Whisper it... Enda Kenny had wise words about border poll

THE American War Advertising Council nailed it with its pithy, four-word slogan during World War II – Loose Lips Sink Ships. The unguarded word can result in tragedy. The US slogan underscored how silence borne of discretion is called for when the risk of saying the wrong thing is impossible to measure. When lives are in the balance.

We’re in that territory now concerning Brexit and the horrible impact it may have on Northern Ireland.

This is not the time to be calling for a border poll. Perhaps at some distant point in the future – but that would only be when the unconscionable savagery that resulted in the murders of more than 3,500 people is nothing but a tragic footnote in history, a reminder of distant tribal brutalities, of times that could never be repeated.

But for now, the warnings are clear. Former British premier Tony Blair expressed his concerns in another television interview this week on Sky. He said a hard Brexit could be devastating for the Northern Ireland peace process. H E PREDICTED that if Britain crashed out of the EU on March 29 it would inevitably lead to a very hard border in Ireland.

The Irish border would become the EU’s only land border with a United Kingdom now OUTSIDE the single market and the customs union.

That means the return of checkpoints, customs personnel, police to protect them and men and women in camouflage uniforms holding an assortment of weaponry such as Austrian-made Steyr assault rifles, to protect them in turn.

And in time, as sure as night follows day, we’ll be dealing with the results of self-appointed heroes and warlords trying to punch holes in those border trade and security measures.

All that is bad enough, without complicating this potential mess even further by suggesting a border poll as a solution.

Because a border poll with the intention of a united Ireland is not a balm. It’s an improvised explosives device. It has the capacity to inflame Northern Ireland and provoke the province into an even greater catastrophe to the one from which it has just managed to emerge.

This is not about money – even though that is a real consideration as well.

Economist Paul Gosling reminds us of the enormous level of public spending in Northern Ireland, the highest per person in all of the UK. What that means in hard currency is that the UK transfers €10.43bn to Northern Ireland each year – that’s about €5,600 for every single man, woman and wain living there.

Can you imagine the disaster Leo Varadkar, Paschal Donohoe and Simon Harris would make of that kind of an annual, on-going, year-in year-out expenditure for the North when they’ve such an extraordinarily poor record with a once-off contract price for the children’s hospital?

There is a great anxiety among Northern nationalists and Catholics to be ‘wanted’ by their Southern neighbours. They crave for the affections of people living in the Republic – a neediness borne out of a sense of abandonment and the experience of real and terrible discrimination for decades.

They want us to want them. And, tragically, some of them are willing to risk a return to conflict and tears if that advances the cause of unity.

It’s at times like this we need the advice of one of our greatest Irish patriots of all time, John Hume. He abhorred the fixation on the border, which he insisted should not be allowed to obscure the need for humanity.

‘The real division is not a line drawn on a map but in the minds and hearts of the people,’ he reminded us.

A precipitous border poll is laden with danger and unpredictability. Such talk does absolutely nothing to heal ancient wounds, to calm fears, to rebuild trust and crosscommunity relations in the North.

Seven years ago, as the government attempted to grapple with the enormous debts left by the Anglo Irish Bank fiasco, Enda Kenny advised quiet reflection by quoting an Irish proverb: ‘Is binn béal ina thost.’ A silent mouth is sweet. Silence is golden.

It was a wonderful, Irish twist on that famous war slogan from the US. It’s time to adopt Enda Kenny’s advice now when border poll proponents start blaring.

You’d think that somebody like Amazon super-billionaire Jeff Bezos would know better than to take snaps of his – ahem – bits and pieces and send them to his darling girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, right.

Well, now we know the answer to that one. Which, I have to say, makes him more human – with ALL the weaknesses and vanities that entails – than one would expect from the richest man on the planet, with €125bn knocking about in his bank accounts.