Don’t drop the backstop, drop the Brexiteer mob

WHY should Ireland or any EU member do anything other than send the primarily English project that is Brexit packing?

Britain joined the EU for primarily economic reasons and has never really been a committed participant in the European project. Unlike Ireland.

So often when there was a step forward in that project, Britain asked for some form of opt-out from responsibility and/ or contribution, while retaining most of the benefits.

Britain asked for its cheap and smallminded rebate and got it.

Now Britain wants to do Brexit in a way that lets it, once again, access many of the economic benefits of the EU while stepping aside from the responsibility and contribution associated with being a member.

The Withdrawal Agreement is effectively yet another ‘yes’ to these kind of tiresome British ‘have my cake and eat it’ demands.

It is like working with a teenager.

I’m fed up with it.

Now the particularly unpleasant wing of the Brexiteer mob wants Ireland and the EU to drop the backstop. That is, to undermine the Good Friday Agreement and the common market foundations of the EU.

At what point do we in the EU finally tell the British, and in particular English Toryism and more extreme Ulster Unionism, to get lost?

Do we in the EU really want to facilitate as nasty and self-centred an outlook as is that of those extreme Brexiteers?

Don’t drop the backstop, drop the British. Let them go off and figure out their folly on their own. Adam O hAodha Sutton, Dublin 13