Ireland needs to lobby its US friends to save the Good Friday Agreement
YOUR editorial (January 7) rightly deplores the apparent lack of realism of many British MPs about the choices facing them over Britain’s impending departure from the EU.
However, this lack of realism equally extends to your own paper in that you completely ignore the American dimension.
US President Donald Trump wants a no-deal Brexit and is actively lobbying in Britain to achieve this in close coordination with Tory Brexiteers.
According to Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation (‘Daily Telegraph’, January 7), he has bipartisan support in the US Senate for this.
Gardiner writes: “A no-deal Brexit would be far better for the US than Theresa May’s weak-kneed proposal and infinitely better than Brexit being derailed.”
The Good Friday Agreement was, among other things, a significant triumph for American diplomacy – enjoying strong bipartisan support in the US Congress.
If the Irish Government wants to safeguard it via the Northern Ireland backstop it is high time it began some lobbying of its own among Ireland’s friends in Congress.
This might well be a more effective way of helping Mrs May than agonising over the wording of political declarations of comfort which both the DUP and Tory Brexiteers will inevitably reject regardless of their content.
A reversal of Brexit, while unlikely, is not as fanciful as your editorial suggests as nearly two million young people have been added to the UK electoral register since 2016. Most of these are probably Remainers and, unlike many older people, deeply anxious about their futures. Ed Kelly Merseyside, UK