The historic illiteracy of Anglo-Irish relations that pervades the United Kingdom’s political class is no secret. Just this week Conservative MP Owen Paterson, a member of the hardline Eurosceptic European Research Group, name-checked Irish revolutionary Michael Collins in the House of Commons, trying to win support from fellow MPs for Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal.
Paterson quoted Collins: “Now, as one of the signatories of the document, I naturally recommend its acceptance. Equally I do not recommend it for less than it is. In my opinion it gives us freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it.”
The small extract came from a speech Collins made addressing the Dáil in December 1921. He was making the case for the Anglo-Irish Treaty – an agreement struck between the UK and Ireland that concluded the War of Independence, created the Irish Free State and partitioned the North.
Many who populate the House of Commons grew up during the Troubles – but you would never know it
An appeal to this figure, and this occasion, to rally troops behind Johnson’s Brexit deal is as tone deaf as one could imagine. But Paterson is not alone in such historical missteps. Months prior, home secretary Priti Patel ventured that leveraging food shortages in Ireland might encourage Dublin to show a little more flexibility in negotiations.
And last year, the then-secretary of state for Northern Ireland (no less) – the UK minister responsible under the Belfast Agreement for the constitutional arrangements of the six counties – observed that she “didn’t understand some of the deep-seated and deep-rooted issues that there are in Northern Ireland” and “didn’t understand things like when elections are fought, for example, in Northern Ireland – people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa”.
There is an evident asymmetry in knowledge. Where the Irish history syllabus is dominated by the events of an Anglo-Irish past, friends raised in the UK tell me they were taught of the family dynamics of the Tudors, alongside the obvious lessons in the rise of Nazi Germany, and the Atlantic slave trade. Meanwhile Home Rule, the War of Independence, the creation of Northern Ireland and everything these events set in motion hardly got a look in.
Rhetoric and policy
That is, to an extent, understandable. The UK is a big country, and has occupied a global role for centuries. What is less understandable is the distance of the Irish question from the sensibilities of the Conservative politicians supposedly central to the Brexit process. Many who populate the House of Commons grew up during the Troubles – but from the way they talk about their nearest neighbour, you would never know it.
This omission is not just in their rhetoric, but something that has influenced government policy, and to an extent the views of the electorate. There was a long-held belief in Westminster – clung to by the right-wing press just as desperately as the Tory party – that Ireland would soon cave and drop its ridiculous demands.
Brexit has brought relations between the 'ancient and friendly' neighbours to a nadir
That Leo Varadkar would eventually realise that playing “pathetic patsy” to the “Brussels oligarchy”, as Brendan O’Neill puts it in the Sun, would eventually leave Ireland out in the cold; and that the staunch commitment to maintaining an open border on the island was simply, in the words of commentator Bruce Arnold, Varadkar and his deputy Simon Coveney “trying to destroy, like wilful children, relations with an ancient and friendly neighbour”.
Brexit has brought relations between the “ancient and friendly” neighbours to a nadir. But it has also set something more valuable in motion. When, on Tuesday evening, MPs voted for Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal by a comfortable majority, it seems that a new reality had dawned in the UK.
Fractious history
That so-called little Ireland had legitimate grievances and concerns, and a sovereignty as demanding of respect as Britain’s. That demands for an open border on the island are not, in fact, a product of Dublin’s intransigence, but the consequence of a bloody and fractious history. There, too, has been a realisation that the votes and vetos of the Taoiseach, leader of a small country though he may be, have equal clout in the European Council to those of the German chancellor and the president of the French Republic.
That Johnson’s Brexit deal maintains an open border on the island – and that the ERG subverted expectations by voting for it, taking their cue not from the DUP but from the prime minister – goes to show this realisation is starting to permeate too.
What is beginning to emerge is parity. A parity of understanding of each others’ history, the political demands that history necessitates and glimmers of something approaching a genuine parity in esteem. Brexit has driven the relationship firmly into the ground, but there is no good reason it won’t now emerge stronger for it.
When Johnson and Varadkar unlocked the impasse between Britain and Ireland in the Wirral, it became clear that Ireland was, perhaps, not the problem it had been held up as all along. And, it became clear that Varadkar’s stalwart demand for maintaining an open border was not an obstruction – denying the British electorate the Brexit it had long been promised – but a commitment to the responsibilities both countries signed up to in Belfast 20 years ago. The meeting between Varadkar and Johnson was one of two statesmen, alike in dignity, charting a course in the future of two nations that finally acknowledged the long and complicated past.