Post Brexit, Ireland may fall through the cracks

Britain is being sucked into the US orbit, so the Irish border will become not just a political frontier but an ideological boundary

ne thing the Brexiters did not lie about was their emphatic assurance that the island of Ireland would experience, as British Prime Minister Theresa May continues to insist, “no return to the borders of the past”. What they did not say was that there will be a whole new frontier — welcome to the borders of the future. We are not going back to the way things used to be before the United Kingdom and Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1973. We are going forward, accidentally and haphazardly, into a division of the island that could be more profound than it has ever been. At best, it will be a border between the UK and the European Union itself. But at worst, it could even be a border between a new Trumpian world order and a Europe struggling to hold on to a notion of transnational democracy.

Yet nobody seems to be thinking much about these possibilities. Politics is in turmoil in both Irish jurisdictions. In the Republic, Enda Kenny is being shooed towards the exit door because of the failure of his government to deal with an extraordinary scandal over the alleged smearing of a police whistle-blower, Maurice McCabe. In Northern Ireland, there is an election brought about by the almost equally extraordinary scandal of a breathtakingly expensive renewable heating initiative. Both issues are important. But neither is of the scale of what Brexit threatens to do to Ireland.

As Brexit moves from airy fantasy into messy reality, Ireland will remain in the EU, and because it is part of the EU, the Irish border will be an external EU border. Even if the implications of this fact for migration can be fudged, the border will be inescapably present. The new line from May is that it will be “as fluid and frictionless” as possible — not so much a UK border, perhaps, as a KY border. But no amount of verbal lubrication can ease the reality that the UK (and thus Northern Ireland) will be in an entirely different customs regime to the republic.

The need for a quick deal will suck the UK into the gravitational field of Trump’s assault on liberal democracy. So when the UK does its fabulous trade deals with United States President Donald Trump’s US, what happens to the KY border? The Oxford-based economic historian Kevin O’Rourke has cited the simple example of one of the things that Trump would undoubtedly want in such a deal: Duty-free access to the UK market for cheap, hormone-enhanced American beef.

When reality bites and Britain realises that the EU is not going to give the UK back all the cake it has eaten, there will most probably be a ramping up of nationalist and anti-European rhetoric in England. And the need for a quick trade deal with the US will suck the UK as a whole into the gravitational field of Trump’s reactionary assault on liberal democracy and transnational institutions. If that happens, the Irish border will become not just an economic, migration and political frontier. It will become an ideological boundary.

Ireland has long enjoyed the luxury of not having to choose between being part of the EU on the one hand and being closely intertwined with the Anglo-American world. But as these two spheres drift apart, Ireland risks being pulled asunder if it tries to stay with both. There is only one way to avoid this and that is, of course, for Northern Ireland to remain effectively within the EU as a special zone — a part of the EU in the UK. That is not nearly so big a stretch of imagination as the crazy divisions that the Brexit zealots are imposing on a small island that was trying hard to escape from the legacy of the narrow nationalism they are embracing.

Fintan O’Toole is assistant editor of the Irish Times and author of Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Killed the Celtic Tiger.

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