Former Department of Foreign Affairs official Rory Montgomery remembers the night in Brussels in 2016 when British prime minister David Cameron told him in a lift that Enda Kenny “was playing a blinder”.
That night, Kenny had tried hard to persuade other European Union leaders to offer Cameron something to take back with him to London as Cameron sought to renegotiate the United Kingdom’s ties with the bloc.
Cameron might have been slightly patronising to Montgomery during their encounter, but he was, nevertheless, grateful for Kenny’s efforts, even though they failed and were followed by the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum vote in 2016 to leave the EU.
Within a few years, Ireland, however, had become the arch-enemy for some in London, with Boris Johnson’s notorious insult directed to Leo Varadkar when the then British prime minister dismissively told No 10 officials: “I thought they were all called Murphy.”
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Today, Anglo-Irish relations are in a better place, but there is much to do to repair the damage suffered in the last decade, and much to do, too, to cope jointly with challenges that were unknown a decade ago before Brexit occurred.
That work will intensify on Wednesday evening with a dinner in Liverpool between Taoiseach Micheál Martin and British prime minister Keir Starmer, followed by detailed talks on Thursday involving both men and senior ministers. The key will be to keep London’s attention.
Anglo-Irish relations have nearly always been unbalanced, with the relationship mattering more to Dublin than it did to London, even during the days when Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair often formed a political double act.
For decades, Northern Ireland dominated. In 2011, Cameron and Kenny sought to broaden the scope of discussions, holding the first of a promised series of annual summits in No 10. However, it quickly faltered, partly because of a lack of sufficiently interesting projects to engage either man.
And then Brexit consumed the political oxygen.
Last year, a new bid to create a better footing was made after Labour’s Keir Starmer’s election, with a quick invitation to Simon Harris to visit Chequers, followed by a September meeting in Dublin and the Ireland-England football match at the Aviva Stadium in September, attended by both.
The communiqué then spoke of four pillars: security, justice and global issues; climate, energy, innovation; trade, growth and investment; and, finally, issues such as the Common Travel Area, culture, education – “the ties that bind” as one official put it.
The four subjects are back on the agenda for this week’s summit, though tonight’s dinner is likely to be dominated by Ukraine, and especially the challenges of coping with US president Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, both sides are determined to stick to Anglo-Irish relations proper during the talks that take place on Thursday, including one-to-one meetings between Irish and British ministers, before Martin leaves for the latest meeting of EU leaders about Ukraine.
Last December’s elections in the Republic and later talks to form a government have affected the time available for preparations, but there will be a list of pledges, including ones on offshore energy and work to combat online harm.
Such communiqués are written by officials from both sides before summits begin, though the work often goes down to the finishing line and texts for this one were still being exchanged on Monday night, if not later.
Officials from the Taoiseach’s office and the Cabinet Office in London, along with the countries’ two ambassadors – Ireland’s Martin Fraser in London and the UK’s Paul Johnston in Dublin – will be involved to keep pace in the work afterwards.
“The more you institutionalise it or at least put some sort of an institutional framing around it, the more likely it is to be substantive,” Sonja Hyland, the Department of Foreign Affairs’ deputy secretary general told a Trinity College Dublin seminar on Monday.
