Anthony Coughlan

If Britain leaves the EU single market and customs union while the Republic stays in the EU, the North-South border within Ireland will become an EU land frontier, with customs controls inevitable and possibly passport controls. EU-based laws and standards, for example in relation to crime and justice, would prevail in the South and British-based ones in the North. Logically therefore the only way to avoid adding new dimensions to the North-South border post-Brexit is for Brexit to be accompanied by Irexit. This thought may be so novel it will shock many. EU membership has brought Ireland good things. Most Irish people have positive attitudes towards it. But if the North is leaving the EU along with Britain we should be able to consider dispassionately the advantages of leaving too – and the drawbacks of remaining in it without the UK as a fellow member. Irexit clearly has some benefits. It would save us money for one thing. Since 2014 the Republic has become a net contributor to the EU Budget: for the previous forty years we were major net recipients of EU cash, mainly through the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. From now on money from Brussels will be Irish taxpayers’ money recycled, as is already the case with the UK. This removes what hitherto has been the principal basis of Irish europhilia, official and unofficial – namely cash. That has always been more important here than ideological enthusiasm for Eurofederalism or ‘the EU project’. If the Republic remains in the EU post-Brexit it will have to pay more to the EU Budget as its proportionate contribution to help compensate for the loss of the UK’s annual net payment. On the other hand a bonus of leaving is that we would get our sea fisheries back. The value of annual fish-catches by foreign boats in Irish waters is a several-times multiple of whatever money we have got from the EU. As regards trade and investment, the Republic sends 61% by value of its goods exports and 66% of its services exports to countries that are outside the continental EU26, mostly English-speaking. It gets two-thirds of its imports from outside the EU26. The USA is the most important single-country market for the Republic’s foreign-owned firms and the UK for its Irish-owned ones – the latter being especially important for employment. The UK and US markets together are comparable in importance to that of the EU26 post-Brexit. Taking other English-speaking markets into account makes trade with the English-speaking world much more important for the Republic than the EU26, with Britain gone. This is a consideration also for foreign investors coming to Ireland. Economically and psychologically, Ireland is closer to Boston than Berlin, and to the UK than Germany. This puts exaggerated talk of the EU’s ‘giant market of 500 million’ in perspective. That shrinks anyway to 435 million with the UK gone. Some 7 billion people live outside the EU. It is not of course a question of the Republic having to choose between one export market and another if it should decide to leave the EU along with the UK. If common sense prevails in the negotiations, there should be continuing free trade between the Republic, the EU and the UK in the context of any Brexit or Irexit. Without Britain beside her in the EU Council of Ministers the Republic would be in a weaker position to defend its low rate of company profits tax, important for attracting foreign investment, for which Germany and the Brussels Commission are now gunning. It would be less well able to defend its fishery interests, its trade interests, its distinctive Anglo-Saxon-based traditions in the area of law and justice, which the EU aims to harmonise, and its military neutrality. The main argument for staying in the EU when the UK leaves is the negative one that we are members of the Eurozone while the UK is not. When the euro was established in 1999 our politicians decided to adopt the currency of an area with which we do just one third of our trade. They thought at the time that Britain would be bound to adopt the euro-currency too and that by going first they would show how “communautaire” they were. The Republic now desperately needs to get its own currency back so that it can devalue it along with sterling and the dollar, and not be stuck with an implicitly overvalued euro that is hitting its exports and encouraging competing imports. Failing that the North-bound shopping queues will grow. This is why Dublin should aim to leave the Eurozone and re-establish an Irish currency in a planned concerted manner, negotiating its departure with Germany, the UK and the ECB in private behind the scenes as part of its move to leave the EU along with the UK, rather than be forced to abandon the euro anyhow in some future Eurozone financial crisis. The UK will presumably revert to its traditional cheap food policy when it leaves the EU. Contrary to some Irish commentary, there is nothing immoral in a country importing its food from wherever in the world it can buy good quality products cheaply. At the same time the British Government will want to support UK farmers for political reasons, presumably by means of direct farm subsidies to replace the price supports they now get from the EU’s CAP. Nearly half the Republic’s agricultural output goes to the UK market at present, so such a development will have major implications for us. Will Irish farm producers be displaced in the UK market post-Brexit by New Zealand lamb, Brazilian beef, American chicken etc? These are the main reasons why the focus of intelligent Irish policy should now be on negotiating a comprehensive deal with London for this State to leave the EU along with the UK, while maintaining maximum free trade with both EU and UK post-Brexit. Such a deal should guarantee continued free access for Irish food exports to the UK

Donald Trump conjures such intense images that it is difficult to frame recollections of a man who made him possible. What memories flood back in your mind’s eye when you think of his Republican predecessor? Weapons of Mass Destruction? That awful expression, like a ghost stirring at the back of your mind? Perhaps you smile? Cringe? Do you imagine him as the strong president standing amid the rubble of the World Trade Center, bullhorn in hand, shouting that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon”? Perhaps as the struggling guy-next-door mispronouncing words like ‘nuclear’? Or perhaps as the most powerful man in the world giving a press conference in Baghdad in the waning hours of his presidency, ducking at the last minute while a shoe, thrown by an Iraqi journalist, sails past his head? The man who smashed international law and the Constitution of the United States has recently been feted by even ‘liberal’ television talk-show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen De Generes. It doesn’t matter; it’s all in the past. Shush! Marvel at his nice paintings, almost professional! Bush’s book of his paintings of servicemen, ‘Portraits of Courage’ currently sits atop the New York Times bestsellers list. Was there never a moment, in the words of Gore Vidal, when television’s cold, distorting eye was not relentlessly projecting a funhouse view of the world? “Pleikus” declared McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson’s National Security Advisor, “are like streetcars. Wait long enough and one will come sooner or later”. Bundy was referring to an incident during the Vietnam War when enemy soldiers attacked a poorly defended US military base in Pleiku, Central Vietnam. It was the pretext for President Johnson escalating the war in Vietnam, with disastrous results. Bush’s ‘Pleiku Incident’ was without doubt 9/11. In the 18 months after this attack, Bush set the US down a long road of unilateralism and ambivalence to international law and treaties. His administration declared the doctrine of “preventive war” and designated suspects captured in the War on Terror as “enemy combatants” – concepts unknown under international law. At the time of its establishment in January 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Guantanamo was established to detain extraordinarily dangerous people, to interrogate detainees in an optimal setting, and to prosecute detainees for war crimes. In reality, the site has long been used for indefinite detention without trial. The first international treaty to sense the acrid cigar-breath was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Signed with the Soviet Union in 1972 to ease Cold War tensions, Bush signalled his unilateral – in other words unlawful – intent to withdraw from it in December, 2001. Worse was to follow. Adrift now, Bush then declared in May, 2002 that the US was no longer bound by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties which governs treaties between states. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a permanent court, founded in 2002 by the Rome Statute to “bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind – war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide”, especially when national courts are unable or unwilling to do so, was next on the chopping board. Signed by President Clinton in December, 2000, Bush then took the astonishing step of retroactively un-signing it in May, 2002. The institution clearly panicked Bush, especially given what direction he knew US foreign policy would shortly take him and his buddies. Petrified of inadvertently doing something which might be construed as US acknowledgement of the ICC, Bush even barred US diplomat Richard Holbrooke from attending the court to give expert evidence in the trial of Serbian warlord, Slobodan Milosevic. This act alone ought to have warned everyone that even then Bush was dreaming of war and was taking steps to ensure that neither he nor any of his cronies could ever be hauled under the court’s scrupulous gaze. To make doubly sure, in August, 2002 Bush signed the American Services Members Protection Act which authorised the US to use force to free any member of its armed services arrested and detained at The Hague for war crimes. The Dutch government dubbed this the Netherlands Invasion Act. The bellicosity only increased. In November, 2002, furious that the international community would not support his Iraq war Bush issued an ultimatum: if the UN wouldn’t take action against Iraq, the US would, thus shredding international law which since 1946 had required that the UN Security Council issue a Resolution in favour of war before it could be initiated. Enemies now seemed to be everywhere, chief among them North Korea. The combined delicate efforts of both South Korea and Bill Clinton during the 1990s to bring North Korea in from the cold were blithely jettisoned as soon as Bush took office. Bush publicly declared that he “loathed Kim Jong Il” and that North Korea was now part of the ‘Axis of Evil’, alongside Iraq and Iran. Predictably alarmed, North Korea then withdrew from Nuclear Non-Proliferation talks and ejected weapons inspectors in January, 2003. When war came to Saddam in March, the North drew the obvious conclusion: the only way to deter the Americans was to acquire nuclear weapons. The catastrophic ‘Shock and Awe’ invasion of Iraq premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction generated the human horror of up to a million civilian deaths. When Iraqis rebelled against the invasion the US reacted with torture as in Abu Ghra’ib and massive violence in, for example, Fallujah and exploited sectarian divisions to maintain its fading power. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, Professor Manfred Nowak, remarked on German television in January 2009 that Bush had lost his head of state immunity and under international law and that the US could start criminal proceedings against all those involved in these violations of the UN Convention Against Torture. It was a minority view, or at least a view that was in the minority amonth those in a position to do

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