7 2 October 2016
S
ince the Brexit referendum in June I have
been rapporteur of a Private Study
Group of Irish economists and constitu-
tional lawyers who have been
examining what we should do
when and if the UK leaves the EU. In August their
report was sent to the Taoiseach, his Ministers and
the Secretary-Generals of all Government Depart-
ments. It has been sent also to the EU embassies
in Dublin, to UK Prime Minister Theresa May, her
key Ministers and senior civil servants concerned
with Brexit, and to a wide range of British Brexi
-
teers whom my colleagues and I have got to know
over the years.
The report’s basic conclusion is that it is in the
interest of the Irish people that Brexit should be
accompanied by “Irexit” - Ireland exit. We applied
to join the then EEC in 1961 because Britain and
Northern Ireland did so. We joined simultaneously
with the UK and Denmark in January 1973. Now
that Britain and the North are leaving, we should
do the same, for three principal reasons.
The first is that Ireland is nowadays a loser, not
a gainer, from EU membership. In 2014 we became
a net contributor to the EU Budget for the first time,
paying in €1.69bn and receiving €1.52bn. This
means that in future any EU moneys that come to
the Republic under the CAP, EU cohesion funds,
research grants, support for community groups
and the like, will be Irish taxpayers’ money coming
back, employing some Brussels bureaucrats on
the way.
Henceforth the EU will no longer be the ‘cash
cow’ most Irish people have regarded it as for dec-
ades, and which is the basis of much of our official
and unofficial europhilia. A bonus would be that
outside the EU Ireland can take back control of its
sea-fishing waters. Eurostat’s estimates of the
value of fish catches by non-Irish boats in Irish
waters since 1973 are a many-times multiple of the
EU cash we got over that time.
INTERNATIONAL
We should leave the EU because we are net
contributors to the EU, we are dependent on UK
trade and to avoid having an external EU border
by Anthony Coughlan
Irexit
October 2016 7 3
The second reason why Irexit should go along
with Brexit is that that is the only way of prevent-
ing the North-South border within Ireland
becoming an EU external frontier, with new
dimensions added to Partition, affecting trade,
travel and different EU laws and legal standards
as between Dublin and Belfast.
For example without the UK as an EU Member
alongside it, the Republic would be in a much
weaker position to withstand pressure to adopt
continental norms in EU crime and justice policy,
which differ significantly from Anglo-Saxon ones
in such areas as trial by jury, the presumption of
innocence and habeas corpus. Such divergence
would adversely affect good relations within Ire-
land as a whole and while it would not undermine
the Peace Process, it would not help it either.
If we stay in the EU while the UK leaves it would
mean that for Irish reunification to come about
at some future date the people of the North
would have to rejoin an EU that Britain had long
left, adopt the euro-currency, take on board a
share of the €64bn of private bank debt which
the ECB insisted that Irish taxpayers finance
during the 2008-2010 currency crisis, and imple-
ment the further integration measures that are
likely to be needed over the coming years if the
Eurozone is to be held together. It would give 26
EU Governments in addition to the UK and the
Republic a veto on eventual Irish reunification.
Such a development should be unacceptable to
all Irish nationalists.
Another consideration is that if the South
remains in the EU while the North leaves along
with Britain, future Irish reunification would
make the whole of Ireland part of an EU military
bloc that is likely to come under greater Franco-
German hegemony following Brexit. That
potentially could be a security threat to Britain.
This will surely change significantly the calculus
of British State interest and give Britain a
strategic reason for keeping the North inside the
UK, an interest it has not got today.
The third reason why most Irish people should
now reassess their attitude to the EU is that the
business case for Ireland remaining an EU
member diminishes significantly if the UK
leaves. Most foreign investment that comes here
is geared to exporting to English-speaking mar-
kets, primarily the UK and USA, rather than to
continental EU ones. Once the UK leaves the EU
two-thirds of Irish exports will be going to coun
-
tries that are outside it, as they are going today
to countries outside the Eurozone, and three-
quarters of our imports will be coming from
outside. Outside also, Ireland’s 12.5% corpora-
tion tax rate would no longer be under EU threat.
Of course our relations with the UK and the EU
in the Brexit context are complicated by our
membership of the Eurozone. Irish policy-mak-
ers abolished the national currency and joined
the Eurozone in 1999 on the assumption that the
UK would do so also and that by going first they
would show how communautaire they were. It
was an utterly irresponsible action in view of the
fact that the Republic does most of its trade with
countries that do not use the euro.
With the pound sterling falling against the
euro as the UK disengages from the EU, Ireland
desperately needs an Irish pound that can fall
with it, so maintaining its competitiveness in its
principal export markets – the UK and America.
That is why the Irish State urgently needs to get
its own currency back. Economist Chris Johns
noted in the Irish Times on 20 August that if the
Irish pound existed today it would be worth
some 10 percent more than the pound sterling.
This was the level it reached in January 1994,
when Irish industry was in crisis because of its
overvalued exchange rate – explicitly then,
implicitly today. That in turn precipitated the
major devaluation which inaugurated our ‘Celtic
Tiger’ years. Ireland needs to regain the freedom
of being able to determine its own exchange
rate.
There is no legal way to leave the Eurozone
and not leave the EU. This will almost certainly
happen in due course over some long weekend
when the Irish banks are closed and a new Irish
currency is issued, or euros are temporarily over-
printed as Irish pounds, which will then devalue.
The Government if it is wise will now start con-
certing such a move confidentially with
Germany.
A planned-for changeover from the euro is
better than having to do that in the middle of the
next euro crisis. Because of the closeness of
Anglo-Irish relations and the fact that the Repub-
lic - unlike all other Eurozone members - does
most of its trade outside rather than inside the
Eurozone, Ireland is probably the only one of its
nineteen Members whose departure should not
in principle cause a general crisis for the euro-
currency as a whole. An attraction for Germany
is that without Britain and Ireland as EU mem-
bers, it would more easily dominate the
remaining EU/Eurozone.
”When the facts change I change my mind.
What do you do, Sir?”, asked John Maynard
Keynes. Ireland’s europhiles should now follow
Keynes. Ireland leaving the EU alongside the UK
would not be apocalypse. It would just mean the
Republic returning to being a normal modern
State, making all its own laws democratically in
a parliament elected by its own people and
responsible solely to them, controlling its own
resources, using its own currency for its own
people’s benefit and deciding independently its
international relations. Would that not be a move
towards the “unfettered control of Irish desti-
nies” which was after all what the 1916 Easter
Rising was all about?
Anthony Coughlan is Associate Professor Emer-
itus in Social Policy at Trinity College Dublin
In 2014 we became
a net contributor to
the EU Budget for the
first time, paying in
€1.69bn and receiving
€1.52bn
A referendum is not needed for Ireland to leave the EU. Article 29.4 of
the Constitution lays down that the State “may ratify” the Treaties estab-
lishing the European Union and Euratom and take on the obligations of
the relevant Treaties, without providing that it “shall” or “must” do this.
The Constitution then provides that EU law necessitated by the obliga-
tions of EU membership has primacy over any contrary provision of the
Constitution as long as Ireland is an EU member. The Irish State is there-
fore a member of the EU by decision of its Government under a permissive
power of the Constitution and not a mandatory or obligatory one. Using
the constitutional license this gives, the Government may also withdraw
from the EU if that should become its policy and it has the assent of the
Oireachtas that elects it. In that case the other articles in the Constitu
-
tion that refer to the EU become redundant and fall out of use, as is
already the case with some constitutional articles.
This is in any case the only practical way for Ireland to leave the Euro-
zone, for if the Government had to give several months notice that it
intended to hold a referendum in the hope of getting a majority of citi
-
zens to vote in favour of leaving the EU, abandoning the euro-currency
and re-establishing the Irish pound, it would immediately have a cur
-
rency crisis on its hands because of speculators.
NO NEED FOR A REFERENDUM

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