AMIDST A DIPLOMATIC game of chess over what compromises can be made on the Irish border to keep the EU, the UK and Ireland happy, it’s been said over and over again that the relationship between the UK and Ireland has become more and more tense.
The Irish government has noted on a number of occasions that Brexit has soured relations between the UK and Ireland; RTÉ Europe Editor Tony Connolly believes there is a perception that the UK couldn’t believe that Ireland was a sovereign state within the EU.
This opinion was echoed by American-British playwright and commentator Bonnie Greer on the BBC’s Question Time, who said: ”Oftentimes, I hear people talking about Ireland as if this country owns Ireland.
Ireland owes this country nothing. Ireland owes this country no concessions, it owes it no quarter, it owes it nothing.
The live-studio audience applauded Greer’s comments.
She also said that the US was closely aligned with Ireland, so any possibility of a US-UK trade relationship post-Brexit wasn’t likely if Ireland or the Good Friday Agreement was negatively affected.
“People are very serious about Ireland in the United States – don’t mess with it, don’t make it look bad.”
Labour MP Stephen Pound – a shadow minister for Northern Ireland who has previously been applauded for his understanding of Irish issues – agrees with Greer’s comments. Speaking to TheJournal.ie yesterday, he said:
In many ways it’s the other way around – Britain owes Ireland rather than Ireland owes Britain.
He said that “knuckle-dragging little Englander’s traditional view of ignorant Irish people is more visible in the rear view mirror”, and that those derogatory views of Irish people were disappearing.
“The marvellously comical, jovial, cheerful jokes about Irish people and leprechauns, and the Gaeltacht being where the wild people live, that view has disappeared now.”
The UK is “recalibrating the relationship in many ways”: “since the horrors that the British border inflicted”, Pound says, this is the last throw of the dice of colonialism and “we’re approaching a state of equality”.
“What’s changing is the Irish themselves are confident,” Pound says.
Irish communities went to Chicago and Australia, usually the best and the brightest; you had Irish bands, not just The Pogues and the Cranberries, but Snow Patrol, Mary Black. There’s that world of music, and at the same time Irish actors like Liam Neeson were becoming very popular, Irish comedians from Dave Allen onwards were everywhere you look. And it’s cool to be Irish – the Irish are the coolest, attitudes have changed. The old ethos looked very stale by comparison.
In the one defence of the derogatory British view of the Irish, Pound says that the “transposed thick rural peasant jokes” are everywhere – in every nation and region. Pound says he was “brought up on Kerryman jokes” made by his mother’s Cork relatives.
But we need to move away from debts and owing people, and we should be looking each other square in the eye.
‘Life and death for Ireland’
Speaking to Channel 4 News last year, Pound’s comments on the Irish border being a “life or death” matter went viral. He also spoke in detail about why the Swedish/Norway option – which has been freshly ruled out by the Taoiseach this week – wouldn’t work in Ireland.
“If you look at the border, 302 miles long, if you think that a camera up a pole can actually provide a border security alert – that will become a target.
If you have a target, you have to defend the target. If you have a defender, you have to have someone to actually protect the defender. Before you know where you are, you’ve got uniformed UK [Border Agency] or customs officers on the border.
If you do that – and I’m not being hysterical about this – then the peace process is finished, the minute you have uniformed troops on that border.
Because of this, Pound has ruled out Boris Johnson’s backstop alternative.
“The latest proposals from Johnson says much more about management within the Conservative party. I still favour an all-island customs union for the whole of Ireland – if it means customs check between Great Britain and Northern Ireland then so be it. But basically, this deal is Theresa May Mark Two.”
Elaborating on his all-island customs union, Pound says:
“An all-island solution is where we’re headed. You had Bord Fáilte and the Council of Education, Recruitment and Training merge into Fáilte Ireland, an all-island tourism body; the Irish rugby team; and so many environmental controls, so the impetus is towards an all-island solution.
He says that he’s not looking for a silver lining, but that Brexit has “brought the issue [of the border] into sharp focus – people are now looking past Winston Churchill’s description of ‘the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone‘.”
The border is something we are utterly complicit in, we created it and we’ve got to be part of the solution.
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