Author: Frank Schnittger

Letter to the Editor, Irish Times.

A Chara,

Newton Emerson’s article on Leo Varadker having a “tin ear” on N. Ireland is notable chiefly for the for the quality of the comments beneath it in your on-line edition. [Leo Varadkar continues to show a tin ear to the North, Opinion, 25/10/2018]

For all his criticism of the DUP, Newton remains of the view that Brexit is somehow just politics as usual, and the usual rules of politics should apply. But to quote WB Yeats, all has been changed, changed utterly, by Brexit.

Time was when Taoisigh had to tip toe around unionist sensitivities for fear of exacerbating a very dangerous situation. Bertie Ahern’s finest achievement was his contribution to the peace process. He deserves a reprieve from political purgatory for that alone.

But the DUP’s adoption of a pro Brexit policy in N. Ireland, against the wishes of 56% of it’s electorate, is a full frontal attack on democracy, the peace process, the Good Friday Agreement, and all that is decent in Irish politics. To imagine it can now be business as usual in the aftermath is delusional.

Frankly, the DUP have now been written out of the script as far as the future of Ireland is concerned. Loyalists can continue to vote for them if they wish, but no one will take them seriously. What Sammy Wilson “thinks” is good for satirical and comedy columns only.

Mr. Varadker’s job is to protect the interests of the people of Ireland from the very serious economic and political implications of Brexit. If that upsets some unionist or brexiteer sensitivities, then so be it. A “tin ear” can be useful in drowning out irrelevant noise. Certainly no one will take the DUP seriously outside its heartlands of north Antrim and east Belfast.

There will be no functioning N. Ireland Assembly or Executive while the current crop of DUP “leaders” are in power, and until Brexit is done and dusted, one way or the other. Not only will the DUP be sold down the river by Theresa May, they will be the laughing stock of everyone else.  

Leo Varadker can bank a few thousand extra votes every time the DUP excoriates him. Michael Martin [Leader of the opposition and Fianna Fail] must be green with envy.

Newton states that “nobody envisages new passport controls, road closures or routine queues for motorists under any circumstances – all widespread public concerns from both a practical and security perspective”.  However this is precisely the prospect that Theresa May’s “time limited” backstop envisages.

Theresa May is hoping she can use the EU’s generousity towards N. Ireland as a lever to prise the same concessions for the UK as a whole. However while the EU has historically tolerated anomalies in relation to relatively insignificant smaller regions – Greenland, Gibraltar and Jersey come to mind – doing the same for a major power is another matter altogether. Norway pays a sum not dissimilar to the UK’s (net per capita) contribution to the EU for access to the single market. Theresa May is not going to get that for free for the UK as a whole.

That is why the EU wishes to include this commitment only in a non-binding “political declaration” to accompany the formal Brexit Agreement. The messy business of sorting out how much the UK will have to pay for the privilege is best left for another day. But seeing an opportunity to grab the high moral ground (to prevent violence in N. Ireland!) Theresa May wants to achieve this privileged position for free for all of the UK now. As Fintan O’Toole has noted:

But there is a dramatic twist: the bargaining is not so much about Northern Ireland. It is bargaining with Northern Ireland. The sheer cynicism of what is going on is so breathtaking that it is hard to credit and thus easy to miss.

The British approach to Brexit has been so chaotic that it has seemed silly to look for method in the madness. In relation to the Irish dimension of Brexit, we’ve become inured to magical thinking (the wonderful efficacy of not-yet-invented technological solutions), blithe misapprehension and sheer fatuousness (Boris Johnson’s insistence that the Border is just like that between two London boroughs).

This has been oddly comforting. Since this stuff is so evidently childish, we can wait for the adults to enter the room.

But the comfort is false. The adults did enter the room. The Brexit negotiations are now in the hands of serious, skilful professional mandarins. And they’ve done something remarkable with the Irish Question. Remarkable in that it takes some nerve even to contemplate it.

For what it comes down to is a strategy of using the human suffering of the Troubles to try to extract a favourable post-Brexit trade deal from the EU. You have to be very clever to think of trying this – and utterly shameless.

The irony is that the DUP cannot recognise a gift horse when they are offered it. Their farmers are already going to lose the generous subsidies offered by the EU’s CAP programs which the UK government has promised to continue only for the life time of the current parliament. N. Ireland will also lose considerable funding under various regional and peace programs. At least the “backstop” would continue to offer them unfettered access to the EU Single Market.

But for the DUP, British nationalism trumps all. They are emotionally and ideologically invested in the extreme right wing nationalist Brexiteer project and have close personal relationships with may hard line Brexiteers at Westminster. Most of their MP’s can look forward to continued safe seats and ennoblement to the House of Lords if all else fails.

Ian Paisley jnr. recently survived a recall petition in his safe N. Antrim constituency for accepting well over £50,000 in luxury holidays from the Sri Lanken  government for lobbying against UN human rights abuse investigations in their country. DUP leader Arlene Foster, wasted £500 millions on a “renewable heat incentive scheme” which paid people more than the cost of the fuel, with the result that many (including her friends and relations) burned tons of fuel in farm barn-houses to no useful purpose other than to profit at the taxpayers expense. The DUP could put up a donkey for election in that constituency and still win. Such is the tribal nature of N. Ireland politics.

But as the Brexit negotiations approach their denouement, everyone is getting nervous. The DUP’s leading position in N. Ireland unionism is at risk if their Brexit strategy goes seriously wrong. Somehow this is supposed to be Leo Varaker’s problem. Normally one of the key requirements of a good negotiating strategy is to avoid humiliating your opponents: You may need them to work with you afterwards. However in this instance the DUP have managed to humiliate themselves all by themselves with no help needed from anyone else.

Blaming everyone else for their predicament is just par for the course.

I don’t like saying “I told you so” and I have a policy of not simply replicating stuff I have read elsewhere, so where do you begin when the Brexit negotiating process is panning out precisely as you expected? It’s like watching a supposed thriller where every new twist has been so well flagged in advance it all gets boringly predictable. I have avoided Hollywood movies for years because the script always seems to follow the same formula to the point where you cannot identify with any of the characters and you just don’t care what happens to them. The scriptwriters are just playing with your emotions and seeking to manipulate your fears.

And so we have Theresa May continuing to play out her role as the designated fall-girl, seeking to bring home a deal you just know will be rejected by the House of Commons. You have the EU Commission and Council playing out their role as the big, inflexible, bad, pack of wolves seeking to bully and disrespect the game and pugnacious Mrs. May. You have May continuing the fight even as some of her supposed warriors fall by the wayside – only to betray her by sniping at her from the ditches.

And you have the cantankerous Irish only itching for a fight and being as awkward as possible. Why can’t everybody just be reasonable and get along? My sociology lecturers used to joke that “common sense” was rarely common and almost never sensible. What is obvious to some can be very difficult for others. What works in one context can be sheer madness in another.
And so we have the DUP extolling the virtues of new technologies and how they can create friction less borders with the Republic but are absolutely impossible to implement at sea and airports or “in the Irish Sea”. Boris Johnson rails against proposals which he says are in “in violation of the Act of Union of 1800, and the very basis on which this country [the UK] is founded”. But as Noel Dorr, former Irish ambassador to the United Nations patiently explains, that act of Union was amended by the Good Friday agreement:

That agreement – an international treaty between the UK and the Irish Government, registered at the United Nations – recognised “that it is for the people of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts”, voting concurrently, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish”; it recognised the right of all the people of Northern Ireland to be “Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose”; and, most notably, it specifically provided for “changes” in British legislation and in the Constitution of Ireland “relating to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland” (emphasis added).

To give effect to the agreement on the UK side, parliament passed the Northern Ireland Act 1998. Its first article provides that Northern Ireland “shall not cease” to be part of the United Kingdom without the consent of a majority of the people there.

It also provides that, if a majority in a poll do express a wish to form part of a united Ireland, proposals to that effect agreed between the British and Irish governments will be put to parliament. Furthermore, Article 2 repeals the Government of Ireland Act 1920 and – as Boris should know – stipulates that the new act is to have effect “notwithstanding any other previous enactment”.

To implement the agreement on the Irish side we changed our Constitution so that it now provides that “a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means” and with the consent, democratically expressed, of a majority in both jurisdictions in the island.

These back-to-back provisions – agreed by all participants in prolonged and arduous negotiations following years of conflict, incorporated in an international treaty registered at the UN, ratified in concurrent referendums by the people of Ireland North and South and, from a legal point of view, enshrined in law by an Act of the United Kingdom Parliament and, in Ireland, by an amendment to the Constitution – which, since 1998, ought properly be described as “the constitutional status of Northern Ireland”.

As a settlement, this, so far as I know, is unique. And it creates a constitutional status for Northern Ireland which is distinctive and quite different from that of any other part of the United Kingdom.

In theory it should be easy to insert clauses in the Backstop wording of the Withdrawal Agreement which explicitly reiterate these points, and thus enable Boris Johnson and Theresa May to get off their high horses about the EU trying to break up “their” Union and effect constitutional change in Northern Ireland. But in practice neither May nor Johnson are as yet “solution seeking” and working to find a practical solution. They are still at the grandstanding stage when they should be closing in on the deal.

Simply put, N. Ireland remaining in the Single Market and Customs Union is an economic arrangement of no constitutional significance whatsoever. Indeed it merely maintains the status quo established by the Good Friday agreement.

My fear is that it may be some time after a hard no-deal Brexit has actually happened before they realise that all this posturing has been in vain. The EU was never going to allow the UK cost free and unfettered access to the Single Market indefinitely. Norway has to pay a sum not dissimilar to what the UK pays per capita for complete EU membership. For N. Ireland they were prepared to make an exception – as they have for Greenland, Jersey and Gibraltar – but as usual the DUP can’t even recognise a gift horse when they are being offered it.

I have responded to Noel Dorr’s articles (in the comments) as follows:

And yet, to a extent, Noel Dorr misses the point of DUP opposition. The DUP is aware that “the backstop” doesn’t change the constitutional status of N. Ireland and that it, indeed, maintains the status quo of no customs border within Ireland.

Their opposition is part economic: N. Ireland trades more with Britain than it does with Ireland, and therefor any impediments to trade across the Irish sea could have serious economic consequences. It is also in part political: as it feeds into their paranoia of any kind of new political distinctions being made between Britain and N. Ireland.

Little matter that there are already legislative and regulatory differences between N. Ireland and the UK when it suits them – e.g. on marriage equality, access to abortion, phytosantory controls, animal exports, and the rules governing the transparency of political donations. They can argue that these are devolved matters, whereas continued membership of a Customs Union may not be.

The answer to their concerns can be found in Greenland, which left the EU even though it remains part of the Kingdom of Denmark proving that even full membership of the EU doesn’t have to apply uniformly to all parts of a sovereign state. Jersey and Gibraltar also have anomalous relationships with the EU that may survive Brexit.

But Brexit has become the DUP’s revenge against the Good Friday Agreement – a chance to get one back against their nationalist antagonists – and to give ground now would be to lose face and perhaps their leading position within Unionism.

The logic of the British position is far less clear: to risk a no-deal Brexit for want of an agreed back-stop makes no sense whatsoever. But perhaps a no deal Brexit actually has to happen for that to become clear to the BoJos of this world.

Reading the pages of the The Telegraph still gives the sense of a country living in a time warp unrelated to present day reality. There is a sense of entitlement which no other non-member of the EU presumes – not even the USA. It may take a very long time for the penny to drop for the UK to actually realise that merely having been a member of the EU doesn’t entitle it to continued benefits other non-members do not enjoy. Indeed, if the EU were to give those benefits to the UK, the EU would be required, under WTO ‘most favoured nation’ rules, to give the same benefits to all other non-members of the EU.

There is only so much you can achieve across the negotiating table, and changing a whole national elite’s sense of entitlement is not one of them. That can take many years of hard and bitter experience. Increasingly, it looks like we are going to have to get used to a prolonged period of no deal antagonism with the UK, only to finally arrive at a deal that could have been agreed yesterday. Seamus Mallon famously described the Good Friday Agreement as “Sunningdale for slow learners” a reference to an 1973 agreement to resolve the N. Ireland conflict which was quite similar to the Good Friday Agreement and which had been sabotaged by violent unionist oppositon.

A return to the dark days of conflict in and around N. Ireland will never be tolerated by Ireland and the EU. It remains a question of how long it will take the UK to realise this. Perhaps the Irish Backstop will come to be known as “The Good Friday Agreement for slow learners”.

August is traditionally termed “the silly season” in the northern hemisphere anglophone media because that is the time when governments, legislatures, and their associated media handlers are on holidays, and newspapers are stuck with having to make up their own news. Many editors keep a stock of non-time specific stories with which they can use to fill their column inches and keep their punters entertained on the beach or wherever else they feel an urge to keep connected to “the real world”.

In the UK, the silly season often extends to the party conference season in late September/early October just ahead of when Parliament, the Courts and the Universities  traditionally emerged from their summer hiatus. It probably dates back to the time that September was the harvest season, and no one could be expected to be away from their country estates until the crops were safely garnered in.

And so we have the Labour Party conference where Corbyn continued his slow dance of moving to the political centre, supporting a second referendum as a decidedly second choice to his preferred option of a general election to put the Tory government out of it’s Brexit misery. Now we have the Tories disporting themselves in their patriotic red white and blue colours, declaring their undying love for the Union, (the UK, that is) and telling Jonny foreigner where to get off. It is time for the EU to get realistic, apparently, and put forward an alternative to the Prime Minister’s absolutely fabulous Chequers proposals. You couldn’t make this up…
Pat Leahy, political correspondent of the Irish Times (in an email circular) begins by offering some free advice:

If you are a Minister or a Taoiseach dealing directly with Brexit (Yes, Messers Coveney, Donohoe, Varadkar) or a senior official guiding the ship of state in the background or a journalist trying to make sense of the British position or indeed a concerned Irishman or woman who pays attention to these matters: do not, on any account, tune in the Conservative Party conference, currently under way amid Birmingham’s ancient arches and dreaming spires.

It will not do your mental equilibrium any good, and as we are all tediously advised these days, you must mind your mental health, whatever that means.

Symptoms of exposure to the Tory conference include holding your head in your hands and sobbing, banging your head against a wall or shouting “BUT THEY ARE THE ONES LEAVING” and “THE NORTH IS DIFFERENT, THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF THE GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT” at passing strangers. Should you find yourself experiencing any of these symptoms, on no account should you share your feelings, or attempt to talk to someone about it. Just shut up and get on with things.

Apparently, Dominic Raab, offered the EU this sage advice:

Britain is willing to listen to “alternative ways” of delivering Brexit as negotiations with the European Union move into their final phase, Brexit secretary Dominic Raab has told the Conservative Party conference. “If the EU want a deal, they need to get serious. And they need to do it now,” he said.

The Irish Times feels constrained to counter:

It’s usually wise to treat the overblown rhetoric of party conferences as theatrical “noises off”, fodder for an excitable rank-and-file. But when a foreign minister speaks, even to party loyalists, the world listens.

What then are we to make of British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt’s preposterous and offensive comparison on Sunday, echoing the reactionary leaders of Poland and Hungary, of the EU to the Soviet Union, a “prison” whose inmates are punished for trying to escape. Describing the EU’s Brexit approach as an attempt to “keep the club together” by punishing “a member who leaves”, Hunt asked: “What happened to the confidence and ideals of the European dream? The EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving.

“The lesson from history is clear: If you turn the EU club into a prison, the desire to get out won’t diminish. It will grow and we won’t be the only prisoner that will want to escape.”

Britain’s foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said it was “counterproductive” to “insult” Britain’s referendum vote talks. “One might expect tact and sensitivity would be the order of the day for a country’s senior diplomat. Yet your comparison with the Soviet Union could not be calculated to be more offensive to states that remember that regime only too well.”

Prisoner? Yet the door is open. You are free to leave any time, Mr Hunt. Go, and take your baggage with you. But the trouble is that you don’t want just to leave. You want to retain all the rights of those remaining incarcerated – free lunches, participation in communal training, the right to sell your wares in the cellblocks unhindered ….

And then there’s the small matter of your other commitments. Like that to Ireland and a frictionless Border – there’s your insistence that when you make a choice to leave the EU, it is the EU, not you, which must change its rules to accommodate your obligations to your own citizens.

At a time when negotiations with partners are particularly sensitive, with 10 days to the crucial October summit, one might expect tact and sensitivity would be the order of the day for a country’s senior diplomat. Yet your comparison with the Soviet Union could not be calculated to be more offensive to states that remember that regime only too well, to leaders like Angela Merkel who emerged from that system. “Open a history book from time to time,” the European Commission’s spokesman suggested politely yesterday.

As Baiba Braže, Latvia’s ambassador to Britain, tweeted: “Soviets killed, deported, exiled and imprisoned 100 thousands of Latvia’s inhabitants after the illegal occupation in 1940, and ruined lives of 3 generations. The EU has brought prosperity, equality, growth, respect. #StrongerTogether.” The EU will take no lectures from a Tory minister on protecting freedom.

And Hunt is not the only Tory playing dangerous conference games. Prime minister Theresa May’s repeated insistence in recent days that the EU has yet to explain its objections to UK proposals is patent nonsense.

It is also verging on a level of bad faith that bodes ill for any prospect of agreement.

As if that were not enough, Arlene Foster, Leader of the DUP has also been attending the Tory conference, speaking of her admiration for Boris Johnson, and having this to say about the Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to Northern Ireland even though it was opposed by the DUP every step of the way:

DUP leader Arlene Foster has said the Belfast Agreement should not be considered untouchable in Brexit negotiations.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Mrs Foster said it was not a sacrosanct piece of legislation.

She said: “It has been deeply frustrating to hear people who voted Remain and in Europe talk about Northern Ireland as though we can’t touch the Belfast Agreement.

“Things evolve, even in the EU context.”

Mrs Foster also said she wanted to see more focus on the positives of Brexit.

“I think the reason why so many people are turned off by Brexit is because they are being fed a diet of negativity – whether it’s infighting, Brussels, being disrespected by people over there.

“We haven’t been able to talk about the aspirations for the nation [because] we’ve spent so much time arguing about what’s happened, is it going to be a disaster for Ireland in inverted commas, instead of actually focusing on what we can achieve in the UK with the Brexit negotiations.”

She’s right about one thing: No one has been able to articulate the benefits of Brexit for Northern Ireland, mainly because there aren’t any. But fear not: Boris Johnson is about to address the conference today, and he is a noted scholar on all things Irish. NOT.

Mrs Foster was speaking ahead of the Tory party conference where Boris Johnson will use his speech to issue a clarion call to activists to “believe in Conservative values”.

In what will undoubtedly be seen as a pitch to replace Theresa May as leader, Mr Johnson will not only restate his opposition to the prime minister’s handling of Brexit but call on Tories to focus on law and order, tax cuts and house-building in order to defeat Labour.

As Mrs May celebrated her 62nd birthday, Mr Johnson was pictured jogging through a field near his Oxfordshire home, in a photo apparently designed to mock the prime minister’s famous memories of “running through wheatfields” as a mischievous schoolgirl.

Mrs Foster praised Mr Johnson’s “belief” and “spirit” and said she’d be happy to work with him as prime minister.

It should be noted that the Tory Party is formally named the “Conservative and Unionist” party, but its links are traditionally more with the anglophile “Ulster Unionist Party”, not with the Paisleyite Free Presbyterian DUP traditionally more closely associated with Scottish “planters” of Presbyterian stock: I.e. people who emigrated form Scotland to take over lands confiscated from Irish Catholics who failed to aligned themselves with the British crown.

So while all the talk now is of an alignment between the DUP and the Tory party, this is an alignment strictly for short term politically expedient pragmatic motives. Culturally, there is little love lost between them, which may also explain why Arlene Foster has not been slow to speak well of Boris Johnson at a time when any such comments might not go down well with any remaining Theresa May faithful.

For some reason the EU27 is supposed to take all this guff on the chin as one would indulge a 4 year old engaged in a petulant screaming session. The EU27 are expected to re-engage in talks next week as if none of this had happened, or if it did, that it was purely for domestic consumption. We shall see. There is every prospect of the Brexit talks going completely off the rails, such has been the emotional gulf which has opened up between them at this late stage in the talks, at a time when negotiators are usually engaged in trying to minimize the the remaining gaps between opposing positions.

Once the conference and silly season is over, next week, Theresa May is expected to unveil her bright new, shining, proposals for the Irish border. Various reports suggest this may include renewed attempts to kick this whole issue into the post Brexit transition period, enabling the UK to blame “EU intransigence” for failing to agree “friction-less trade” in any post Brexit situation resulting in a hard Irish border; giving the currently defunct Northern Ireland Assembly a role in deciding on any “regularity divergence” between the UK and N. Ireland, which might result in some customs controls “in the Irish sea”; and agreeing to full regularity alignment between the UK and EU pending the development of technological solutions to avoiding customs controls at the border. Somehow it is always up to the EU to develop an alternative workable solution.

As Fintan O’Toole notes in the Irish Times, the UK has had many years to develop such “technological solutions” to avoid a hard border between the British territory of Gibraltar which is outside the Customs Union, and Spain, and yet has failed to do so. And that is with a territory with just one border crossing, whereas there are 208 official crossings between N. Ireland and Ireland, and an infinite number of unofficial ones.

But no report entitled “the silly season” would be complete without repeating Boris Johnson’s epic contribution:

In a speech which delighted an audience at the Conservative Party conference, Mr Johnson called for no new taxes and extra health service spending while the room erupted into cheers when he said Mrs May needed “to chuck Chequers,” as her Brexit proposals are known.

With just six months before Britain leaves the European Union, Mrs May’s precarious position at the helm of her party has been further shaken by criticism of her plans, both at home and in Brussels.

Mr Johnson, who became the figurehead for the campaign to leave the EU, has been one of her loudest critics.

“Do not believe them when they say there is no other plan and no alternative,” Mr Johnson told the hundreds of Conservatives who queued to get a seat in a 1,500-seat conference hall.

“This is the moment to chuck Chequers,” he said. “If we cheat the electorate, and Chequers is a cheat, we will escalate that sense of mistrust.”

Mrs May’s team had hoped the party’s annual conference would hand her a platform to revitalise a pledge she made when she became prime minister in 2016 to help those people who are “just about managing” and try to steal the initiative from Labour.

But the conference has been dominated by Brexit, with eurosceptic lawmakers attracting hundreds of Conservative members to their events on the fringes. Only handfuls turned out to hear ministers’ speeches in the main hall.

In all the hullabaloo about the EU’s rejection of the Chequers proposals, one little detail has been forgotten: The Chequers proposals were never going to be part of the Brexit agreement in the first place. If agreed, they would have been part of the proposals for the future relationship between the EU and UK – as contained in a non-binding “Political Declaration” – to accompany the legally binding Brexit agreement.

The Brexit agreement itself is concerned mainly with the UK’s exit payment, the treatment of EU nationals in the UK and UK nationals in the EU, and with the back-stop on the Irish border.  According to all parties, that Brexit agreement has been 90% agreed, and the UK even signed up to the EU’s outline proposals on the backstop in December 2017.

Theresa May only got cold feet on the deal in March 2018 when the EU produced a legally enforceable text which defined how it would work in detail.[Pages 108-116 of attached draft Brexit Agreement (PDF)]. Realizing that a failure to secure full access to the EU Customs Union and Single Market would result in some kind of customs or regulatory difference and therefore control requirements between Great Britain and N. Ireland, she caved in to DUP pressure and declared no British Prime Minister could ever agree to this.

Except she already had agreed to it (in principle).  So the row over the EU rejection of the Chequers proposals (which had already been killed off by internal Tory party opposition before they ever got to Salzburg) is nothing but a red herring to distract attention from her real difficulty with the DUP. The political declaration to accompany the formal Brexit Treaty can be as vague or aspirational as she likes, referencing Chequers, Norway or Canada +++, but whatever it contains is not legally enforceable and won’t be agreed in detail until towards the end of the transition period in any case.
Fintan O’Toole sees a dark conspiracy in all of this. Realizing that the EU proposals would give N. Ireland free and full access to the EU Customs Union and Single market (CUSM), May saw an opportunity to use this as a means of retaining full access to the CUSM for the UK via the back door of N. Ireland.

Suddenly the prospect of having any kind of controls between N. Ireland and Great Britain became absolute anathema. Never mind that controls on agricultural products and animals already exist, and the fact that N. Ireland already diverges starkly from Great Britain on matters like abortion services, marriage equality, and recognition and protection of minority languages.

When both the EU and many in the Tory party rejected this ruse, on the grounds that continued membership of the CUSM would restrict the UK’s ability to control immigration, negotiate its own trade deals with third parties, and reduce the UK to being a “rule taker” of EU rules it had no power to control, May produced her “compromise” Chequers proposals which restricted membership of CUSM to products and excluded services.

This compromise, too, was rejected by many in the Tory party (and the wider public) on the same grounds as before – as effectively turning the UK into a vassal state. It should not have been any great surprise to anyone when it was also rejected by the EU, on the grounds that you cannot “cherry pick” the parts of the CUSM you like. So why the big row?

It all began to unravel at May’s breakfast meeting with Varadker prior to the summit where May indicated that the UK’s counter proposals to the EU’s text on the backstop would not be available for quite some time to come. The EU had been preparing “to be nice” to May ahead of the Tory party conference, in the expectation that May would deliver on her earlier commitments on the backstop shortly thereafter.

Instead May penned a hardline op-ed in Die Welt on the eve of the summit, one which she repeated almost verbatim in a speech to EU leaders at the Summit dinner. It’s hectoring and moralizing tone was too much for some leaders, particularly Macron, to take. The following day they responded in kind.

But let us not be taken in by this exercise in kabuki theater. The precise shape of the UK’s ongoing trading relationship with the EU won’t be contained in the Brexit agreement in any case. This is a matter which cannot and need not be resolved now. What matters in the conclusion of the final 10% of the formal Brexit agreement, and this includes above all, the legal wording to give effect to the backstop deal on the Irish border May had already agreed to.

If Salzburg did nothing else, it should have abused May of the notion she can continue to procrastinate on this issue. At stake is that most precious of commodities in any negotiation: Trust. May has just run out of it. As Chris Johns says in the Irish Times:

Anybody who was surprised by the latest episode of Brexit psychodrama simply hasn’t been paying attention.

The template for negotiations was set within hours after the June 2016 referendum: the European Union sets out its stall and waits for the British response. As soon as UK prime minister Theresa May’s `red lines’ became apparent, the EU could legally and logically offer only one of two routes: Canada or Norway. Each time this is politely repeated, the UK cabinet and the rest of the Conservative Party pay little attention to what Brussels says, choosing instead to have a row among themselves.

This little two-step has been repeated many times. After each Tory party row, when someone says something like “the EU can go whistle for its money”, the British return to the negotiating table with some new concessions and a slightly shorter list of impossible demands.

The whole process will get repeated until that list is small enough for Brussels to start negotiating. We are almost there. That list of impossible demands is actually quite short but, on the face of it, irreconcilable: no borders in Ireland or down the middle of the Irish Sea.

Part of the psychology of all this is the importance attached to high dudgeon. It is vital that members of the British cabinet takes turns to get very upset, if not angry at some imagined insult from Brussels. It almost looks choreographed. If a moral high horse is spotted somewhere in the distance, great effort is expended to climb upon it.

It is vital that tabloid newspaper editors are given the opportunity to write headlines in a style not seen since the sinking of the Argentinian General Belgrano during the Falklands war. Everything is a “shock” or a “blow”. Or, more latterly, May’s “finest hour”, the latest in a long line or Churchillian, wartime, references.

I’m not sure why it has to be this way: trying to understand what basic human needs are satisfied by this kind of behaviour leads to another form of madness. But the results are clear. One consequence is an erosion of faith in the British as capable and efficient administrators.

Another is the evisceration of trust: any agreement, free trade or otherwise, can only ever be negotiated between parties who trust each other. There has been plenty of British backsliding but the signing last December of the Border backstop deal, followed by an immediate effective breach of contract, has been quietly noticed everywhere.

The Guardian has been excoriating Theresa May for her Salzburg performance: Macron puts the boot in after May’s Brexit breakfast blunder:

The spin from Downing Street had been that Theresa May’s meeting with her Irish counterpart, Leo Varadkar, shortly after breakfast in the margins of an EU summit in Austria, had been “relatively warm”, albeit “frank”. The dawning truth later that evening was that, in a premiership littered with missteps, May had made one of her worst errors of judgment as the two leaders and their teams met in a private room in Salzburg’s Mozarteum University.

For weeks the working assumption in Brussels had been that, on the Irish issue at least, a major step forward would be made by the next leaders’ summit in October. But over the coffee the prime minister dropped a bombshell. She did not believe it would be possible for the British government and Brussels to come to a solution by then. Six months after promising to come up with a fix that would avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland in all possible circumstances, the British appeared to be stalling for time again.

The message reverberated around the Salzburg summit and reached the ear of the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

The intention had been that this would be a good summit for the prime minister, giving her something to work with on the eve of a difficult Conservative party conference. “Things didn’t happen as we expected,” an EU official admitted.

The French president ripped up the plan to offer Theresa May warm words along with an extraordinary Brexit summit on 17 and 18 November in order to finalize the terms of a Brexit deal. During a two-hour Brexit discussion over lunch among the EU27 heads of state and government, Macron told his fellow leaders that the prime minister should not be allowed to drag her heels. The pressure for a result needed to be increased.

May was to be set a threshold that she would have to reach if she wanted a deal. The EU’s leaders were instructed to increase their preparations for a no-deal Brexit. Viktor Orbán, the populist Hungarian prime minister, who had bowed and kissed May’s hand the previous evening before dinner, and boasted to reporters on Thursday of being part of a growing camp of leaders opposed to “punishing the British”, did not demur. “He did not say a word,” said a source.

Parliamentary sketch writer John Crace is no less damning:Theresa May in denial after her Salzburg ordeal.  “PM pretends nothing has changed as EU leaders take turns to rubbish her Brexit plans…”

If it hadn’t all been so numbingly inevitable, it might have been possible to feel sorry for Theresa May. Back in the UK, both remainers and leavers had pronounced her Chequers’ proposals to be dead in the water, but the prime minister had still travelled to the informal EU summit in Salzburg hoping for a stay of execution. A few luke-warm words and some insincere air kisses at the very least, until after she had survived the Conservative party conference. Her current range of vision really is that limited.

Instead she got a lesson in plain-speaking brutality. No attempts to sugar the pill, as EU leader after leader took it in turns to dismiss Chequers and to mock the UK over its lack of progress in its Brexit preparations. Even the Dutch thought they were better prepared for a no-deal Brexit than us. It was left to Donald Tusk, president of the EU council, to deliver the coup de grace. The Chequers’ deal was unworkable because it undermined the integrity of the single market. And, by the way, its solution to the Northern Ireland border was just fantasy.

Moments after being given the bad news in person, May had to face the UK media. The room in which the press conference was held was small and airless, but the prime minister was already sweaty when she walked in. More than that, she looked angry and terrified. Alone and out of her depth, her eyes darting across the room, searching for one friendly face. There wasn’t one. There hadn’t been one in the two days she had been in Austria.

—<snip>—

There were a few seconds of silence as everyone took this in. It almost felt intrusive to observe the prime minister visibly falling apart. A public humiliation on the epic scale of both her refusal to accept the reversal of the dementia tax during the general election campaign and her car-crash leader’s speech at last year’s Tory party conference. Then May composed herself as best she could and invited the kicking she knew was coming her way. Bring it on. Everyone else had had a go so she might as well let the media have theirs. The martyrdom of St Theresa.

—<snip>—

The digging became ever more fevered as her facial expressions became more contorted. Too much more of this and she would have become a dead ringer for Munch’s The Scream.

It doesn’t get any better… Dan Sabbagh, Daniel Boffey and Pippa Crerar continue: May humiliated by Salzburg ambush as she fights to save Chequers plan

A clearly nervous and angry May told reporters that EU leaders were engaged in “negotiating tactics” designed to throw her off course. “I have always said these negotiations were going to be tough,” she said. “And at various stages of these negotiations, tactics would be used as part of those negotiations”.

The assault on May’s plan came shortly after a lunchtime meeting of EU leaders in the Austrian city, where they discussed the Brexit talks in May’s absence. EU council president Tusk declared that Chequers “would not work” while French president Macron said it was “not acceptable”.

A combative Macron accused British Brexiters of lying about how easy it would be to negotiate an exit from the EU on terms favourable to the UK.

“Those who explain that we can easily live without Europe, that everything is going to be alright, and that it’s going to bring a lot of money home are liars,” said Macron. “It’s even more true since they left the day after so as not to have to deal with it.”

But fear not: Ian Duncan Smith rides in to the rescue:

Leading Brexiters have criticised the French president, Emmanuel Macron, for his extraordinary break in diplomatic convention in which he branded prominent leavers as liars who had misled the British people.

While Theresa May’s Chequers plan was left hanging by a thread after an ambush at the Salzburg summit, her French counterpart launched an unprecedented attack on Brexiters, warning that leaving the EU was “not without costs”.

Furious leavers immediately hit back, accusing Macron of trying to distract from his own domestic woes, with the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith telling him he should “butt out” of British politics.

There! That will put those Frenchies in their place!

The Guardian has never made any secret of its opposition to Brexit, and it hardly speaks for the whole of the UK. However it is difficult to see how Theresa May can recover her authority when her own side is so dismissive of her performance. Bridges have been burned, and both sides appear to be moving further apart at the very time they should be closing the deal.

EU leaders have lost patience with her procrastination and appear not to care any more whether or not she survives as Tory party leader and Prime Minister. If she can’t negotiate seriously with the EU, they might as well deal with someone who can. The Salzburg summit was meant to give her a boost heading into the party conference season. Now EU leaders have all but dismissed her signature Chequers plan on which she has built her premiership and for which she lost two senior cabinet ministers.

Theresa May had a pretty disastrous Conservative Party conference last year. A repeat performance this year, and her leadership is over:

It appears that Brexit madness has finally reached its logical conclusion…

(A not entirely accurate geographical metaphor).

We’re now moving into the Brexit negotiation end-zone with EU leaders trying to give Theresa May as much cover as they can ahead of the Conservative and Labour Party conferences from September 23rd to October 3rd.  After that they will expect significant concessions form the UK side particularly on the Irish border back-stop to clinch a deal.

But the UK side is singing an altogether different tune and are doubling down on their reneging on last December’s deal on the backstop. They claim that allowing N. Ireland to remain within the Customs Union would shatter the constitutional integrity of the UK, and that “no British Prime Minister would agree to this”.

For the Irish government, this represents a particularly difficult dilemma, because a “no deal” Brexit – now being re-branded as a “World Trade rules Brexit” – could be just as damaging to the Irish economy as to the UK. Something has to give, and the UK is betting that the Irish government, or EU support for the Irish position, will be the first to fold.

It’s a bit of a fool’s errand to try and guess how Leo Varadker and his government. will react in that scenario. He is currently riding high in the polls chiefly because of what is seen as a robust and sure-footed response to Brexit so far. An orthodox conservative neo-liberal on the economy and a liberal on social issues, he leads Fine Gael, the least nationalist party in the state. But Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail are sure to make hay if he is seen as being weak on the border issue.

In one sense he can’t go wrong by taking a hard line on the border: conservative and moderate non-nationalist voters have nowhere else to go if Fine Gael takes an uncharacteristically hard line. But Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein will also be the first to blame him if the negotiations stall and a no deal Brexit looms. They are unprincipled enough to blame him regardless of the outcome in what is always likely to be (at best) a damage mitigation exercise.

The other thing Varadker has going for him is that he is likely to become the focus of a sustained hate campaign in the British media if he is seen as standing in the way of “their” Brexit deal. Nothing unites Irish people more than an attack by the British establishment or media on one of their own.

The question is will the EU27 maintain their solidarity with Ireland when the prospect of “no deal” becomes a reality. Up until now that solidarity has been exemplary, although there have been suggestions that an Irish concession on corporate taxation, and particularly on a European digital tax will be expected as a quid pro quo.

My best guess is that it is simply inconceivable to UK Tories that Ireland and the EU27 will not fold when faced with the reality of what a no deal Brexit will entail. Boris Johnson has described the border issue as an insignificant gnat which can be sorted out by technology and even Barnier has requested more details on North South trade in order to see whether a “trusted trader” scheme might be feasible as a way of avoiding customs controls at the border.

I would suspect no one will be too concerned if some UK goods leak across the border in private cars or small vans provided these are not then re-packaged and re-invoiced as “Irish” exports to the rest of the EU. The issue is how the EU can avoid British originating goods using Ireland as a back door to the European market by the container load. Would customs checks at Irish sea and air ports be sufficient to avoid this risk, and how would this impact on bone fide Irish exports to the EU?

Some fudge seems likely, if only to get a minimal deal over the line so that more permanent arrangements can be negotiated during the transition period. What I am less sure about is whether such a fudge would pass muster in the House of Commons. Boris Johnson & co. seem to be only looking for an opportunity to tear the whole house of cards down, almost regardless of the consequences. For them, there has to be an opportunity to clinch a better deal later on: otherwise how can he topple May and achieve power?

Logically he should wait until after March 29th. when the economic consequences of Brexit start to become clearer, and May’s popularity wanes still further. But would the Winston Churchill in him not want to be the Prime Minister, waving the flag, as Big Ben intones Brexit hour? Never discount the power of ego in politics.

Hungary and Poland pose worse threat to EU than Brexit

Unforeseen and shocking political developments in another member state have placed Ireland at the centre of the biggest crisis facing the EU. No, I am not talking about Brexit but the breakdown of the rule of law in Hungary and, particularly Poland.

Ireland’s central role in this comes from a case that has come before the Irish High Court. Artur Celmer is wanted by the Polish authorities for trial on a number of charges including drug trafficking. An EU law called the European Arrest Warrant made the extradition of people from one member state almost automatic.

However, politics has intervened. In recent years, the Hungarian and Polish governments have been criticised for adopting increasingly illiberal policies, particularly in relation to judicial independence.

Under EU law, the Irish authorities are required to trust the institutions of other member states. In extradition proceedings, if a court in an EU member state asks an Irish court to surrender someone for trial, the Irish court under EU law has to assume that that person will get a fair trial.

However, EU institutions have been openly doubting whether the Polish government respects judicial independence. So it was not surprising that the Irish High Court decided that it should ask the European Court whether it should continue to assume that people such as Celmer would get a fair trial if extradited to Poland. This decision caused an avalanche of criticism and abuse from leading pro-government figures in Poland.

The High Court decided it should ask the European Court whether it should continue to assume people such as Celmer would get a fair trial if extradited to Poland

The European Court ruled that the Irish court should verify whether there is a systemic problem in relation to judicial independence and whether there is a real risk that, if extradited, Celmer would suffer a breach of his right to a fair trial. The High Court has now decided to ask the Polish authorities for more information before it decides whether to surrender Celmer to them.

It is difficult to overstate the seriousness of this situation for the EU. Mutual recognition based on mutual trust between member states goes far beyond issues of extradition. Indeed, EU law as a whole is an elaborate web of duties on member states to recognise and enforce each other’s decisions.

In addition, as Idiotsavant and Oui have pointed out, the EU Parliament has voted by the required two-thirds majority to take the unprecedented step of initiating Chapter 7 disciplinary proceedings against Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian regime in Hungary: Proceedings which could result in Hungary being deprived of its voting rights within the EU.

For this threat to become a reality, however, all 27 other EU member states would have to support that next step. Poland has declared it will not support this, presumably to pre-empt the possibility of a similar action being taken against Poland.

So we have a standoff within the EU: Hungary and Poland are systematically seeking to undermine the democratic norms on which the EU is built, and there is nothing the EU can do about it, provided they remain united in their opposition to the rest of the EU. Or is there?

2014 figures

By a strange coincidence, Poland and Hungary are also the largest net beneficiaries of EU funds. Could the Commission – acting within it’s legal competences – slow down the disbursement of funds to Poland and Hungary until they become fully compliant with EU democratic norms?

More crucially, the next 7 year cycle of the EU budget is currently under negotiation. Cutbacks are going to have to be made because of the loss of the UK’s net contribution. The process could stall if there is a loss of trust that all EU members are implementing their EU responsibilities in accordance with the Treaties.

Poland and Hungary have the most to lose if that process breaks down and is replaced by only minimal emergency funding to keep EU institutions operational. Why should other EU states continue to fund them if they then proceed to undermine the very basis of EU solidarity? Certainly, it will be very difficult for any member to agree an increase in their net contribution while net beneficiaries flout EU norms.

Viktor Orbán and Andrzej Duda need to learn that cooperation and solidarity work both ways.

Nothing undermines a leader more than having important members of their own side align themselves with the opposition: First Donald Trump rather pointedly remarked that Boris Johnson would make a great Prime Minister. Then Boris Johnson chips in that the Chequers proposals represent the white flag of surrender.  Now Rees-Mogg praises Barnier for his charm and remarked that Barnier and Brexiteers are agreed that Theresa May’s Chequers proposals are “absolute rubbish.”.

How is the poor woman supposed to conduct a negotiation when her own side give such aid and comfort to the enemy? In a normal democracy, Johnson and Rees-Mogg would be excoriated for betraying their own side. But it seems anything goes when it comes to attacking Theresa May. She is the fall girl for a negotiation they are determined to see fail.

Their only problem is how to prevent her from calling a general election if her putative “deal” is voted down in the Commons: A General Election that would quite possibly usher in Jeremy Corbyn into No. 10. So the trick is to undermine her sufficiently to cause her to resign the leadership without going to the Country first. She must not be allowed to clinch a deal on which she could then launch a campaign.
The longer this can be dragged out, the more likely a “no deal” Brexit. But that is a step too far in the machinations of Boris & Co. The first step is to saddle her with an unpopular deal, and then replace Theresa May without risking a general election.

Then sing “Land of Hope and Glory” loud and clear. Threaten the EU with dire consequences in the event of a no deal. Demand an extension of the A.50 deadline if that is required. Stomp your feet and hammer your fist on the table at an EU Summit. Go all apex predator male. Fight them on the beaches…

Then present any deal, if one is agreed, as a major improvement on what May negotiated. The substance doesn’t matter much. Presentation is all. You must be seen to have fought the good fight and brought home the booty, giving the Boche one in the eye for good measure…

All silly fun and games really, but also the substance of much politics. Any good stage play needs a villain, a Judas, and a Saviour – a white knight on his charger. The Dramatis personæ of epic struggle: Boris Johnson’s Churchill to Theresa May’s Neville Chamberlain, caught in the act of appeasement.

This is not a commentary on Theresa May’s leadership qualities or her lack of them. It is her misfortune to have drawn the short straw in the Casting Director’s allocation of roles in this epic tale. But fear not: An Astrological reading of Brexit charts predicts that Brexit will be followed by an economic boom in the UK because departing immigrants means rising wages and increased consumer expenditure for those who remain.

It also “predicts turmoil in Parliament, public disagreement among members of the Cabinet, probable changes in Cabinet personnel, and movements to increase the power of the voters over the political system.” I could have told you that. The economic boom, not so much: I suspect the astrologer, who takes a very UK centric view of the world, has forgotten that all those departing immigrants also produced much of Britain’s wealth.

The next step in this charade is the Conservative Party Conference in October. Expect lots of fighting talk on all sides: Lost of lambasting of the Commission for it’s “inflexibility” and failure to take a “sensible” approach. Ireland can also expect to come into the firing line for it’s failure to engage constructively with more “imaginative” British proposals to avoid controls at the border.

And then comes November, the latest deadline for an agreement set by the Commission. Of course an agreement cannot come then, because that would be to cave into Commission “inflexibility”. So this weary saga drags on into December, when a limited deal of sorts will be agreed and condemned by all sides not directly responsible for it.

That will be Theresa May’s zero hour. Can she get it through the Commons, and if not, should she resign the Tory leadership or call an election? Is her primary loyalty to the party or the country? She may be Dead Women Walking, but she still has one crucial card to play. And Boris (or Corbyn) is going to have to bide his time.

Both sides in the Brexit negotiations have been hyping the risk of a no deal Brexit and becoming more explicit in discussing the economic damage it will do. This is to be expected  in the run up to the end of the negotiations, if only to soften up opponents of a deal.

“There is no alternative”, Mrs. May can be expected to say if and when negotiators finally come to a deal: The economic consequences of no deal are too awful to contemplate, a point made clear by the publication of the first of 84 studies on the economic impact of a no deal Brexit.

All of this may very well be true, particularly in the short term. But are there longer term benefits to a no deal Brexit than can overcome any short term disadvantages? This is certainly the theory which arch-Brexiteers cling to when opposing the compromises any deal would entail.

They too can be suspected of tactical maneuvering, both to stiffen the resolve of British negotiators to hold out for a better deal, and to absolve themselves of any responsibility when any final, messy, compromise deal is done.

But let us take their objections at face value, for the moment, and examine their claim that a sovereign UK, free of any entanglement with the EU, could be much more successful, economically and politically, on the world stage.
The common wisdom points to a UK in gradual decline, economically and politically, when the UK was last entirely sovereign: before it joined the EU in 1973. Since then it has lost the remains of its empire, its industrial base, and much of its influence on the world stage. Former colonies like India, Pakistan, Australia, and South Africa have become much more independent and influential.

Within the EU, on the other hand, the UK has been able to push for the rapid expansion of the EU eastwards, the creation of the Single Market and Customs Union, and the adoption of English as the working language of key EU institutions. Politically the push for Scottish independence has been contained, and the Northern Ireland  troubles have been brought to an end.

What’s not to like, from a UK perspective? Apparently, rather a lot, if the Brexiteers are to be believed. Freed from meddling Brussels bureaucrats, the UK will apparently be able to negotiate much more advantageous trade deals, keep out undesirable aliens, and “take back control” over its own foreign and security policies.

“How has that been going?” The EU may well be inclined to ask, a few years from now.

First of all, it is difficult to see how the UK, a market of 65 Million people, can negotiate more advantageous trade deals than the EU with 450 Million people.  It would take spectacular incompetence on the part of EU trade negotiators for that to be the case – and they have a lot of experience of negotiating trade deals, whereas the UK has none.

Secondly, immigration from within the EU has generally been of highly qualified professionals or hard working eastern Europeans prepared to do manual agricultural jobs Britons have shown little enthusiasm for doing. Their numbers have already been in decline since Brexit was announced, partly because they feel unwelcome, partly because of the decline in Sterling, and partly because their prospects elsewhere are improving with a gradual rise in EU employment levels.

Many UK farmers, employers and the NHS have been sounding the alarm that they cannot sustain output and services without these workers, who have cost the UK little to bring up, educate and train, and who generally contribute more in output and taxes than they cost in terms of the consumption of state health, education and social welfare services.

Thirdly, the UK’s foreign policies adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Libya, and Syria have not been spectacular successes of late, and Trump shows little inclination to treat the UK as anything other than a colony in future US adventurism. What has the average UK citizen to gain from all of this?

All international forecasters predict significant short/medium term economic losses for the UK, and it is difficult to see how those losses can be made good. The above chart dates from 2016, but a a recent Financial Times analysis suggests that the UK economy has already suffered a Brexit hit of between 1 and 2% of GDP.

However because the UK entered the Brexit negotiations with strong momentum, these reductions have resulted in a slowdown of UK growth relative to its G7 competitors, but not an outright recession. Record employment levels mean that the political impact has, to date, been relatively small.

All of which has meant that the UK has been able to adopt a relatively insouciant approach to the Brexit negotiations to date, up to and including a certain alacrity about the impact of a no deal Brexit if that is the outcome of the negotiations.

This is in spite of economic predictions that estimate the impact of Brexit on long term EU growth of c. 1.5% and anything from 4 to 10% on the UK. Economic predictions don’t change voter preferences, felt realities do.

Given these are long term scenarios, spread over many years, the impact will hardly be felt in most EU countries, except for specific sectors. Ireland is the only EU country which suffers a comparable level of damage to the UK, and given Irish growth has been averaging over 5% in recent years, some cooling off may not be an entirely bad thing, even from an Irish perspective.

And while there is some very justified skepticism over Irish GDP figures, especially 2015/6, employment figures suggest a similar trend:

And the unemployment rate amplifies this:

So the real problem for Ireland is less the overall macro effect of a hard Brexit on the Irish economy,  but on the specific impacts on our agri-food exports, subject to the highest WTO tariffs, and based in rural communities with few alternative employments. Ireland already suffers from an Urban Rural divide and gross income inequalities between Dublin and city based financial services, Big Pharma, and IT industries and more rural agri-food and service industries.

So the political impact of a hard Brexit on Ireland would be major, and that is before one factors in the impact on the Northern Ireland border and on peace and stability in N. Ireland itself. Ireland will require a special dispensation from the EU to mitigate the worst impact of Brexit  and this may include a limited level of continuing free trade across the border for goods not destined for the rest of the EU.

But presuming these intra-EU issues can be managed, what has the EU really got to lose from a hard no deal Brexit? Why would the EU want to encourage UK exports to the EU aided by perhaps a 30% cumulative Sterling devaluation rendering EU competitors un-viable? Why not maximize the opportunity to replace UK exports of goods and services with indigenous EU products and services? Can the EU really afford to continue being dependent on a non-member for the production of vital goods and services?

But most importantly of all, why would the EU want to assist the UK in “making a success of Brexit” when that would undermine the very raison d’être of the EU itself? Whereas the UK Brexiteer case for a no deal Brexit is all bluff and bluster, could it be that the EU case is very real indeed?

British expectations for a deal now appear to be wildly unrealistic, involving, as they do, the undermining of the “four freedoms” underpinning the Single Market. Is the only way of achieving a more realistic deal for the EU to wait a few years until the real effects of a no deal Brexit have worked their way into the UK body politic and expectations have been reduced to a point the EU can concede without damaging it’s own internal coherence and stability?

Of course it would seem grossly revangiste for the EU to pursue such a strategy as a first choice, any hint of which EU negotiators have been careful to eschew. But when UK Brexiteers extol the virtues of a no-deal Brexit, they should perhaps be more careful as to what they wish for. A no deal Brexit may very well be what they will get, and their hopes that German car industry executives will come to their aid may be very mistaken indeed.

And with Trump threatening to withdraw from the WTO, the “WTO option” so beloved by hard Brexiteers may not be the “worst case” scenario a no deal Brexit could usher in. If the UK defaults on its €40 Billion exit payment, there may be no incentive for the EU to grant the UK any kind of “most favoured nation” market access at all. No deal doesn’t just mean no deal. It could mean very rapidly deteriorating relationships, mutual recriminations, and ultimately, a trade war.

Brexit may  be a full frontal attack on everything the EU stands for, but there is no reason why the EU should fulfill UK stereotypes of an ineffectual bureaucracy and fail to fight back. Brexit may very well become the impetus the EU needs to forge a new unity of purpose and collective self interest. That self-interest may not include giving an ex-member and chief critic an easy ride.

^{Much lower than expected crowds show up for Pope Francis Mass}

Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland, just concluded, was very different to that of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, in 1979, but it is very difficult to gauge it’s significance in the immediate aftermath. The visit was dominated by the clerical child sexual abuse scandals and cover-up, and other scandals concerning Church run mother-and-baby homes, forced adoptions, and forced labour in Magdalen laundries. Pope Francis referred to these scandals in all four of his speeches and begged forgiveness for the Church’s part in them.

What he did not do was announce any concrete measures to help bring the perpetrators and those responsible for the cover-up to justice, such as releasing files on the perpetrators held by the Vatican to state prosecutors. He referred to some Archbishops and Cardinals being sacked but claimed he was limited in what he could do by opposition from the Curia. It seems that too many people directly involved in the cover-up are still in power in the Vatican. The Pope himself has also just been accused of covering-up the abuse by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in Washington and called on to resign by the former Vatican ambassador to the US, Archbishop Vigano, a conservative with hard-line anti-gay views.  The Curia may be fighting back.

The crowds attending his ceremonies where also much reduced on 1979 when over a million attended Pope John Paul II’s Mass in the Phoenix park. This time half a million were expected but only an estimated 130,000 showed up, perhaps not helped by the inclement weather. Croke Park Gaelic stadium was also far from full for a Papal homily on family values despite a host of musical stars performing as well. A rival protest event organized at short notice with no logistical support by abuse survivor Colm O’Gorman drew a crowd of about five thousand.

Many practicing Catholics were hoping the Pope’s visit would result in an upsurge in religious fervour as had happened after Pope Jon Paul’s visit in 1979, followed soon after by a clause banning abortion being inserted into the Irish Constitution through a referendum carried with a two thirds majority. Exactly the same majority removed that clause just a few months ago, and so the two Papal visits nicely book-end a very significant change in  popular attitudes to Church doctrine and teaching in the meantime.

Leo Varadker gave a widely praised speech to the Pope urging the Church to adopt a policy of mandatory reporting of sex abuse allegations to civil authorities world-wide, a policy only recently adopted by the Irish Church following some opposition from the Vatican. As a non-practicing Catholic he had to tread a thin line between representing the public interest and appearing to breach the principles of separation of Church and State and freedom of religion by interfering in Church affairs. In the circumstances, it was the very least he could do.

The united front on this issue presented by both the Irish Church and State to the Vatican does however represent a powerful signal to the Vatican that any further non-reporting of allegations, or interference in the subsequent investigations will not be tolerated. The Pope appears to have been visibly moved by the forthright condemnations of church actions declared to his face by abuse survivors at a private meeting organized by the church even though it excluded some of the more vocal church critics on the issue.

Most people who met him appeared to have been impressed by his sincerity and listening skills, but many expressed disappointment at the lack of any concrete follow-up actions proposed by the Pontiff during his visit. Most will now adopt a wait-and-see approach to see if Vatican policies, personnel, and practices really do change. Few expect any fundamental changes in church teaching and practice, for instance on birth control, same sex marriage, the medical management of unsafe pregnancies, and the ordination of women; but future appointments and policy pronouncements by the Vatican will be watched closely.

Pope John Paul II initiated a conservative counter revolution in Ireland when he visited in 1979, one which took a generation to reverse. Far from a repeat performance, it is just about possible that Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland will have more of an impact on the Vatican than on Ireland.