We must stand with EU during Brexit endgame

WE HAVE known since June 24, 2016, that there was serious trouble ahead of us all as the UK voted narrowly, but collectively to leave the European Union. Since then the Irish Government has been fighting for three fundamental aims. First is to ensure there is no return of a functioning Border on this island, which had been effectively done away with by the 1992 EU border-free single market and the emerging peace. Second was keeping tariff-free trade between these two islands. Third was the continuation of the ongoing “free travel area” between Ireland and Britain.

Irish officials negotiating our crucial Brexit interests, as part of the remaining 27 EU member states, must continue to fight a not-an-inch battle here. The bugbear remains the British prime minister’s insistence that the United Kingdom must leave both the EU customs union and the internal market as part of the narrow referendum vote taken on June 23, 2016.

In the ensuing time we have been left with a lethal blame-game by which rampant Brexiteers in Britain, and more tragically the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, tend towards “blaming the European Union” for its failure to concede a “cake and eat it” status to the UK.

Time is now dangerously short. The UK will permanently leave the EU in less than 13 months. We on this island must steel ourselves for potentially tough times ahead. But we must stay with the EU, whatever emerges.