GAVAN REILLY: What now, as our eggs fall out of the Brexit basket?

With apologies in advance, this column is once again going to talk about Brexit. (This is likely to be a regular theme in the coming months: if the topic does not float your boat, you might be advised to cover your ears until at least Easter. In fact, make it Christmas.)

It’s only now just over 50 days until the UK’s scheduled departure from the European Union, and still – unbelievably – we know nothing of exactly how it might all pan out. We know MPs are due to hold their next votes on February 14th, but nothing about how they will go. In fact, as it stands we don’t even know what they’ll be voting on: Theresa May has set herself an absurd deadline of bringing back a revised deal from Brussels, which is made even more impossible by the EU’s refusal to revise the existing deal, and May’s refusal to accept that a ‘better’ backstop arrangement won’t be invented in the next week-and-a-half. None of it bodes well when the Prime Minister can only unite her party by capitulating to its extremists.

All of this brings us back to some of the catechism repeatedly heard from Irish ministers, like those I mentioned on this page last week when discussing a gaffe-prone week. One lynchpin in any Irish commentary on Brexit is that it’s not Ireland’s idea, nor Ireland’s policy. It is therefore, we’re told, not up to Ireland to find the fixes to the problems that Britain’s decision is creating.
It were not always so. Those who have been following the process more closely will remember how the Revenue Commissioners were discreetly making plans to deal with the customs trouble that might be required at the Northern borders, which were nixed when Enda Kenny handed over the reins to Leo Varadkar. The new Taoiseach is purported to have told Revenue to scale down any such plans, and announced to journalists that border checks were more likely to become a reality if Ireland produced a workable model to operate them.

That might have been a principled position at the time but it’s a line of inquiry we might miss in the coming months. No matter how it may be spun otherwise, if the UK ever leaves the EU customs area (as it will in a no-deal scenario) then there will be two customs jurisdictions on this island, and customs checks will be needed on things that pass between them. Separately, the EU has made clear that there has to be checks on animals or food products entering its territory from the UK. The only way that any of these checks can be kept away from the border is if they still happen somewhere else.

It might be a principled position for Ireland not to plan for a hard border, but at some imminent point the contrast between our ideal principles and our real-world practice will catch up with us. Ireland threw all its eggs into the basket of preparing for a deal, hoping it would be able to hold the UK to certain commitments. It now finds itself on the precipice of failure on that front (though not entirely of its own making) and we might all come to regret the impractical outcome.

The principle of not planning a border is all well and good. But given the massive impact of Brexit on our diplomacy and on the lives of those near the border – and the prospect of hundreds of thousands of our citizens, trapped next door behind a hard border – it might have been no harm to soften the principle, and step up the practice.