There will be four people at the Ireland-England game in Lansdowne Road on Saturday afternoon in new roles vulnerable to the vagaries of public opinion.
Two of them – the respective football managers Heimir Hallgrímsson and Lee Carsley – will be on the sidelines. The other two – Taoiseach Simon Harris, just 151 days in office, and UK prime minister Keir Starmer, 64 days behind the desk at Number 10 Downing Street – will be in the stand.
So far, the latter two have struck the right notes. Starmer’s July 17th meeting with Harris at Chequers – where they shared pints of Guinness, as captured in photographs – was his first with an international leader, coming soon after his election.
The gesture offered signals, not just to an Irish or international audience, but to his own ministers and officials: the relationship with Ireland matters once again. It will never be London’s most important concern, but it matters.
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Opinion differs on how bad Anglo-Irish relations got over the past decade. It was poisonous at times, say some. Bad but not the worst, say others, who point to far darker days during the Troubles. But relations have changed.
“They’re improving rapidly,” says Prof Jon Tonge of the University of Liverpool, an Anglo-Irish expert. “The trajectory is very good. The improvement preceded Starmer, it should be said, since Rishi Sunak was regarded as one of the adults in the room.
“From the nadir of the Johnson/Truss era they have improved quite spectacularly. The stuff about pints of Guinness in Chequers is a cliche, sure, but it did reflect a new approach.”
Looking back over a decade, according to the views of a number of politicians and officials, David Cameron was interested in the Anglo-Irish relationship, but only to a point. Theresa May was seen as decent and honourable in her dealings with Ireland, but viewed as having made wrong choices and was politically weak as she depended on the Democratic Unionist Party.
Starmer’s immediate predecessor, Rishi Sunak, seemed to have no feel for diplomatic relations of any sort, but tried hard. He left behind the Windsor framework, the 2023 reworking of the Northern Ireland protocol (the Brexit deal for the North in the wider EU-UK divorce agreement), and helped to reduce the temperature in the relationship.
The one thing nearly all parties involved in maintaining Anglo-Irish relations agree on – on both sides of the Irish Sea – is a loathing for Boris Johnson.
“Clearly, things were appalling under Johnson because Johnson treated anybody really with contempt. And he certainly treated the Irish with contempt,” says a figure on the British side, speaking privately. “There was a general view that it was an irrelevance. You could see it in his cavalier attitude to the protocol and in the way that that he approached British-Irish relations generally.”
However, the blame is not always laid at London’s door, with some in experienced quarters arguing privately that the Dublin government under Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and tánaiste Simon Coveney was sometimes too sharp in tone.
“Yes, we had warned them that Brexit was daft, and that they were going to get into all sorts of trouble, which they did,” says an Irish source. “But then they came to believe that Dublin was deliberately acting against them. It wasn’t, but there were times when our language was stronger than needed. The points made were right, and needed to be made, but not quite so bluntly as they were.”
Dominic Grieve, the former British attorney general and chairman of the British-Irish Association, describes the relationship between Ireland and Britain as one “that for obvious reasons the Irish take very seriously and that the United Kingdom sometimes neglects”.
“To its cost, and mistakenly so, because it’s got other things to think about,” says Grieve, who was expelled from the Conservatives over his opposition to Brexit.
In contrast, Starmer, the Labour leader, is interested in Ireland and has a good understanding of Irish affairs, helped by his time as the part-time human rights adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board in 2003-2007.
His choice of Hilary Benn as Northern Ireland Secretary of State is “telling”, say some of those close to the Anglo-Irish brief today. Now 70, Benn, politically, is a heavy hitter.
An illustration of the change in relations came at the Chequers meeting, where Harris and Starmer spoke of having discussed the Belfast Agreement “as co-guarantors”.
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The word has rarely, if even featured in British language since 2010, an indication of “the lack of ownership” about the 1998 deal that fed the Conservatives’ attitude towards it since 2010, says one former official.
The word was pointedly absent in the communique issued by Enda Kenny and David Cameron after their March 2012 Downing Street meeting, when Anglo-Irish relations were at their height after Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Ireland the year before.
“That’s simply because they always saw it as Labour’s agreement, not theirs. That’s an emotional thing, but it’s a matter of substance,” says one source.
One event starkly illustrated the strain in relations: the visit by US president Joe Biden to Belfast in April 2023 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement during a four-day trip.
Logically, the gathering should have included Biden, Sunak and Varadkar, but the then taoiseach Varadkar was not invited. In the end, an irritated Biden met Sunak for little more than a coffee, his disdain evident.
The question now is where will Anglo-Irish relations go, beyond the positive language that will no doubt emerge from the Farmleigh meeting before Harris and Starmer head to Lansdowne Road.
Twelve years ago, Kenny and Cameron agreed a work programme in Downing Street.
“I wouldn’t exaggerate its merits, but it did bring people together on a fairly systematic basis at senior official level,” says one former official.
However, the principal problem remains. “[London], no matter who is in power, has never signed up to the [Belfast] Agreement institutions with the same degree of enthusiasm as the Irish,” says former Irish diplomat Rory Montgomery.
The British-Irish Council, which includes representatives from Dublin, London, Belfast, Edinburgh, Cardiff, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, celebrates its 25th anniversary, but has struggled to build a profile.
The smaller administrations see the council as an opportunity to build connections, one of the rare chances they have. Dublin, Edinburgh and Cardiff have been favourable, too, while Stormont’s interest has waxed and waned.
London, however, has been disconnected. In 25 years, Gordon Brown is the only UK prime minister to have attended a full council meeting, while Sunak came for a dinner it hosted.
“Structures can be helpful, but they don’t solve the problem of engaging busy politicians,” says Montgomery.
However, Farmleigh summits and British-Irish Council meetings will never replace the connections built over decades by Irish and British politicians and officials in EU corridors in Brussels. “We were drawn to one another, usually,” says a veteran.
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Today, both Dublin and London hope that Northern Ireland is heading into calmer waters, with both Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party agreeing to continue to share power and keep the Stormont parliament functioning after years of disagreement.
For now, Dublin will hold off on withdrawing its European Court of Human Rights challenge against the UK’s Northern Ireland Troubles Legacy Act, but, equally, few in Dublin now think a court battle will be necessary given that Starmer has pledged to repeal the controversial legislation drawn up by the Conservatives to give immunity to British soldiers for Troubles-era crimes.
The past decade has highlighted the fundamental flaws and promise in the Anglo-Irish relationship. Despite bitterness, Dublin and London made progress when opportunities arose – for example with the 2019 Wirral agreement between Varadkar and Johnson that led to a post-Brexit deal for Northern Ireland and the subsequent Windsor framework under Sunak last year.
The two capitals have been less successful in broadening and deepening the relationship. Nevertheless, Harris and Starmer, as they sit beside one another in Lansdowne Road today, are the first Irish and British leaders in a decade with a comparatively clear pitch to play on, free of Brexit tensions.
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