Talks vindicate Micheal Martin’s calls for bilateral backchannels

FIVE million people in the Irish Republic have reason to rejoice that London and Dublin are talking directly to each other again — as Micheal Martin has long advocated.

In spite of the welcome silence that surrounds the talks, we can guess at where they might be going.

Most likely the tunnel talks are focused on a reciprocal deal covered by the kind of face-saving fudge that coated the Good Friday Agreement.

Northern Ireland leaves the customs union with the rest of the UK: Britain enforces EU customs regulation tariffs on goods moving from Britain to Northern Ireland.

If the Irish Government does not let the EU hawks dictate the agenda, this could lead to a win-win for Varadkar and Johnson.

Leo Varadkar could say Ireland still has only one rate of customs at the Border: Boris Johnson could claim he had protected the integrity of the union.

But I am still not going to write the Irish Government any premature blank cheques, because if talks break down they are likely to return to their old bad habits, aided and abetted by an amoral media.

If you think amoral is too strong a word, what word do you suggest covers the campaign to normalise an abnormal no-deal?

Instead of ripping apart the notion of no-deal being normal, the Irish media aided and abetted this campaign to coerce the Irish people into silence.

Should talks fail, our Government and media are likely to go back to the big lies they used to support the backstop — a bad karma word thankfully dropped from the Liverpool lexicon.

Right up to the wire last week, the Irish Government and media behaved badly in three areas.

First, they hadn’t the decency to concede the DUP’s concession on the single market created a positive mood for Liverpool.

Alban Maginness of the SDLP, no admirer of the DUP, at least had the honesty to acknowledge the scale of its concession in the interest (which is our interest too) of an orderly Brexit.

As he wrote in the Belfast Telegraph: “This radical change of direction by Foster and her deputy, Nigel Dodds, on behalf of their party, is a pragmatic but welcome change of policy, presumably to avoid the disaster of a no-deal Brexit or the serious consequences of a hard Border.”

Our demonisation of the DUP disfigures our public discourse. In my column of June 16, 2019, I castigated the toxic tribalism that spurned the olive branch offered by Jeffrey Donaldson on his trip to Dublin calling for direct talks.

Donaldson recalled how Sean Lemass never hid behind outside bodies when dealing with the Border.

“Leo Varadkar is the first Irish Taoiseach to subcontract Northern Ireland policy to the EU Commission, instead of emulating Sean Lemass, who tried to settle the Border issue, not by bringing outsiders in to lean on unionists, but by means of tri-lateral talks between Belfast, Dublin and London.”

Last week in Liverpool, Leo Varadkar broke the Irish Government’s ban on bilateral talks with Britain — the kind of backchannel talks continually advocated by Micheal Martin.

Earlier this year, I was shouted down by Twitter louts when, on February 5, 2019, I wrote that Leo Varadkar had admitted that in the event of a crash-out, the UK and Ireland would have to reach a bilateral deal.

Logically, I asked: “But if the Taoiseach accepts he would have to sit down and talk to the Brits after a crashout, why on earth not head off that horror by talking to them now before a crashout?”

The month before last, on August 11, 2019, I made a suggestion that was dismissed at the time but has now come true: “Why not make Ireland the pivotal broker between Brussels and London in a process to secure an orderly British exit from the EU?”

But in spite of the evidence, Bobby McDonagh, who has been leading the parade of retired DFA backstoppers in The Irish Times, is in denial about bilaterals.

Last Thursday on Prime Time, he denied Miriam O’Callaghan’s suggestion that the Liverpool discussions represented something of a climb down by the Republic in agreeing to direct negotiations with the UK.

McDonagh’s denial is not credible. Earlier, Tommie Gorman stressed that what happened in Liverpool was qualitatively different from previous British and Irish contacts on Brexit.

My third reason for refusing more than two cheers to Leo Varadkar is that, as late as last Tuesday, he was on Prime Time repeating Simon Coveney’s favourite — and politically dishonest — dirge, that the UK government showed bad faith by resiling from Theresa May’s commitments of 2017.

This is breathtakingly misleading, if not a downright lie. Three times Theresa May put these commitments to a sovereign vote in the British House of Commons parliament — the equivalent of a referendum — and three times they were rejected.

Three rejections is an effective referendum. When the Irish people rejected Nice and Lisbon, the British government didn’t accuse us of bad faith for requesting changes to the treaties.

Finally, I fear the bad faith of this Irish Government in its dealings with the majority of Northern Protestants, some 81pc of whom, no matter what their other differences, reject the backstop.

But like the rest of the Irish media, the main thing that interested Sean O’Rourke last Friday was whether or not Boris Johnson had thrown the DUP under a bus.

The Irish Examiner ran a particularly rabid polemic denouncing the DUP in terms which, if aimed at immigrants, would be close to ethnic jeering.

This kind of tribal taunting and sectarian slurring is what drives the DUP into digging in.

Targeting the DUP not only disgraces our Republic but it works against our interests by driving a wedge between people trying to do a deal.

Thank God, there is at least one adult political leader who does not simply see Northern Protestants as so many chess pawns to be pushed around the board to suit our agendas, and defamed when they resist.

Last Friday, Micheal Martin on Morning Ireland reminded us that we still have pluralist politicians like Jack Lynch. He said there had been “too much of a knee-jerk reaction” to Boris Johnson’s proposals a week ago.

He said the meeting between Johnson and Varadkar displayed the “British-Irish axis” and was a “serious bilateral”.

He noted the risks run by the DUP: “There had been a change in unionism which wasn’t acknowledged fully.”

He called for harmony: “We have to share this island for a long time to come. We have to accept the constitutional position as outlined in the Good Friday Agreement.”

He finished by saying that any mooted referendum in Northern Ireland on proposals was “a bad idea”.

Let me sum up the week: Leo Varadkar has taken the Brexit ball to the try line by personally bonding with Boris Johnson as Simon Coveney could never have done.

And Micheal Martin is making sure the Taoiseach’s triumph doesn’t turn into triumphalism.

‘The media’s tribal taunting of the DUP only forces that party to dig in against our interests’