How much does Theresa love us? Let’s not count the ways

Can there be a more painful thing than unrequited love? Where you burn with ardour for the loved one, who responds by making it clear to the world that s/he finds you tedious, embarrassing and wants to be seen in public with you as infrequently as possible. And worst of all, that you never learn from the many rebuffs but, miserable and hang-dog, keep coming back for more.

I thought about this last weekend as the news media reported that Theresa May had turned up at Balmoral Show. She ‘ran into’ Arlene Foster and her son, and chatted with both briefly; she posed for pictures with a group of Women’s Institute people who had dressed up as nursery rhyme characters, she said ”We have got to make sure we do resolve the issue of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.” Shortly afterwards she left, having spent a total of twenty-five minutes at the show.

Oh dear. Which way should we look? At the ground, I suggest, and try not to think of ourselves as a piece of dog-dirt that got stuck on the British Prime Minister’s sole.

In contrast, consider the EU’s chief negotiator for Brexit, Michel Barnier. He spent two days in Ireland, which by my reckoning is somewhere between 70-100 times as long as the British Prime Minister. He addressed both houses of the Oireachtas; he met business owners on both sides of the border, discussing with them the possible impact of Brexit on their lives. Last Friday he visited a food export business in Co Monaghan, where he said he wanted to “work with all these people on the ground to find solutions” to the border question. At the same time, the Brexit talks, he warned, would be “extraordinary and very complex and difficult. This negotiation will not only be financial, legal or technical – in my view, it will first be human and social and economic.”

Now. Theresa May, presuming she wins the British election , will be heading up, with David Davis, the Tory government’s negotiations with the EU, and has warned all concerned that she will be “a bloody difficult woman.” Michel Barnier will be on the other side of the table, explaining the position of the EU. Which of them has shown more concern for the border and the Irish people on both sides of it?

And yet, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, the DUP continues to argue that Brexit was a desirable occurrence and that we’ll all be much better off under the less-than-hygienic wing of go-it-alone Mother Britain.

I was asked earlier this week to take part in a BBC World Service TV programme, where a range of people will say what they’d do if they became the government for twenty-four hours. I told them I would arrange for a border referendum on 3 May 1921.

By then – four years from now –Brexit should have its thumbs firmly locked on our northern windpipe. All of the 54% of people here who voted Remain will have had their worst fears confirmed. The 46% who voted to leave the EU will have been made painfully aware of the price of their folly. And everyone in this tormented corner of Ireland will be searching frantically for a way out of the economic midden into which we’ve been plunged.

And why 3 May 2021? Because that day will be exactly one hundred years since our deformed northern state was born. There’d be something fitting about the majority of people, on the centenary day. switching off the misshapen creature’s life-support system.