Planes, brains and motorcades — a glimpse behind the velvet curtain
Varadkar’s face-to-face meeting with Johnson paved the way for a deal that could someday settle the issue, says Philip Ryan
THERE was always going to be some last-minute jitters. The weight of almost an entire continent was resting on the shoulders of the Irish negotiating team as their motorcade made its way from Brussels Airport to the European capital’s city centre.
Unlike many government jets and an increasing number of commercial airlines, the State-owned Learjet does not have access to the internet. There is an old fashioned telephone in the cabin which is never used, so once you’re in the air you are cut off from the outside world.
This was the case last Thursday morning as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar flew to Brussels for the most important European Council summit of his political career.
It was only when the jet landed in Brussels that Helen Blake, a senior official in the Taoiseach’s Office, turned on her phone and an alert from a news agency pinged on to her screen — the EU and UK had agreed a Brexit deal.
This was the first official confirmation the Irish team received about the breakthrough. They were, of course, closely involved all the way through the process — but at the vital moment they were in the skies above Europe.
Confirmatory phone calls were made by officials as they descended from the jet to the awaiting cavalcade and all the signs were that more than three years of negotiating were coming to an end.
However, the words of Enda Kenny were echoing inside Varadkar’s head as he was chauffeured to the summit in the company of Ireland’s Permanent Representative to the EU, Ambassador Declan Kelleher. The former Taoiseach had warned him to look out for any last-minute shenanigans from the EU if a deal was in sight.
At this point on Thursday morning an agreement had been reached on new customs arrangements for Northern Ireland. However, the UK had yet to sign a declaration on the consent mechanism which would allow the Northern Ireland Assembly to vote on leaving the new customs arrangement with the EU.
Varadkar and Kelleher got paranoid and began to worry there may have been some last-minute changes to the agreed mechanism for giving Stormont a vote on the Brexit deal.
The motorcade was ordered to pull over and panicked phone calls were made to EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s office to ensure there had been no last minute chicanery which would have put pressure on the Irish position.
Thankfully, their concerns proved to be unfounded and there were no changes to the consent mechanism. “They both got a bit worried that someone might have tried to pull a fast one at the last minute but it was a false alarm,” a source said.
With minds put at ease, the motorcade continued on to a European Peoples Party (EPP) event where Varadkar was scheduled to brief his EU Parliament colleagues on the deal.
At the meeting, the Taoiseach broke down the agreement in detail and thanked his colleagues for their solidarity throughout the Brexit negotiations. Varadkar specifically thanked German Chancellor Angela Merkel for the tough line she took with the UK on the Border which paved the way for the breakthrough meeting between Varadkar and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Liverpool a week earlier.
Chancellor Merkel joked that she played bad cop in her dealings with Johnson so Varadkar could swoop in as good cop and smooth things over. This was a reference to a telephone call she made to Johnson during which she threw down the gauntlet and told him Northern Ireland had to stay in the EU customs union if a deal was to be done.
Merkel’s tough stance backed Johnson into a corner and allowed Varadkar to offer an olive branch when they spoke by phone the day before the landmark meeting in the Thornton Manor Hotel on the Wirral peninsula just outside Liverpool.
Despite being on the north west coast of England, Liverpool was seen as a neutral ground for the meeting; Johnson is somewhat of pariah on Merseyside over comments he made about the Hillsborough disaster.
“It might not have been Dublin but he was going out of his comfort zone of London,” an Irish source said.
In the days before the meeting, a deluge of negative briefings against Varadkar filled the pages of the UK newspapers.
The Taoiseach was accused of betraying Johnson and backtracking on commitments he made when the two leaders met at a United Nations summit in New York a few days earlier. An Irish source described this as “codswallop” and directly blamed Downing Street for the briefings.
The parameters for the Wirral meeting were set out in the phone call between Varadkar and Johnson the day before and the Taoiseach came away from the conversation believing a compromise could be found.
Johnson brought a huge team of advisers and civil servants to the meeting.
However, for the majority of the crucial bilateral their time was spent mingling with the Irish delegation while both sides picked at mini wraps, pasta dishes and cold meats laid out in a wedding style buffet.
The two leaders spent an hour-and-a-half thrashing out the details of a Brexit deal which was to be agreed by the EU Council. Much of the meeting centred on drafting a consent mechanism which would give Northern Ireland a say on the proposed new customs arrangement which would be implemented if the UK leaves the EU at end of 2020.
Johnson was keen to allow the people of Northern Ireland vote in a referendum on the new deal. But Varadkar insisted a referendum would be too divisive for the politically volatile region and would also be perceived as being a de-facto border poll.
The idea was dropped in favour of allowing Stormont to vote on the new trading arrangements every four years which would be increased to eight if the vote was passed with cross-community support from both republican and unionist politicians.
However, if Stormont votes in favour of ditching the deal then a two-year cooling off period is implemented during which all sides would try find an alternative arrangement to avoid a hard border. But, if they can’t, a hard border may be erected on the island.
The Taoiseach’s advisers believe Stormont will never vote down the new customs arrangement which allows Northern Ireland to benefit from UK trade deals with other countries while also staying closely aligned to the EU on rules and regulations for certain goods.
The deal will see a customs border in the Irish Sea but rebates will be available to businesses on goods imported into Northern Ireland which incur higher EU tariffs than those charged in the UK.
Varadkar has been lauded — mostly from his Fine Gael colleagues but from others too — for the impact of the Liverpool meeting. “Leo’s intervention was the greatest piece of statecraft by an Irish leader since the Good Friday Agreement,” one senior EU source said.
However, no-one went into the meeting believing there would be a positive outcome before they landed in Liverpool. For instance, the intimate photoshoot of the two politicians walking through the gardens of Thornton Manor had not been planned in advance.
“If the one-to-one had been a disaster there would have been no pictures,” a Government source said.
Varadkar found Johnson very personable, intelligent and easy to deal with. The Taoiseach is naturally cautious of the prime minister given his reputation for flakiness but so far Johnson has given him no reason to mistrust him.
The Taoiseach’s team are eager to point out that no one side can claim to have made the Brexit breakthrough in Liverpool and insist the final agreement is a melting pot of ideas from both teams.
The technical and legal details of the agreement were left to the EU and UK negotiators to work on as the clock counted down to Thursday’s EU summit in Brussels.
Surprisingly, it went ahead on time despite some last-minute concerns raised by the UK about how VAT would be charged on goods coming into Northern Ireland.
However, this was dismissed by the Irish negotiating team as the UK playing to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which had yet to be convinced to sign up to the new deal.
“We didn’t know if this was a genuine row or were they just trying to find some more cover for the DUP,” a source said. Despite initial suggestions they might back the deal, the DUP firmly rejected the proposal soon after the details were published.
Johnson went ahead with the agreement nonetheless and insisted he was still confident of passing the deal through the House of Commons without the party’s support.
Even after the deal was signed there was still tension in the air. Jean-Claude Juncker snapped at journalists “I’m still talking” when they began asking Johnson questions at a joint press conference. Johnson moved to soothe tempers by pointing at Juncker and insisting, “Jean-Claude is the boss here.” There was no celebratory mood.
But at this stage the deal was done, and the EU insisted there were no plans to renegotiate on Brexit any further. Later in the day, in an unusual but significant move, Varadkar was invited to take part in the final Brexit press conference alongside Juncker, European Council President Donald Tusk and EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. The EU solidarity of the previous three years was being put on display to show the remaining 27 member states would stick together.
Johnson stayed in Brussels for the EU leaders’ working dinner and is believed to have made some insightful contributions on the ongoing situation in Syria and Turkey. He also made interesting comments on the EU’s plans to accept Albania and Macedonia into the union.
Varadkar is understood to have noted after the meeting it was a pity Johnson will no longer be a permanent member of the EU council because he would have brought a lot to the table as the UK prime minister. While the Taoiseach was dining with his EU counterparts, his team popped out for pizzas in downtown Brussels and waited for the leader’s dinner to end.
They cautiously celebrated finally getting a deal over the line but knew they would have to spend yesterday afternoon glued to their television watching events in the House of Commons where the prime minister would be fighting to get agreement on the Brexit deal. What next?
‘Merkel joked she played bad cop so Varadkar could smooth things over’ ‘If the one-toone had been a disaster, there would have been no photos’