Demexit - Village Magazine

2 2 June 2017

HILE THE consequences of the UK’s deci-

sion to leave the EU remain unclear, one

thing is certain - the power and inﬂuence

Ireland, North and South, will exercise

over the ﬁnal decision-making is limited.

The hype in May of this year over apparent ‘concessions’

gained by Ireland from the EU, about an early resolution

to how the Irish border will be affected, was quickly rub

bished by UK Brexit Secretary, David Davis. He and other

English Tory politicians have made it clear that the UK’s

self-interest goes beyond, and is much more important

than, the concerns of those living either side of the Irish

border, or indeed the Irish peace process. It is not even

clear how the 27 remaining member states of the EU (of

which the Irish State is only one) will actually approach

negotiations with the UK, and whether they will indeed

take the concerns of the Irish seriously. The Irish State

has not been awarded a veto similar to the one appar

ently granted to Spain by the EU over any decisions on

Gibraltar, in relation to the North or the Border.

Indeed it is not clear that EU interests (if they

exist collectively) are likely to coincide

with Ireland’s when it comes to what

will be a new EU land border with

what will be a non-EU state.

And if the Irish State will have

limited power and inﬂuence

over negotiations it is clear that

the people of the North will

have none at all. Despite a

majority of the North’s popula-

tion (56%) voting to Remain in

June 2016, that voice has more or

less been silenced by an overwhelm

ing majority of English MPs in

Westminster supportive of Brexit whose

minds are concentrated on negotiating a deal that will

suit their own constituencies.

One option touted by some hopeful nationalist politi

cians is for the people in the North to vote for Irish

reuniﬁcation, in a referendum (allowable under the Bel-

fast Agreement, 1998). David Davis accepted in March

of this year that by joining an existing EU State (Ireland)

the North

could remain in

the EU without

having to reapply.

However, while many Union-

ists, particularly in Border areas, voted

against Brexit it’s not clear that this would translate into

a vote for the ending of partition. The Northern Ireland

entity was after all created in 1920 speciﬁcally to give

Unionists a majority, where they had lacked one in the

whole of Ireland. It is true that that majority has

decreased in recent years. It is also true that in the

Assembly elections in March 2017 the Unionist parties

(for the ﬁrst time since partition) did not win a majority

of seats, but then neither did the Nationalist parties.

There is also no guarantee that votes for the

Nationalist parties would necessarily

translate into votes for reuniﬁcation,

particularly if this led to the loss of

the NHS, social services and pub

lic-sector jobs. Ironically, an

Westminster Tory Government

dedicated to rolling back the

welfare state and public-sector

cuts, might make that choice

easier!

In any event the British Govern

ment has refused to agree to a

referendum in the North as it also has

in Scotland, apparently fearful that this

might lead to the break-up of the UK.

The lack of control over its own destiny is not some

thing new for Ireland of course. Though the North

remained within the UK after the 1921 Treaty, the ‘inde-

pendence’ of the Irish State in the South always seemed

compromised, initially by economic dependence on Brit-

ain and then, from 1973 onwards, by EU membership

and a progressive seepage of sovereignty to the EU and,

Brexit, like the bank bailout, shows how

little democratic control we really have in

the global economy

Demexit

The hype in May over

‘concessions’ gained

by Ireland from the EU,

about the Irish border, was

quickly rubbished by UK

Brexit Secretary,

David Davis

POLITICS

by Féilim Ó hAdhmaill

Little control

June 2017 2 3

in particular, its bigger states.

The lack of democratic control over the economy in

Ireland, North and South, became particularly clear

during the banking crisis and the period of austerity.

While the experience of the crisis and austerity was dif-

ferent, North and South, reﬂecting different social,

economic, and political contexts, as well as different

forms of democratic control, it nonetheless showed that

power lay elsewhere.

The 2008 global economic crisis and the responses to

it in the industrialised rich countries of the world led not

just to a re-moulding of capitalism, but to increased clar-

ity about both the lack of global democracy and what

John Pilger termed in 2002, “the new rulers of the world”.

Neoliberal minimalist State regulation of ﬁnancial

institutions, and the economy in general, was replaced

by high-State interventionist ‘austerity’ measures,

aimed at protecting capitalist ﬁnancial structures. In the

EU, Governments nationalised private debt, spreading

the costs across their local communities, largely to

ensure that capitalism as an economic structure and ide-

ology was maintained. The notion of ‘European-ness’

and a sense of a uniﬁed EU citizenship - used to promote

the idea of a greater social and economic union from the

1970s - gave way to single-State self-interest as the

bigger economies banded together to protect their

national interests and the interests of their banks and

their bondholders.

Smaller EU states, having progressively relinquished

sovereignty to the larger states, from Maastricht (1992)

to the Euro (2002) to Lisbon (2007) in the

interests of ‘Europeanisation’, realised

that they no longer controlled their own

economies, budgets or ﬁscal arrange-

ments. Ideological choices appeared

limited in smaller states – either accept

the new ‘austerity’ measures, enthusi

astically, as the only solution to a global

crisis, or accept them, reluctantly. What

Greece’s former Finance Minister, Yanis

Varoufakis, was to call, “ﬁnancial terror-

ism” was in town.

Irish Governments from 2008 on ﬁtted in with that

‘austerity’ agenda accepting with enthusiastic energy

the dominant agenda of public-sector cuts. Although the

capitulation to threats from the IMF and the EU seemed

to show a lack of democratic control, they still had a

choice, even if it was simply to raise a protest at the way

their State was being treated. A ‘pragmatic’ approach to

the powerful seemed the best option and by and large

the approach ﬁtted with the world view of the main

parties.

Up until 2015, the North of Ireland had not suffered the

same level of cuts to the public sector, welfare services

and beneﬁts or the same levels of unemployment or emi-

gration, as the South. Initially this was because the

Brown Labour Government in Britain opposed wholesale

‘austerity’ as the way out of the crisis.

However, the elections of Governments in 2010 and

2015 committed to ‘austerity’ meant that the North then

experienced in a more brutal way the sharp end of ‘aus

terity’ especially from 2015 onwards. Indeed it was even

clearer by this stage that ‘austerity’ was a tool used by

the Tory Government as part of a wider agenda to reas

sert Neoliberal thinking, regardless of any economic

crisis - and to reject any serious consideration of alter-

native approaches.

Lack of democratic control in the North was of course

exacerbated by the lack of agreement between the

Nationalist and Unionist parties within the devolved

Executive - largely linked to the old animosities over the

constitutional question, the legacy of the conﬂict and

continuing political uncertainty and distrust. However,

it was also linked to different ideological positions on

the new Neoliberal agenda. While the nationalist parties

made some sort of a stand against ‘austerity’, the union-

ists demanded the implementation of the UK

Government’s ‘austerity’ agenda.

As the Executive faced collapse throughout 2015, over

a range of different issues, austerity being only one, an

initial agreement was cobbled together by the parties to

continue on in Government. By the end of 2016, the Exec

utive had shattered, possibly indeﬁnitely.

What the future holds for Ireland, North and South,

remains unclear. Despite everything, however, people

still do have choices.

In the South they have shown that in recent years - in

the rise in the vote for parties from the Left in opposition

to ‘austerity’ and during the successful water-rates cam-

paign. Whether that leads eventually to a Left-leaning

Government for the ﬁrst time in Irish history is difﬁcult

to predict, as is whether such a Government would reas-

sert more democratic control over the economy in the

face of potential global opposition.

In the North it is too early to say whether traditional

Unionists will revisit the ideas espoused by their ances

tors in the 1790s in the United Irish Society, ideas not

just about grasping the idea of self-determination but

about national reconciliation on the island.

And of course little has been said in recent months

about whether Brexit may lead Ireland North and South

to eventually consider Irexit, an Irish withdrawal from

the EU, or at least a renegotiation in relation to greater

sovereignty. Of course that decision may be made for us

by others – if the EU itself ultimately disintegrates!

Féilim Ó hAdhmaill is a lecturer in social policy at Uni-

versity College Cork. This article is partly based on his

chapter, Ireland and the Global Economic Crisis: One

Island, Two Different Experiences, in Murphy, M, and

Dukelow, F, (2016) ‘The Irish Welfare State in the

Twenty-First Century: challenges and change’.

The ‘independence’ of the

Irish State in the South always

seemed compromised, initially

by economic dependence

on Britain and then by EU

membership and a progressive

seepage of sovereignty

Leave and Remain