Kicking the can as far as possible down the road is the only thing to do

The Taoiseach won the Brexit deal he wanted in Brussels, and silenced the doubters — for now at least, says Eilis O’Hanlon

REPUTATIONS can turn on a sixpence. A week or so ago, the Taoiseach’s was looking wobbly. He’d lost a Tanaiste, despite backing her doggedly to the last minute. The country had come within a whisker of a pre-Christmas general election. The whispers were getting louder. Leo was too young, too weak, too inexperienced, they said. His critics may still be proved right.

For now, though, he’s silenced the doubters. He needed to get a positive outcome from the Brexit talks in Brus- sels, having set down some potentially tricky red lines. Eventually, he got one. A week is a long time in politics.

Some might still say that the woolly, deliberately ambiguous text which was produced last Friday is a far cry from the declarations which the Irish Government was seeking in the run-up to this month’s summit. It’s being presented as a “guarantee” that there will be no return to a hard border, but talks on the UK’s exit from the European Union could still stall, propelling Britain into a hard Brexit, making these guarantees look rather thin.

The shift to compromise had already been signalled in advance, however. As for the vague wording, that’s the normal language of international fudge. These phrases which can be spun to mean all things to all men — “regulatory alignment” and so forth — may be an abomination to plain speaking, but tightening definitions would only have reduced the wriggle room needed by all sides.

Yes, it’s kicking the can down the road, but, if the can has a bomb in, delaying the moment of explosion in order to figure out how to defuse it can only be a good thing.

Fudge or not, it would be pure begrudgery not to concede that the Taoiseach has had a good week. Micheal Martin certainly didn’t seek to undermine his Fine Gael counterpart when he appeared last Friday on Today With Sean O’Rourke. Instead he gave credit where it’s due, not only to Leo, but to British Prime Minister Theresa May. She faced a much harder task than Leo Varadkar. Her party was, and is, catastrophically divided; Cabinet colleagues are still waiting in the wings to knife her. She also faced the combined weight of 27 countries working in tandem.

That she managed to finalise the text of an agreement allowing the European Commission to recommend to next week’s meeting of the European Council that enough progress had been made to move into the next phase of talks should not be taken away from her.

The Taoiseach, equally freed from let-down, is now able to be generous, and he immediately was, declaring that “Britain will have no closer friend than Ireland” in trade talks thanks to this agreement. That was absolutely the right note to strike.

An ugly tone has entered public discourse in the past few weeks, not just against the DUP for temporarily scuppering last Monday’s victory party, but against perfidious Albion itself and all its works. Resisting the opportunity to crow helps in moving on.

Others could usefully learn the lesson of magnanimity. Fintan O’Toole could not resist rubbing the Brits’ noses in it on Radio Ulster’s Nolan Show last Friday: “Britain is now effectively tied in to seeking to stay in the customs union and the single market.”

O’Toole would surely rather we all forgot the tub-thumping article which he wrote the summer before Britain’s decision to leave the EU, in which he reacted to attempts to bully Greece during its financial crisis by lambasting those in charge of the EU as “a tiny elite of fiscal gnostics”, an unelected “tight, disciplined and single-minded technocratic elite” who were now wielding “the kind of authority that, in European history, previously belonged only to the Oracle at Delphi or to mediaeval popes”.

Borrowing internet conspiracy theory terminology, Fintan referred to these people as the new “Illuminati”, adding that “the [European] project has taken a decisive turn away from democracy”.

This is rhetoric which implicitly echoes the logic of the Leave campaign. There’s not a word in it with which Nigel Farage would surely disagree. When did the “Illuminati” suddenly become the blessed antidote to populism?

For extreme nationalists, it was when the EU started to give the Brits a bloody nose. Then it became a “get in the pints and let’s sing another rebel song” moment. At least they’re consistent in that. What’s Fintan’s excuse?

Many leftists doing these contortions in praise of Europe are like men trying to keep their marriages to frumpy socialist childhood sweethearts while having a bit on the side in middle age with a glam globalist seductress in Brussels. It’s “my enemy’s enemy is my comrade” gibberish taken to absurdist levels of cognitive dissonance.

President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, provided a necessary corrective to triumphalism by pointing out that the real work still lies ahead. Leo Varadkar has plenty more negotiating to do. A large part of that will involve repairing the harm which he accepted last Friday has undoubtedly been done to relations between the Irish Government and unionists in the North by the tone which he’s adopted. Polls say it was popular, but polls are fickle.

“A lot done. More to do.” That was Fianna Fail’s slogan back in 2002, and it perfectly fits the week that was in it. You can only get over the hurdles one at a time. Leo did his job by clearing the immediate one. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, as the man said.