As the reality of Brexit imposes a range of changes to the economic and political relationships between Ireland, Britain and the EU, along with the ongoing disputes and negotiations over the Irish Protocol Article 16 in the EU, Sinn Féin MEP CHRIS MacMANUS outlines the critical role the EU and its institutions will play in the steps leading to an Irish Unity referendum.
BREXIT,, EUROPE AND
IRISH UNITY British and Irish governments have done a good job over the years in convincing people that the ‘Irish issue’ was resolved. Since the Good Friday Agreement, the diplomatic services of both countries have put about the idea that there was no need for the international community to bother itself with any ongoing problems about Partition or the denial of democratic rights of people living in that part of Ireland governed by Britain. Honestly, neither government has ever fully committed to implementing the Agreement. They pay only lip service to the North-South and East-West provisions and virtually ignoring the rights-based provisions and the recommendations of the Human Rights Commission. Rather than making the Agreement a living, breathing process, they bypassed parties in the North to do things between London and Dublin where convenient. The Single Electricity Market was a case in point. Rather than embedding it in the NorthSouth institutions as a new ‘agreed area of cooperation’, as provided for in the GFA, they made a bilateral London-Dublin agreement. They hoped that the parties in the North would be content with an Assembly limited in its powers and ignored the rest of the GFA and subsequent agreements. The British
The EU were fully supportive of the GFA without understanding the political dynamic. They largely saw it as a point in time, a good news story with a powersharing Executive. They didn’t see a living, breathing peace and political process
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government have to be dragged kicking and screaming to fulfil their commitments. The failings of the British government and the unwillingness of political Unionism to genuinely work on the basis of equality meant that the ‘Irish issue’ re-emerged from time to time, but governments and media around the world usually only paid attention when the Executive ceased to function, swallowing the view that the British and Irish governments were honest brokers, doing their best to talk sense into the ‘difficult’ parties who shared power. The EU were fully supportive of the GFA without understanding the political dynamic. They largely saw it as a point in time, a good news story with a power-sharing Executive. They didn’t see a living, breathing peace and political process. That the pro-Brexit elements of the British establishment couldn’t foresee the problems caused by Brexit was heavily aided by successive Dublin governments, who had been compliant in allowing Unionism and British governments to hollow out the Agreement. Indeed, the first priority of the Dublin government was to have as close an agreement as possible with Britain and safeguard the Common Travel Area, showing 27
