Next year will mark a decade from Britain’s European Union exit. If a week is a long time in politics, so goes the cliche, then 10 years should feel like an eternity. Plenty of time, then, for Ireland and the United Kingdom to drop all those hostilities fomented over the Brexit years.
At its peak, 2018 and 2019, Leo Varadkar was cast as villain-in-chief to the British state, while Ireland had its own fair share of schadenfreude to lob over the Irish Sea. Both bear responsibility for the collapse in that once-friendly acquaintance.
Now everyone with any eyes on the Anglo-Irish relationship will earnestly tell you things have improved since then, the nadir is over, what’s past is past, et cetera.
They are right, but they are neglecting to mention that things could still be much better, that the wound has not entirely healed. Instead of open upset, a stilted distance between these oldest and closest neighbours is still lingering.
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Maybe it is just a matter of time. Britain’s Labour Party and the Government parties here were talking to one another months before Labour was even elected last July.
Keir Starmer’s party understood the importance of fostering a functional and amenable relationship, more so than the Conservatives managed to reckon with (or wanted to reckon with).
There are the obvious facts to contend with: Starmer was forged by his experience advising the PSNI in the 2000s and his closest adviser is a Cork man. The ingredients for a happier marriage are there.
(There were some in the Conservative administration who really got it, who understood that Brexit was destined for a muddled fudge so long as Ireland was cast aside as a secondary concern, but they were outnumbered and hardly helped by a media landscape that liked to refer to Varadkar as a naive patsy of the bloc among some harsher words too.)
So, what to do now?
The UK is “resetting” its relationship with the EU, seeking that vague notion of “closer ties” and striking more concrete agreements on fishing, trade, defence and energy.
But the movements of this month are not the beginning and end of the UK’s EU conversation: there are plenty of policy areas floating around in need of reappraisal. Here, the Coalition, in some form or another, ought to be Starmer’s closest ally and conduit with the Continent.
What’s in it for us? There are all the sentimental reasons, of course. The “oldest and closest” neighbours adage does tug on the heart strings in our more mawkish and less practical moments.
After such a difficult, protracted and bloody period – 800 years, some like to say – the triumph of the Belfast Agreement and the depth of goodwill generated thereafter should not be lost to a petty squabble over the EU’s customs union (surely).
We have – and sorry for the second cliche – more in common than divides us. File under statements that are true, banal and important.
But we can harden our hearts around some cold realpolitik (Ireland has always been good at balancing the sentimental “land of saints and scholars” woolliness and the harsh practicalities of a small, rich, capitalistic economy).
Predicting the movements of Donald Trump is no safer than playing roulette; Ireland has lost its golden child status in Washington; the entire model could be upended. We don’t know.
But in Europe and in Britain there is some certainty: Trump and Vladimir Putin have proven the logic of closer union on the Continent, Ireland can help facilitate it.
This is precisely what a small nation with a population of sub-10 million can do well. It is the most likely locus of Ireland’s future impact. The Government has had a stuttering start with foreign policy focused on Israel, neutrality and trying to mitigate the unmitigable Trump. People are welcome to make the moral case on all three. But the practical case is harder to accept.
Neutrality is not a recipe for popularity with Europe at a time when Ireland needs friends. When it comes to Israel and Gaza, the realities of a horrifying war shouldn’t be ignored, but Ireland is not a big enough player to make any meaningful difference (even the EU as a bloc is going to struggle to cohere around a single political line on the question).
In the UK’s reset there is an opportunity for Ireland to take a leading role and contribute positively rather than posturing into the void. On Brexit, Ireland has the institutional experience and the negotiating talent. Ireland’s influence in the bloc has waned in recent years – but few argue that it is impossible to wrest it back.
Starmer is going to face a slew of Brexit ideologues claiming that he is betraying the UK’s democratic will by edging closer to the Continent.
But if he can sell the turn towards Europe he can finally look like a prime minister somewhat in control of his country’s direction of travel.
Ireland can do the same by acting where it matters. Small, dynamic, popular – these are assets, and it is unclear to me why Ireland is so resistant to using them.
