Noel Whelan: May U-turn reinforces need for backstop

Theresa May’s deal is suddenly not her deal any more. This week the British prime minister with whom Ireland and 26 other countries negotiated, in good faith, an agreement for the UK to withdraw from the European Union disowned that deal.

She did this even though she had spent the best of part two years negotiating it, had persuaded her cabinet to support it despite ministerial resignations, had proposed it to parliament and had argued for it repeatedly.

Her actions represent an extraordinary breach of constitutional and diplomatic norms. Usually government leaders negotiate with other countries until they feel they have secured the best deal possible.

Then they bring this negotiated outcome to their parliaments for ratification. If they fail to secure parliamentary endorsement they resign.

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When historians get to look back at the fuller picture, they are likely to commend Varadkar, Coveney and their colleagues for their extraordinary restraint

May has simply ignored the centuries of logic behind those precedents. When her deal was rejected she carried on regardless. Now in order to survive and create a veneer of unity in the Conservative Party she has executed a massive U-turn.

Her actions were disingenuous. She stood at the Westminster dispatch box and promised to renegotiate with Brussels on the backstop even though previously she had repeatedly told parliament the EU would not alter the legal text.

She didn’t tell parliament that European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker had reiterated this to her over the phone a couple of hours earlier.

Diplomatic insult

The scale of her diplomatic insult to Ireland also needs to be appreciated. Having expressly abandoned the text of the agreement May then whipped her own parliamentarians to vote for a strategy which specifically targets that aspect of the deal which is of most importance to Ireland. It’s a strategy pointedly designed to maximise pressure on Ireland.

In so doing she has given free rein to those Brexiteers and Conservative cheerleaders who wish to frame Ireland as being responsible for Europe’s refusal to give them Brexit on their fanciful terms. More dangerously, May has contravened the spirit of the last treaty the British government negotiated with this country, the Belfast Agreement, and in so doing has imperilled our peace.

When she chose to leave herself beholden to those of the minority opinion on Brexit in Northern Ireland we knew it couldn't end well

There was an understandable edge to Tánaiste Simon Coveney’s tone when he responded to May’s U-turn on radio on Wednesday. One had a sense of great anger unexpressed.

Many in the media here in Ireland have been busy microanalysing the public utterances of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and his Ministers in recent weeks seeking to generate a narrative about gaffes or mixed messaging.

When, in the future, historians get to look back at the fuller picture, however, they are likely to commend Varadkar, Coveney and their colleagues for the extraordinary restraint they have shown in the face of intense British provocation, especially this week.

For centuries the suggestion that “you can’t trust the British” has been a stereotypical view in Ireland nationalism. Over the last three decades much has been done to displace this presumption.

This has included the work of Tony Blair on the Belfast Agreement, the work of John Major on the Downing Street Declaration, and the work done even earlier by Margaret Thatcher and her officials on the Anglo-Irish Agreement. All their work is now endangered.

Warning signs

Ireland now knows that May is not to be trusted. In fairness, there were warning signs. They go right back to that rushed summit with Enda Kenny in late January 2017 when a jet-lagged May came to Dublin, after high-profile visits to the new president of United States and then to Turkey.

As I wrote then, it had all the hallmarks of a round of consultative photo calls before the Westminster parliament debated the Brexit Bill later that week.

More importantly there was her decision to enter a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party after her disastrous election in 2017. When she chose to leave herself beholden to those of the minority opinion on Brexit in Northern Ireland we knew it couldn’t end well.

Less than six weeks ago, in a passionate defence of the text of the withdrawal agreement, May spoke in Westminster about how the backstop was “a necessary guarantee to the people of Ireland” and of how “whichever future relationship you want there is no deal available which does not include the backstop”. The facts haven’t changed but May has changed her mind.

This week she asked MPs to send her to Brussels to seek a backstop with a time limit or with a unilateral withdrawal clause, neither of which is a backstop at all.

These events in Westminster represent a new low after several recent lows and blows to Anglo- Irish relations. The implications for our relationship will endure long after Brexit is resolved.

We have been reminded that we can’t always trust British politicians to act in the interest of this island. That’s why we need a backstop.