When Britain voted for Brexit in 2016, one of Ireland’s strategic assets — a close relationship with its larger neighbour — suddenly seemed a liability. Large trade across the Irish Sea, which had until then been a sign of strong bonds and common prosperity, was now a symbol of the State’s worrisome overexposure to an unreliable partner. A strong Anglo-Irish political alliance, hard-won over decades of work on the Northern Ireland peace process and through regular contact between officials in the European institutions, had been a bedrock of Dublin’s negotiating strategy on everything from tax to trade. Now, with Britain set to leave, it left Ireland fearing isolation, highlighting the State’s failure to cultivate allies elsewhere on the Continent.
In the weeks and months after the British referendum, then taoiseach Enda Kenny travelled the EU to stress that Ireland had no intention of following Britain out the door. The idea that the UK’s departure would power a Eurosceptic surge in Ireland held weight only in the wishful imaginings of the Brexiteer echo chamber, but the prospect that the EU-UK separation would leave Ireland caught in the middle was a real concern. Ireland’s future in the EU was and remains a points of Irish mainstream consensus, but the fear was that if Britain and the EU were to pursue different tracks, the gravitational pull of Britain, so closely connected to Ireland through people and commerce, would be hard to resist.
Six years on, it’s clear that the reverse is happening. Ireland and Britain, slowly but unmistakably, are growing apart. The near-collapse in the bilateral political relationship was underlined this week when Taoiseach Micheál Martin warned that London was about to hit “a historic low point” by unilaterally repudiating an international agreement. The breakdown in trust is openly acknowledged. At the heart of the Anglo-Irish partnership for the past quarter-century has been joint custodianship of the Belfast Agreement, but Brexiteers’ indifference to Northern Ireland’s fate during the referendum, and their use of it now as a tool in the only political project that appears to interest them — keeping Boris Johnson in power — has left the east-west relationship in a worse state that it has been since the Troubles.
But the divergence of recent years goes deeper than that. Before Brexit, the UK was Ireland’s single biggest trading partner, but since 2015, the year before the UK referendum, Britain’s share of total exports to Ireland has declined from 23 per cent to 7.2 per cent.
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Tables turned
Under the rule of radical English nationalists, Britain has taken policy turns that put it increasingly at odds with Ireland, where elections are won on the centre-left and liberal internationalism is now a defining part of the national self-image. While Ireland chose to put out the welcome mat for refugees fleeing the horrors in Ukraine, the UK put up barriers. Contrasting approaches to the pandemic were just as stark. It is a stretch to say that Ireland is slowly moving towards the European mainstream — Johnson’s populism reflects the European zeitgeist as much as Martin’s liberal centrism — but the gap between the two political cultures is widening.
For Ireland and Britain, shared EU membership had the effect of aligning many aspects of life, from business regulation and food standards to pain-free travel and low-cost mobile roaming. In many of those areas, the two countries will now go their separate ways. The law will develop differently, continental legal tradition and methods growing in influence in Ireland while waning in Britain.
Meanwhile, many of the things that Ireland took for granted about Britain — the quality of its civil service, the strength of its institutional checks, the supposedly untouchable postwar settlement around the NHS and the welfare state — have been shaken by Brexit. As the historian Diarmaid Ferriter has written, contrasting the relationship of today with that of the early days of the Free State, the tables have turned: now it is the Irish side that bemoans the erratic statecraft of its neighbour. There are other, smaller reversals. For example, it is today more common in Britain to hear a government minister speak about the influence of faith on their politics than it is in Ireland, where public displays of religiosity are now rare among senior politicians.
Some of these changes will be lasting, but others less so. Irish people continue to go to work and study in Britain in large numbers, the cultural ties between the two countries remain strong and wider interests will continue to be closely aligned. Some of the shifts are rooted less in a breach between the neighbours than between two Britains — first over Brexit and now as a broader culture war fomented by the Conservative right. As the easy rapport between Keir Starmer and his hosts in Dublin this week underlined, Ireland has a big interest in seeing that other Britain succeed.