Rewriting history: Ireland and Brexit

Image by Stefan Schweihofer courtesy of Pixabay

On 25 January, The Irish News published details of an interview with Ray Bassett. The headline over the piece described Mr. Bassett as the longest serving Irish government official in Northern Ireland and a key figure behind the scenes during the peace process[i]. The interview is behind a pay wall but can be read for free by opening an account with the newspaper.

According to the newspaper, Mr. Bassett spent the best part of two decades of his distinguished career as an Irish diplomat immersed in matters to do with Northern Ireland and Anglo-Irish relations. He retired from the civil service in 2016. Since then, he has been a critic, to whom the adjective “outspoken” fits perfectly, of the way the EU and the Irish government handled the negotiation of the United Kingdom’s departure from the organisation, a theme he addressed in his interview.

Asked for his view of the prospects for Irish unity, Mr. Bassett said he was optimistic. But he cautioned:

Having the British onside would be helpful in this regard.

The interview continues thus:

He suggests that had the Dublin government under Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney been “less strident” during Brexit negotiations and acted with generosity at the EU on behalf of British prime ministers David Cameron and Theresa May, we would not have had the “disasters” that were Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Varadkar and Coveney’s stance destroyed, he feels, relationships between Dublin and London, relationships that are only starting to be repaired now.

“My personal opinion is that the EU used Ireland as a bit of a battering ram against the Brits. Despite all the scare stories, there was no way they were going to put a border back on the island of Ireland. Not a chance. Too many people had died because of that border.”

Newton Emerson is a columnist with both The Irish News and The Irish Times who might broadly be described as sympathetic to the unionist perspective. He took up Mr. Bassett’s remarks in his Irish Times column[ii] four days later.

The implication that Brexit has been a setback for unity runs counter to received wisdom…

It would be ironic if Varadkar, who now champions unity, helped to make it a more difficult goal.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course, but Bassett warned from the outset that the government was mishandling Brexit.

At a 2017 conference in Belfast, one year after his retirement, he said the European Union was engaged in a humiliation exercise, dragging Ireland on to “the wrong track”.

“It is not in your interest to insult or defeat the other person and there is too much of that at the moment,” he continued, in remarks widely reported at the time…

Almost everyone in the UK, whatever their position on Brexit, would welcome an acknowledgment that it could have been handled better from the EU side. The Republic is more likely to be thanked than blamed if it volunteered this suggestion…

Newspaper interviews and opinion columns are very limited canvases. And all of this is so much water under so many bridges now. Nonetheless, there is a lot of magical revisionism in play here that needs countering.

First a small point. Leo Varadkar became Taoiseach and Simon Coveney Minister for Foreign Affairs in June 2017, just under a year after David Cameron resigned as UK Prime Minister. So, though the interview implies otherwise, neither would have engaged with Mr. Cameron himself or with the EU on his behalf regarding the UK’s membership of or exit from the EU — though they would have had extensive engagement with his successor, Mrs. May.

Moving on, it would have been so helpful to readers if either Mr. Bassett or Mr. Emerson had given even a hint of what the Irish government and the EU might have done differently in the Brexit negotiations on the border issue — other than being nicer and more sympathetic, more feeling towards the UK’s apparent pain at not having a nice downhill jog towards the destination of getting its own way.

At a very long stretch indeed, it is just about possible to imagine a scenario whereby the EU might have looked at the border issue differently. The narrative could have run something like this.

“Well, the UK won’t commit to following the rule book of the single market and wants freedom to do its own bilateral trade deals all over the world.

But Ireland is already an island on the edge of Europe and a small one at that, a tiny proportion of the EU in size and population. In the overall scheme and scale of things, cross-border movements within Ireland are small beer — and consequential movements between traffic originating in the North and mainland Europe would be small beer too.

Provided the UK is also happy to allow traffic into its jurisdiction to continue unimpeded, allowing traffic to run freely in our direction on a reciprocal basis exposes us to some risk of contamination and discrimination, but not very much — and we do want to maintain good relations with the UK despite their leaving the EU rather than causing relations to sour more than they have to because of their departure.”

But it is a stretch — and the UK itself would have had difficulty wearing such a “loosey goosey”, “virtual” land border arrangement too. After all, the express purpose of Brexit was, in the words of the snappy slogan, to “take back control”, expanded by Theresa May into “control of our borders, our money and our laws”.

From the outset of negotiations, both sides, not just the EU, were publicly and solidly committed to the avoidance of a hard border on the island of Ireland. The principle was not contested. Only the implementation was difficult. For Brexit to work for both sides though, there had to be an effective border somewhere. The UK could offer no workable alternative arrangement as to where that “somewhere” — or “somehow” — should be.

But Mr. Bassett implies that, if the UK had just not blinked, the EU would have eventually folded and left the border within Ireland as open as it is today without a guardrail in sight, thus avoiding a contentious internal border within the UK.

Counterfactuals are great generators of animated discussion because of the impossibility of bringing “killer” evidence to bear to resolve the argument. “We would have been better doing X rather than Y.” is rarely amenable to proof because Y being done meant X was not tried.

However, surely the fact that the UK did “blink” on the border issue is greater evidence that it was always more likely to have to do the blinking than the EU’s continued steady gaze was evidence that it might have blinked first if only the UK had waited long enough.

But there is a much broader silliness in play from both Mr. Bassett and Mr. Emerson. That is the notion that the eventual agreement that required the UK to operate border arrangements within its own jurisdiction was somehow “punishing” or “humiliating” for that country to a degree that made the UK lose the plot altogether and eventually put first Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss in charge of the shop.

That depends for even superficial plausibility on the notion that the UK had some kind of entitlement to respect for the superiority of its perceived interests over those of the EU — and, indeed, those of Ireland.

While Brexit was mandated and therefore sanctified by a referendum in the UK, that sanctity applies only to the UK’s desire to give effect to the referendum result. It neither imposed nor deepened any obligation on the EU to manage the exit negotiations in any particular way other than as laid down inby the treaties. And, with all due courtesy to our neighbours, Ireland was as entitled to pursue its interests in its international engagements as the UK was — as was the EU.

Another possible explanation for Mr. Bassett’s assessment is the idea that Ireland might have entirely misconceived where its real interests lay, thereby engendering chagrin among the higher echelons in London who knew exactly what those real interests were — alignment with the UK “against” Europe.

There was even hope in some loonier circles in London that Ireland’s continuing geographic, historic political and contemporary economic “closeness” to the UK might persuade it to follow the UK out of the EU. They forget that some of that historical “closeness” is not recalled with unalloyed fondness in Ireland.

To anyone of sane mind, Irexit was never a possibility, and it was explicitly rejected by the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, in his speech the day after the Brexit referendum.

Ireland will, of course, remain a member of the European Union.

That is profoundly in our national interest.

After more than 40 years of membership, we have built up strong bonds of partnership with all the other member states, and with the European institutions, that will continue to serve us well.

The entire Brexit process from its genesis as an idea to the UK’s approach to negotiations was predicated on the superficial notion that the UK had enough “leverage” to be able to impose its own terms on the EU — to have its cake and eat it too, to divorce but retain the benefits but not obligations of marriage. Whereas previously, the UK was in with lots of opt outs, it could be out with even more a la carte opt-ins.

Any punishment or humiliation caused by its being unable to do that was entirely self-generated — reflective of disgruntlement at its inability to secure the Brexit it thought it could get.

And as regards the rise of Johnson and Truss, “You made us do all this silly stuff.” is never a convincing argument. The UK had the responsibility for its fate that goes with the exercise of agency that brought it about. Own the means and you own the outcomes of their application.

Now to the possibility that Ireland’s behaviour in the Brexit negotiations might have set back the prospects for Irish unity.

Some basics.

First, the Good Friday Agreement did not establish the attainment of Irish unity as a shared goal between the UK and Ireland. Rather, it established a process by which Irish unity might come about.

Second, if Mr. Bassett or anybody else has evidence that, in the interval between the Good Friday Agreement and the Brexit referendum, UK governments were positively keen to promote Irish unity rather than being merely open to the possibility, they should share it.

It is plausible to imagine that disgruntlement at Ireland’s stance during the Brexit negotiations might have caused UK governments of that time to be less keen on facilitating Irish unity. But even if this is true, that is academic because movement towards Irish unity was no more “live” then than it is now.

Third, the likelihood of Irish unity is dependent primarily, even predominantly, on the emergence of a prospective majority in favour of it in Northern Ireland. London and Dublin have roles to play, but not control.

Repeating the mantra; if either Mr. Bassett or Mr. Emerson has evidence that the balance or trend of opinion on Irish unity within Northern Ireland was altered in either direction by the Brexit process, he should share it.

But one thing in his interview that Mr. Bassett got 100% right was this. Asked who least impressed him during his many years of engagement on Northern Ireland, he replied:

I think Peter Mandelson was easily the worst politician, definitely the worst British Secretary of State I came across. I never got why he was so well regarded by the hierarchy in the Labour Party.

He also had this arrogant air about him.

Spot on! If anything, an understatement.

[i] https://www.irishnews.com/news/northern-ireland/ray-bassett-our-man-in-the-north-QCLOSOQUQBDGVH6Z7Z4MS6IFI4/

[ii] https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/01/29/eu-used-ireland-as-a-battering-ram-against-britain-its-time-to-undo-the-damage/