Fintan O’Toole: Ireland’s difficulty becomes England’s opportunity

According to the well-known model created by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the first three stages of grief are denial, anger and bargaining. In their approach to Northern Ireland and the Irish Border, the Brexiteers have broadly followed this pattern.

First, clothing their naked indifference in wilful ignorance, they denied that the problem existed at all. Next, they resorted to anger at the bloody Irish, the perpetual disturbers of the British peace without whom Brexit would have been, as promised, the easiest deal in the history of the world. And now we are at the bargaining stage.

But there is a dramatic twist: the bargaining is not so much about Northern Ireland. It is bargaining with Northern Ireland. The sheer cynicism of what is going on is so breathtaking that it is hard to credit and thus easy to miss.

The British approach to Brexit has been so chaotic that it has seemed silly to look for method in the madness. In relation to the Irish dimension of Brexit, we’ve become inured to magical thinking (the wonderful efficacy of not-yet-invented technological solutions), blithe misapprehension and sheer fatuousness (Boris Johnson’s insistence that the Border is just like that between two London boroughs).

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This has been oddly comforting. Since this stuff is so evidently childish, we can wait for the adults to enter the room.

But the comfort is false. The adults did enter the room. The Brexit negotiations are now in the hands of serious, skilful professional mandarins. And they’ve done something remarkable with the Irish Question. Remarkable in that it takes some nerve even to contemplate it.

For what it comes down to is a strategy of using the human suffering of the Troubles to try to extract a favourable post-Brexit trade deal from the EU. You have to be very clever to think of trying this – and utterly shameless.

England’s opportunity

Essentially what has been taking shape in British strategy is a reversal of the old Irish nationalist adage: England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity. Ireland’s tragedies are being deployed as England’s last opportunity to achieve what the Brexiteers promised: the advantages of EU membership without the obligations. If we leave aside its amorality, there is an element of brilliance here. The strategy takes the biggest weakness of the British position and seeks to transform it into the greatest strength.

To understand how this strategy has evolved, we need to go back to last December. On Monday, December 4th, Theresa May and Michel Barnier agreed a text on the so-called backstop, the default commitment to avoiding a hard border after Brexit.

It essentially conceded to the position of the EU and the Irish government: that no hard border means keeping the North effectively inside the customs union and large parts of the single market. But May was summoned from that meeting to take a call from DUP leader Arlene Foster, effectively vetoing the deal.

So May returned to London, negotiated with the DUP and went back to Brussels on Friday, December 8th. There she agreed to the same backstop proposal but added a politically crucial rider: just as there would be “full regulatory alignment” between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the same would apply between Northern Ireland and Britain. So no hard land border on the island and, in the rather hyped-up term, “no border in the Irish Sea”.

Logically this double backstop can have only one outcome. If the North is aligned to the Republic (and hence to the EU), and Britain is aligned to the North, then it follows that Britain remains aligned to the Republic – and hence to the EU.

Northern Ireland can be allowed to be what the Brexiteers have always fantasised about: it can formally leave the EU while retaining the benefits of membership

In simple terms, Britain remains in effect within the customs union and the single market. So Theresa May had essentially signed up to the softest of soft Brexits and had done so because there is no other way to both honour her commitment to avoiding a hard Irish border and to keep the DUP happy.

Except that she had no political cover for this dramatic manoeuvre. It is not an outcome she had ever promised, articulated or prepared for. Hence the stalemate in the talks on the withdrawal agreement: May has been unwilling and unable to say what it is she signed up to in December. It is an agreement that dare not speak its name.

Brilliance and cynicism

This is where the brilliance and the cynicism come in. What if the metaphors were to change? For the Brexiteers, Ireland is the poison that has seeped into their great project, sapping all its vitality. But, as the mandarins took full charge this spring, they realised that Ireland might be thought of rather as the magical elixir that could bring a dead project back to life.

The thinking is in itself simple enough. The EU has accepted from the outset of the negotiations that Northern Ireland is special. It is special because it has suffered – the bodies of the dead and maimed are the eloquent argument for a recognition that this place needs to treated tenderly.

What that tenderness translates into is have cake/eat cake. Northern Ireland can be allowed to be what the Brexiteers have always fantasised about: it can formally leave the EU while retaining the benefits of membership. The whole point about this is that a massive, rule-based organisation such as the EU can do it only in a very special case. For the North it is doable because (a) the place is very small and (b) the suffering has been so great.

But what the British have done is to seize on this tenderness as a weakness in the EU’s position. The North is to be the aperture through which the hopeless fantasy of have cake/eat cake can be reborn. The EU has conceded that this fantasy double existence is possible for this one part of the UK. And the December agreement says that Northern Ireland must remain aligned with the rest of the UK.

Trojan horse put down

So the EU must concede that the UK as a whole can have all the special benefits that it has offered to the North. Voila! Northern Ireland is not the tail wagging the British dog, it is a different kind of beast altogether – the Trojan horse within which all of Brexit is smuggled into the promised land of frictionless access to EU markets without the political obligations of membership.

Clever as this is, it won’t work because, were the EU to concede to it, it would be signing its own death warrant.

And even if it is cunning, it is a very low cunning indeed. Britain is not solely responsible for the Troubles, but it bears a huge responsibility for creating the conditions in which they happened and in prolonging them through ineptness and misgovernment. It faced those responsibilities in the peace process and, it seemed, thought well of itself for doing so.

It is really quite something to seek now, in the midst of a self-inflicted crisis of authority in Britain, to turn the North’s suffering and the EU’s care for it to advantage. The dead are surely not to be bargained with.

The next stage in the grieving process after bargaining is depression. Perhaps we are moving into it now, for it is deeply depressing to find what is still in many ways a great country giving way to such cynicism.

It is a reminder that the damage from Brexit is not just economic or political. It is also moral.