Fintan O’Toole: A banal moment in Brussels is a black joke on Ireland

On Friday, a very ordinary thing happened. A man packed up his stuff, closed the door and left his office for good. There was no ceremony to mark the big moment. It was like Bruegel's great painting of the fall of Icarus where, in the foreground, people are going about their mundane business and you have to look very hard to see the boy just about to disappear beneath the waves. As the poet William Carlos Williams has it, "unsignificantly/ off the coast/ there was/ a splash quite unnoticed/this was/ Icarus drowning". The man is called Julian King. Unless something dramatic happens in the UK election, he will be the last British member of the EU Commission. And from an Irish perspective, his departure has a peculiar poignancy.

This is not an epic retreat from empire, just a wilfully foolish retreat from influence

The Guardian got a photograph of King preparing to leave. Behind him are the last objects ready to be carried away from the Berlaymont building in Brussels: two bankers’ boxes sealed with duct tape; a Union Jack cushion and two wrapped-up pictures. One of them, you can just about see through the bubble wrap, is a portrait of the Queen.

The whole thing seems like a desultory version of the end-of-empire moments that ran through the second half of the 20th century, the great winding-up replayed as a mere wind-up, the jokey little cushion serving as a mock-heroic version of the imperial flag being hauled down at sunset as the troops and the memsahibs wait in the bay to sail back to Blighty. The banality of this particular instant in history seems quite apt, for this is not an epic retreat from empire, just a wilfully foolish retreat from influence.

Britain is still a member of the EU and there is no legal basis for its government’s refusal to nominate a successor to King. It is, on that level, another gesture, another piece of Brexit showbusiness. Yet it carries a charge of its own – after nearly half a century of engagement, there is this week a resonant absence: no British member of the commission. As a way of saying that something big is ending, it works: this feels like a point of no return.

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But the particular poignancy for Ireland is the identity of the man who has been forced to be the lead actor in this piece of political theatre. Eight years ago, King was the British ambassador in Dublin. He was a key figure in what also felt – but in a completely different way – like a point of no return. King did a great deal to create the exquisite choreography of Queen Elizabeth’s state visit to Ireland in 2011, the first time in 100 years that a reigning British monarch could come to what is now the Irish republic.

Ghosts of Irish resentment

That visit, I think, caught most of us by surprise. These things are generally not that interesting. But from the moment the Queen bowed her head so respectfully at the Garden of Remembrance, honouring those who had died as rebels against the British Empire, it was clear that something extraordinary was going on. Ghosts were being exorcised: not just the ghosts of Irish resentment but those of British condescension. This drama was beautifully scripted. It touched the sites of pain: the raw nerve of Bloody Sunday in 1920 when the Queen visited Croke Park, the memories of the futile sacrifice of Irish troops at Gallipoli and the Somme when she went to Dublin’s long-neglected war memorial.

And King had a large part in the crafting of that speech in Dublin Castle, when the British monarch began with those words, so often tokenistic clichés, now made electric: “A Úachtaráin agus a chairde…” The speech was not just historic, it was about “the weight of history”, “the complexity of our history, its many layers and traditions”, the need to be “able to bow to the past, but not be bound by it”. It acknowledged, gently but unmistakably, the legacy of British misgovernment: “we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all”.

That seeming moment of no return has been replaced by another, much darker one

The warm reception the Queen received was widely hailed as proof of Irish maturity, but the conduct of the visit also seemed to be proof of British maturity. It seemed to be a point of no return in the best sense – no return to ignorance about Ireland, no return to feckless damage, no return to superiority. This, surely, was a coming to terms with more than John Bull’s other island. It seemed that in settling once and for all its relationship with Ireland, Britain was also settling its relationship with the rest of the world, taking its place as a normal, equal democracy.

The Queen acknowledged in that speech that in working with the Irish government towards the Belfast Agreement her own country had learned something: “The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load.”

Those lessons have been, sadly, unlearned. That seeming moment of no return has been replaced by another, much darker one. That the same man should be part of both dramas is another of history’s increasingly unfunny jokes.