting its growing band of sceptics. If anything, I also suspect that Brexit will fan the flames of the debate about the EU’s future. And nowhere more than here in Ireland where in one way or another we have had a cultural, political and economic umbilical cord to the United Kingdom for centuries. For many here even psychologically the mothership will have moved away.
Even more extraordinarily and beyond all the referendum rhetoric, nobody anywhere can give an accurate forecast of the enormous changes coming all our ways: simply in political and economic terms none of us has ever been here before. We’re all in the lap of the gods.
In Ireland we seem to have been caught like rabbits in the headlights. Instead of sitting down and rationally preparing for either eventuality – or even looking afresh at our membership of the EU – our political class regressed into a state of denial.
For weeks Taoiseach Enda Kenny dispatched senior and junior ministers to the North and across the Irish Sea to warn against voting for Brexit. They toured various Irish centres, attending Gaelic football matches and even giving press conferences encouraging the significant Irish community in the UK to vote to stay in the EU. How ironic is this, asking those thousands of Irish for whom this country failed, to oppose a British attempt at regaining their sovereignty?
IT was a farcical enterprise, as if foreign interference in the UK has not been a principle reason for Brexit. Seriously, imagine how the ‘Paddies’ arriving to tell them how to vote went down!
No wonder David Cameron suddenly decided not to appear with Enda Kenny during his recent visit. Given too that the significant part of the Brexit vote came from working-class communities – which is where most of the Irish in the UK come from – there was even less reason why Enda Kenny’s mission would achieve anything.
In all this great uncertainty there is only one thing we can be sure of and that is that Brexit is as much an existential moment for the Republic of Ireland as it is for the UK.
When British Prime Minister David Cameron first announced that he was going to have a referendum to finally end the UK’s generational problem with the EU, he must have thought that he had a foolproof democratic device to escape that terminal political crisis for all Tory governments. How dreadfully mistaken he has been. In fact the greater the debate about EU membership, the greater the argument about it has grown and now huge numbers in the UK suddenly seemed to have awoken from their political slumber. Cameron’s referendum became Cameron’s farewell.
In Ireland for our political establishment the prospect of a Brexit went from at first amusement, to concern and now to a growing panic. Despite independence for 26 counties in 1922, that centuries-old relationship between Ireland and Britain, while it may have gone through many manifestations, has never ended. Whether we like it or not – and some don’t – these islands are essentially like an extended family. Down the centuries we have intermarried and interbred, had wars and made peace treaties, but that long and complex web of historical, familial, linguistic and cultural linkages persists and is important to both nations.
The Northern crisis poisoned the well for years but the new settlement has revolutionised the old relationship.
Nowadays if you step back and look at the domination of British-owned business on our high streets and shopping malls, things like our obsession with Premier League soccer and the hugely popular recent Queen’s visit, there are times when it seems like we have re-colonised each other.
Recently a visiting English-born cousin said something to me I still can’t quite get out of my head. She commented that ‘I love coming to Ireland, it reminds me of the England of my childhood’.
As the Brexit opinion polls climbed, I began to understand what she meant.
Suddenly the prospect of the reemergence of that old frontier-line running from Derry to Newry and returning centre stage in all our affairs and threatening to change everything has re-appeared. It’s certainly a once unimaginable, if not bizarre, new version of partition.
Until now, these scare stories about the border being hardened up and the threat to our extensive trading relationship with the UK seemed like ‘Remain’ propaganda deliberately angled to frighten: but given we are now faced with Brexit and suddenly the UK has decided that the time has come for it to stand on its own two feet, might not this moment also have come here in Ireland? Have we not arrived at a point where we need to stand up and take a good look at our relationship with the EU?
TAKING back ‘control of our country’ is the slogan that has fuelled the Brexit campaign, but does that sentiment not appeal here in an Ireland once famously nationalistic?
Only weeks ago we were celebrating our historic striking against a republic in the midst of imperial Europe: now we seem to lie on our back while Brussels tickles our bellies (or our wallets). Do we never ask who now controls us, those five unelected EU presidents whose names nobody knows?
Back in 1973 we joined the same day as the UK but 43 years later how come we aren’t looking for a divorce? Of course the engine of mass immigration which has driven the UK’s disenchantment with Brussels hasn’t occurred here but everything else has.
So have we no concerns at all about the future as a tiny part of a federal European superstate as simultaneously we contemplate our national democratic project – for which so much blood was shed – shrivelling before our eyes? What about the threat of belonging to a future superstate that may not only include Turkey but also Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. Whither our European heritage then?
Do we forget it was Brussels’s insistence when the Celtic Tiger collapsed that hundreds of people should lose their homes to prop up the banks, that the Irish taxpayer had to find €90billion? Yet still there’s hardly a single cheep of complaint from our political classes. Is this because it suits them to have found another mothership to cling to in case the old familiar bulk of the UK slips away on the tide? Or that our elite can’t forget that the EU hosts the best-fed political troughs around so if political careers crash, there’s always the little old lobbyist number available to them out there on the well mineral watered streets of Brussels?
Given that the UK has answered their existential question with a resounding yes and left, are we not also facing our defining existential question, that in many ways it’s London or Brussels now? Remarkably there has been no attempt here to consider any alternative to ending up as the last bit of offshore EU post-Brexit.
Is there not a reasonable case, given the immense complexity of constructing a new relationship with a post-EU UK, that we need to step back and consider whether we also need to change our relationship with the EU?
I believe that two separate futures need consideration: remain in the EU for the inevitable submersion in a federal Europe where we will have almost no control over our destiny or striking a new deal with the UK. Special arrangements and even semidetached relationships with the EU already exist. Both Norway and Switzerland enjoy an extensive trade relationship with the EU, the Scandinavians also have special arrangements as do the many parts of ex-colonial France. I would argue that we should seize the moment of Brexit to reestablish our political independence by simultaneously maximising our political and economic linkages with both the EU and UK.
For a start, this requires our insist---
ing to the EU the seminal importance of maintaining our continuing historic relationship with the UK. The common travel and citizenship agreements must be maintained including the right of all citizens in the North to Irish (therefore EU) passports.
FURTHERMORE, given the cultural and geographical realities, Ireland must be given the freedom by Brussels to maintain our extensive trading relationship with the UK. Since, for example, we are two islands, we should insist on a special tariff-free trade between the two – provided the goods stay within the ambit of the two countries.
But while all of this might be negotiable for Ireland what is not is the march to federalism if we stay in. Have we still not comprehended that this dispute is not really about trade at all, it’s about our immersion in an anti-democratic political project? Furthermore I also believe that there’s another urgent reason for radically re-examining our EU relationship, that as a political project it is in meltdown. The growing levels of political dissatisfaction with the Union, the massive economic failure of the eurozone with huge unemployment levels, the EU’s utter inability to deal with the ongoing migrant crisis and more recently the extensive growth of far right and even neo-Nazi parties in response to it all prove the EU is in a seemingly endless growing crisis.
This is not the time to underestimate the massive global and historic significance of a Brexit, it’s a rejection of the defining European, political and economic concept and it gives a two fingers to Europe’s major political experiment since the Second World War. Furthermore it removes a big beast of political, economic and military power out of the EU.
Indeed a British departure could set off a significant political chain reaction because if it leaves and subsequently enjoys economic and political success, will that not become a significant pointer to the way out for others to follow? I suspect it will inflame anti-EU sentiment across the remaining 27.
So there is no way we just can sit back and allow Brussels to dictate the impact of a Brexit on Ireland without our significant input. And given the dictatorial nature of Brussels, this may constitute a very real crisis for us just down the road. If, for example, Brussels were to insist on penalising the UK for leaving and imposing huge trade restrictions and tariffs to the immediate detriment of the Irish economy, we could not accept it. But by staying inside we would have no power to oppose it.
We simply cannot remain mere spectators to Brexit.
It’s a hugely complex moment for us but it begs a very simple question: have we the courage to take our own future back into our own hands or not?