Kathy Sheridan: Pandemic is reminder of poison in British and Irish politics

It’s an odd conundrum. About six out of 10 English people still think of themselves as more British than English – yet only three in 10 of them would be upset if Northern Ireland opted for reunification. Worse, nearly four in 10 aren’t bothered about it either way.

The Sunday Times’ State of the Union polls are not the first to intimate that many English people like the notion of Britishness yet are fairly indifferent to the fate of its few remaining, visible bits.

Brexit – a brazen push for English “sovereignty” and damn the political and economic consequences for the rest of the UK – was the ultimate expression of this indifference. The DUP’s calculation that the Leave campaign’s sour, bullish nationalism would cleave to a troublesome remnant of Britannia if only for nostalgic reasons was always a risky one. Britannia is not bothered. Really.

The sad parade of small businesses announcing they can no longer deliver to Northern Ireland from the “mainland” due to unsustainable paperwork is testament to all the idiocy. One way or another, it’s a monumental achievement by the DUP; the current form of Brexit could not have happened without it.

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In a column last week, former chancellor George Osborne – David Cameron’s stout lieutenant when plumping for the in/out referendum – used terms such as “short-sighted” and “unbelievably stupid” to describe DUP strategy, taking the pot-calling-kettle-black concept to stratospheric levels. There was nothing original about it either.

I've been asked several times by genuinely baffled people for the 'real reason' why the Border could not be closed for a while to get the Covid case numbers down

His assertion that Northern Ireland is “already heading for [the UK] exit door” and is “for all intents and purposes, now slowly becoming part of a united Ireland” has already been expounded across acres of print and airwaves. What rankles is the shruggy, imperious indifference of a man instrumental in launching the Brexit destroyer.

All-island approach

Back on this island, all those words and chatter have merely put our current problems into a more aggravating context. The notion of an inevitable and imminent Border poll had been seeded in our psyches so successfully that, not for the first time, we got ahead of ourselves in terms of the state of play of politics on the island.

In recent months, I’ve been asked several times by genuinely baffled people for the “real reason” why the Border could not be closed for a while to get the Covid case numbers down. “It can’t just be about politics, can it?”

I’ve been asked numerous times why – given the received wisdom about the glide toward unification – an all-island quarantine agreement could not be achieved at a time when thousands of people are sick, dying or dead and national economies shredded. “If they can’t agree on something so monumental how will they agree on anything?”

No one seems to understand why authorities in the South seemed unable to hand over passenger locator forms to Northern Ireland authorities to monitor new arrivals

On Monday night’s Claire Byrne Live on RTÉ, Leo Varadkar said that an “all-island approach is not possible because of the politics in the North between Sinn Féin and the DUP” – and added (I paraphrase) that Fine Gael is certainly not going to take the flak for closing the Border on the centenary of partition.

But to ordinary grown-ups working on logical assumptions and basic decency, this is nonsense. If Kildare, Laois and Offaly could be targeted and locked down why couldn’t the same strategy be applied in tandem to Border counties by both jurisdictions ?

The same old lines

According to a poll run by the show, more than seven in 10 people believe the Border should be closed. By way of reply, the famous 300 Border crossings and “legacy issues” were cited by Oisín McConville, a former Armagh footballer. These apparently need little further elaboration.

Then again if county lockdowns should be enforced by gardaí or police, as Sinn Féin’s Matt Carthy seemed to suggest, why hasn’t it happened?

On the other hand, no one seems to understand why authorities in the South seemed unable to hand over passenger locator forms to Northern Ireland authorities to monitor new arrivals. Did the all-island proposal actually founder on GDPR concerns? At first listen, that appeared to be Ian Paisley Jr’s sole explanation for the absence of an all-island approach. Listen further though, and the DUP man was declaring that the all-island approach was off the table anyway: “It’s too simplistic to say ‘give up the politics’. . . We’re just not going to close ourselves off from our nation’s capital [London]. . .that’s not realistic.” What he proposes is the “British Isles” approach.

Those of us old enough to recall merry Cheltenham 2020 and the “herd immunity” musings from Westminster might balk at putting all our eggs into that basket.

The Covid-19 pandemic has served to remind us of the poisonous brew that washes through these islands’ politics even at a time of deepest mutual need. The Sunday Times polls included a question on how the four UK members would feel about border referendums in the next five years. Northern Ireland, rather surprisingly, is up for one by 51 per cent to 44. The historian Paul Bew reckons that some of that majority is down to unionists saying “bring it on” simply to end the chatter.

Risky move.

If ever an issue was designed to clarify what matters right now, a killer pandemic is surely it.

The sight of Sinn Féin and the DUP reprising the same old lines and finding their only point of agreement in attacking the Irish Government hardly bodes well for a Border poll.