Brexit: an Irish voice for Leave

This is reaching the absurd. The Irish political class have made the Irish afraid of Brexit. Which is to say they have made the Irish afraid of Britain regaining its democratic independence from the European Union.

Our political class wants us to believe that a vote for Brexit will threaten economic upheaval for Ireland, a closed Border and renewed violence in the North.

This is just the Irish franchise of the British government’s Project Fear. David Cameron has warned the British that they will face war and global recession if they vote for independence. The UK chancellor, George Osborne, has threatened that Brexit would cost every household £4,300 – about €5,500 – a year.

The threats, now coming daily, have become so hysterical that most British just shrug them off. Which shows you that most British are sensible people.

It is time for the Irish to be sensible, too. Brexit is not a threat. It is a question of whether to return full self-government to Britain. We should applaud that.

It is also an opportunity for the Irish to consider whether it is time they regained full self-government, too.

The Irish need to realise that their fear of escaping the EU is no more than Stockholm syndrome. The Irish have been EU prisoners for so long that they have begun to identify with their captors. They don’t want to escape because their governing class has convinced them that only control by the EU keeps them safe.

Safe? Time to remind: in 2009 the powers that the State handed to the EU and its creature the European Central Bank bankrupted the country. Yet the EU elite has never answered the question of why they inflicted this burden on the Irish people.

There has been never been an answer except the one our governing class has given. It tells us that Ireland must be not just an EU prisoner but also a model prisoner, and comply.

What the Irish political class will not say is that the damage is not over and will not be over until Ireland is out of the EU.

Last year the Commission issued proposals that, some argue, would turn the euro zone into a single state. There would be a euro-zone finance minister, taxation powers shifted to Brussels, a phasing out of what is left of the national veto in the European Council, and more.

In theory the Irish people would have a referendum on such changes, but as we have seen in the past, a No vote from Ireland is not allowed to stand. What is left of our independence in corporate taxation, and much else, could be destroyed.

So Brexit would be an opportunity, not a disaster. If Britain makes a break for independence, so can we.

Will it be risky for the UK to leave the EU? It does not have to be. Britain can leave the EU in stages. It is called the Norway option. This would leave Britain in the single market while freeing it from political union.

This would leave Britain’s trade and industry safe during the years it will take the British government to negotiate a final trading arrangement with the EU.

It would also mean no change to the Border or with British-Irish trade during those years of negotiations.

The agreements and institutions for this Norway option are already in place. Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein already operate as successful non-EU members of the single market.If Britain now leaves the EU and joins them, they together will form the fourth-largest trading bloc in the world. An independent Ireland could join them, too.

ME Synon is an Irish journalist based in Brussels. She has covered European political and economic affairs since 1979, when she won a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust fellowship to study the then EEC