COMMENT

A refreshingly no-nonsense take on Article 50

LAST week was a historic one for Ireland, and not in a good way. Despite all our many problems – the banking crisis, the housing crisis, the health crisis, and so forth – the period since 1990 or so has in many ways been a golden age for Ireland. (At least, that’s what those of us who remember the 1980s think.) The EU has been central to the things that went well for us.

Economically, the ‘good growth’ of the 1990s, before the Celtic Tiger became the Celtic Bubble, was based on exports to the European Single Market, which was created at the beginning of the decade.

Modern economies need rules about what can be sold, and how it should be produced – for example, as consumers we want to be sure that our burgers don’t contain dog meat. Before the 1990s, each EU country had its own rules, and goods that could be sold in one country couldn’t necessarily be sold in others. By harmonising these rules, firms found it much easier to sell their output right across the huge, EU-wide, Single Market. Ireland provided the perfect export platform for many.

POLITICALLY, the fact that Ireland and the UK were both part of the EU meant that border controls on goods travelling between the North and the Republic could be abolished. (They began in 1923, after Ireland got back control over its own trade policy.) The EU mattered in two ways. The fact that Ireland and the UK were in the same customs union meant that goods coming in from the US, say, paid the same import taxes when they arrived in either state. There was thus no need to check that the correct tax had been paid when goods crossed the border. And second, the Single Market programme meant that border controls were no longer needed to check goods travelling between member states. If they could be legally sold in one state, they could be legally sold in all.

Brexit threatens to unravel several of these gains.

The decision of the UK to leave both the customs union and the Single Market means that checks on goods crossing the border are inevitable – unless Northern Ireland stays inside both. We should be strongly arguing for this, but you have to doubt whether Mrs May and the DUP will go for it.

Economically, the costs of doing business with the UK are going to go up, no matter what happens. But they will go up even more if the UK crashes out without a deal, and tariffs on trade between the UK and EU are reintroduced.

Hopefully the negotiations will go well: the UK and EU will reach a civilised agreement on the terms of the divorce, and then agree on some interim ‘transitional’ arrangements, keeping trade flowing relatively costlessly for a number of years while the details of a free trade deal are hammered out.

But there is an alternative scenario, in which the divorce talks break down in acrimony, no transitional deal is put in place, and the UK becomes just another foreign country on March 29, 2019.

There are at least three reasons why such an ‘off the cliff’ Brexit is likely.

FIRST, and most importantly, an ‘off the cliff’ Brexit is what the hard Brexiteers want: a break with the European Union that is as clean and unambiguous as possible. And they are currently driving the show. Arguments about economic interest have no impact on this group: for them, it is all about sovereignty, as they see it.

Second, the key Brexit ministers are not on top of their brief. Why would they be? They have always despised the EU, so you’d hardly expect them to be on top of all the minute details of how it makes trade easier.

When they are shown up for the spoofers they are, it risks being humiliating. What could be more natural, then, but to storm out of the talks, blaming the breakdown on foreigners. That might not be very good for their country, but blaming foreigners is something that they at least know how to do. Third, while UK civil servants are very competent, there are only so many of them. If all off-the-shelf transitional arrangements are ruled out, then it is hard to see how bespoke arrangements can be sorted out within two years, even if ministers understand what needs to be done, and even if they want to do it.

HOPEFULLY I will be proved wrong, but we have to assume the worst and prepare for it. That means not putting all our intellectual, political and administrative energy into fighting among ourselves as to what the best deal should be: there may not be one at all, simply because the UK doesn’t want one or isn’t capable of delivering it.

It means thinking about the people who will be hurt – those working in small businesses exporting to the UK, primarily, but also people living in border regions – and how the State and the EU can help them adjust. It means targeting every British food processing firm that may find itself at a disadvantage in the EU post-2019 and seeing if they can be induced to invest in Ireland (outside Dublin, which is where we need jobs). It means listening to the industries involved, and solving specific problems one at a time. It means the rest of us abandoning the ‘I’m alright Jack’ mentality that pervades Irish discourse, and all of us realising that we really are in this together.