Time to answer the ‘unanswerable’ Irish question

When the United Kingdom and the European Union signed the “Joint Report” on the Brexit divorce deal last December, both sides did so in the clear knowledge that the Northern Irish border question had been transparently fudged.

The UK committed to avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, even though Theresa May remained committed to leaving the customs union and the single market. The EU has long asserted these pledges are irreconcilable.

At the same time, the UK promised the Democratic Unionist Party that there would be no “new regulatory barriers” between Northern Ireland and the UK mainland, a promise equally inconsistent with avoiding a North-south border, unless Mrs May broke her pledge to Brexiteers.

In the Northern Ireland position paper published last August the government proposed “unique solutions” to a unique issue – based on technology and devolved decision-making in Stormont – but this was swiftly dismissed by the EU as “magical thinking”. This EU view has not changed.

So all sides knew perfectly well that the December deal deferred the hard choices for another day. Now it seems that day of reckoning is fast approaching: on Wednesday the EU will publish a draft legal text of the December deal, and the EU says it will be “unambiguous”.

This begs a question: why, if the EU was prepared to fudge the Irish question in December, are they now so determined to drive to the wall the constructive ambiguity on which a workable solution might rest?

If you were cynical, you might think that the EU did a quick-’n’-dirty deal in December in order to seal agreement on the €45bn Brexit bill. And that now it has got its money, it sees the opportunity to turn the screw.

With barely a year to go until Brexit day, the EU does not believe the UK will walk away – the Dutch recently announced they were hiring 750 new customs officers, but Europe sees no equivalent British preparations for a clean-break. Whitehall knows it is not possible too. As a result, driven by a combination of legal purism and political opportunism in France and Germany, it appears that Europe now feels it can force the UK into taking the hard decisions that it has so far failed to make.

The hope that the Irish question could be diffused and turned into “a question of policy, not politics” – as one senior Irish official suggested during the afterglow of the December deal – now seems to be lost.

The UK is surely not blameless. The hardening rhetoric from the Brexiteers on the customs union, the dithering in Cabinet over trade terms (“pure illusion”, says Donald Tusk) and the recent questioning of the Good Friday Agreement itself by leading Brexiteers, have surely spurred Europe on.

But Europe has played its part too. It has failed utterly to recognise the uniqueness of the Ireland situation, which long predates the rules of its single market.

This is not a techno-legal question but rather an 800-year-old identity issue – with guns – that now risks breaking up the United Kingdom.

In place of artful compromise, we now see a high-stakes game of armtwisting. After Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to commit Labour to membership of a customs union, pressure will now undoubtedly grow on Mrs May to follow suit.

Such a move would be a significant step in solving the Irish issue and this might, come October, be the net result of the EU’S uncompromising approach. But even this, given the apparent breadth and depth of the EU’S definitions of “full alignment” on Ireland, may not be sufficient.

Ireland was always the “unanswerable” question thrown up by Brexit; it was always going to need the most deft handling if the Good Friday Agreement – which has ambiguity over identity at its very core – was to be preserved.

Now it seems to be getting the bulldozer treatment.

‘It appears that Europe now feels it can force the UK into taking the decisions that it has so far failed to make’