Brexit means Brexit, but not for everyone
When bureaucrats die and go to heaven, the most favoured few are ushered into the presence of the Almighty, who — as a sign of divine appreciation — bestows a beatific smile and directs them to a cloud marked “Brexit.”
That’s because, while normal humans view the whole question of Britain leaving Europe as a big, boring, incomprehensible puzzle, to the bureaucratic mind the megasaurus- sized tangle of impenetrable prose and convoluted regulatory billibumphery is like 365 days of Christmas. They contemplate the decades of torturous decrees imposed on innocent Europeans and weep tears of joy.
To those still labouring away in earthly halls, perhaps the most perplexing challenge among the many puzzles of Brexit is the question of Ireland. The Irish situation stands out because it is the riddle that can’t possibly be solved without a bureaucratic fudge of epic proportions. The positions involved are too contradictory to be compromised, and the forces too adamant to be obscured. It begs to be buried beneath a mountain of obfuscation, but such is the extent of the conflict that it’s not clear the planet contains the supply needed to do the job.
Ireland, for the uninitiated, is divided in two: the Republic in the south, and Northern Ireland in the North. The Republic is an independent country, part of the European Union. The six counties of the North are part of Britain. The North is subdivided again between Catholics and Protestants, and between those who would like to join the Republic, versus those who are determined to remain with Britain.
Both of those Northern Irelands voted against Brexit. Britain voted in favour. Even though those in favour won, Northern Ireland wants to stick with European rules anyway, because they carry great benefits. But the dominant faction also wants to remain part of Britain. It wants both: to be in Europe but to be out, even though leaving is what the Brexit referendum was all about.
Complicating matters is the fact Northern Ireland has no government at the moment. A falling out several months back resulted in the collapse of the uneasy alliance of Catholic and Protestant that emerged when 30 years of bloodshed finally ended in the 1990s. Months of negotiations have failed to end the divide. Sinn Fein, the Catholic portion, would be happy to unite with the Republic. The Democratic Unionist Party ( DUP), headed by First Minister Arlene Foster, is adamantly pro-Britain.
It’s the DUP that agreed to prop up Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives when she miscalculated in calling an election and ended up with a minority government. Without DUP support, the government collapses. When May reached an agreement with the EU on the Irish border question just ahead of this week’s key Brexit gathering, a quick phone call from the DUP scuttled it. So Foster can’t form an administration in Belfast, but she can pull the strings that control events in London.
Foster insists that whatever happens in Britain must also happen in Northern Ireland. Since Brexit decreed that Britain will leave Europe and set its own rules, that would mean an end to EU regulations. But doing so would mean the return of a “hard border” between north and south, with guards and inspections and perhaps a revival of the tensions that caused the bloodshed of “The Troubles.” No one wants that.
May tried to skirt the issue with the EU agreement that the DUP vetoed. On Friday she tried again, reaching a pact that doesn’t solve the situation but pledges to settle it later. May guaranteed to avoid a hard border, and pledged that, if no compromise could be found, Britain would take whatever steps are necessary to keep North and South happy. She just doesn’t know what those might be.
That was enough f or European Commission president JeanClaude Juncker, a man with a fine understanding of the dark arts needed to keep Europe’s capitals from one another’s throats. Ireland’s Foreign Minister Simon Coveney told an interviewer “we have got a caste-iron guarantee from the British government that under no circumstances will we see a hard border. That was at the core of what we wanted.” Foster grumbled, but agreed, for now.
The complications don’t end there, however. In Scotland, separatist leaders who lost a referendum on quitting Britain in 2014 have been following Irish developments with keen eyes. Like the Irish, Scots voted overwhelmingly to stay in Europe. If Ireland gets special treatment, declared Scottish Nationalist Party leader Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland should get one too. “A UK government that is able to say that come what may, it will avoid hard borders with Ireland/ NI after Brexit can never again tell Scotland that independence would mean a hard border between Scotland and UK,” she tweeted.
And if Scotland and Ireland both get cushy deals, Wales won’t be far behind, raising the prospect of Britain leaving the EU, except for three major regions that don’t want to. Even tiny Gibraltar got into the act, reminding London that “We can’t forget that thousands of people will need to be able to continue to freely cross the frontier between Gibraltar and Spain after Brexit — it’s not all about the border with Eire!”
May is now committed to solving this puzzle, with no real idea how and a shaky hold on her own job. And the clock is ticking, as other EU leaders pointedly reminded her ahead of this week’s gathering.
As Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar grumbled: “It’s 18 months since the referendum, it’s 10 years since people who wanted a referendum started agitating for one, sometimes it doesn’t seem like they’ve thought all this through.”