IRISH CONGRESSIONAL BRIEFING
Distributed to Congress by Irish National Caucus
“This article by Fintan O’Toole will be most helpful for Members of Congress and their Staff in clarifying the Brexit-Northern Ireland chaos.It is a ‘must-read’ by a master of his subject.”—Fr. Sean Mc Manus
Tories must grasp the profound stupidity of their approach to the
North
Brexit deal depends on Britain
restoring disinterest towards Northern Ireland
Fintan O’Toole. Irish Times. Dublin. Tuesday, October 15, 2019
I try not to be a pedant but I do get annoyed when people use
“disinterested” when they mean “uninterested”. To be disinterested is to
be impartial, to deal honestly with other people without seeking to
advance one’s own interests. To be uninterested is not to care about what
happens to those people. One of the reasons Brexit has been such a
mess is that the British government has seriously confused these two
attitudes to Northern Ireland. It has managed, under both Theresa May and Boris
Johnson, simultaneously to abandon its duty to be disinterested and to be
fundamentally uninterested. If a Brexit deal is finally to emerge, it
will be because the British have been forced to grasp
the profound stupidity of this combination.
The Belfast Agreement is very clear on the idea of disinterested
government. It requires that “whatever choice is freely exercised by
a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, the power of the sovereign
government with jurisdiction there shall be exercised with rigorous
impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their
identities and traditions.” This requirement has been openly flouted
since May’s ill-starred election of 2017 in which the Tories lost their
majority in parliament. Impartiality has been abandoned in favor of a
formal alliance with one party, the DUP, whose support lies almost
entirely within one politico-religious tradition.
But this abandonment of the duty to be disinterested has gone hand-in-hand
with a lack of interest. The Tories have been fundamentally indifferent to
the desires of most people in Northern Ireland, to the realities of
life for the Border communities, to the fragility of the peace process and
to the consequences of the recreation of a hard Border. In this, they have been
faithful to the instincts of their own voters and members: 75 per cent of
Tory voters say the collapse of the peace process in Northern Ireland is a
price worth paying for Brexit and 60 per cent of party members say
Northern Ireland leaving the UK is an acceptable consequence of Brexit.
The message the DUP has failed to get is: they’re just not that into you.
It is quite a feat to be both nakedly partial and essentially unconcerned
and its consequence is, of course, utter incoherence. The abandonment of
impartiality led to a rhetoric of the “precious, precious union”. But the
lack of real interest in that peculiar part of the Union known as Northern
Ireland has made British governments incapable of addressing the
real problems of the peace process and the Border with any credibility
or indeed honesty: we passionately love Northern Ireland but not enough to
take its specific history and geography seriously. This, in
essence, is why the Brexit tractor has been stuck in the muddy fields of
Fermanagh and Tyrone, spinning its wheels ever more frantically but going
nowhere.
Willful erasure
The most ludicrous effect of this contradiction has been the willful
erasure of an obvious truth that both the British government and the DUP
themselves accepted and articulated in the immediate period after the
Brexit referendum: that Northern Ireland is different to Britain and that
therefore Brexit would have to be different for Northern Ireland. It is
hard to remember, after so much nonsense, that this was once a truth
universally acknowledged in post-referendum discourse.
The British government’s first substantial Brexit plan, the white paper of
February 2017, says: “The government recognizes that Northern Ireland’s
particular circumstances present a range of particular challenges to
be taken into account when preparing for our exit from the EU.” Even
before that, Arlene Foster (yes that Arlene Foster) had put
her name beside that of Martin McGuinness in a joint letter of August
2016 to May stressing that “this region (i.e. Northern Ireland) is
unique” and actually demanding that the prime minister be aware of the
“unique aspects of negotiations that arise from the Border”.
But the result of the 2017 election created a toxic collusion in which the
DUP, drunk on the illusion of power, spun the fantasy that Brexit could be
exactly the same for Northern Ireland as for Somerset or Warwickshire
and May (against her better judgement) indulged it. Out went “particular”
and “unique”; in came “exactly the same”. More than two years have
been wasted on the pursuit of a proposition that both the
British government and the DUP knew to be unreal. But in the manual of
Brexit for slow learners, the last chapter of this volume was always
going to be the same as the first: go back to the plain truth that Northern
Ireland is unique and that, if it really has to endure Brexit, it must
have a bespoke version. Its Brexit suit cannot be off the peg —it
must be made to measure.
If a deal is now to be possible, Boris Johnson must restore some
semblance of disinterestedness by acknowledging that Northern Ireland
is not the DUP. And he must, however belatedly, try to seem interested in
the realities of the place and its communities. It would be too much
to expect either of these conversions to be sincere. But they are the key
to the one thing that really interests Johnson: his own survival.
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