Brexit: A new era begins creating memories for the future

Last night you probably raised a glass at midnight to celebrate – I certainly will have – and now that the United Kingdom, that wee country the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar chose to insult last week, has successfully extricated itself from the European Union – we can breathe a sigh of relief that democracy finally won through.

I had been keeping back a bottle of champagne from my Christmas stock for that moment, mindful of the words of William Hague this week in his Daily Telegraph column: ‘democracy is not just one item in a menu of equally desirable systems. It is the only means civilisation has ever discovered of reconciling governing with human dignity and freedom. It has to be fought for and defended every day’.

A celebration coin was OK. But, a medal for every supporter of Brexit would have been better.

That awful anti-Brexit mob who hung around Westminster each day in the run up to the crucial final vote forcing we, the viewers, to turn up our TV sets can now be forgiven. It was, after all, their absolute democratic right to protest. In what other country would they have had such freedom without been sprayed with fire hoses, beaten with truncheons and whacked over the head with a military baton. Think of Hong Kong recently.

The Westminster mob has long gone, no doubt to enjoy the eventual benefits we can expect from extricating ourselves from a concept which deprived us from making our own decisions and whose military might, had the vote been lost, could have beensubsumed into something too big and with too many competing interests to be effective.

Ireland’s prime minster, Leo Varadkar, doesn’t quite get it.

Britain, he said “must come to terms with the fact it’s now a small country”.

I say to him that big organisations fail because they become too big and the EU was an example of that.

Mr Varadkar has the temerity to suggest also the UK “could re-join the EU if Brexit doesn’t work out for them”.

Such attempts to poke fun at the Brits is the sort of thing you expect from a spotty teenager who hates his history class.

Now that we’re unleashed from the too-big-for-its-boots EU, I expect great things from our United Kingdom. I certainly expect to continue our decent working relationship with our neighbours in the south and a realisation down there that we have Sinn Fein members in government here.

President of Sinn Fein, Mary Lou McDonald says the party wants a border plebiscite by 2025 and an all-party forum on unification to convene in the next parliament. She may start praying.

Northern Ireland is part of one of the most influential countries in the world. The UK might now be ‘a small country’, according to Mr Varadkar, but the south of Ireland deserves better than to have a leader which insults and makes fun of the now unfettered (to the EU) UK.

Earlier in the week we were ravaged by wind and rain. I had hoped I might have a nice show of early daffodils to greet this historic first day outside the EU. I had to settle for potted hyacinth grown indoors grieving along with all my other pots of various plants which have struggled in this extreme weather.

I read Monty Don’s published gardening page every week but still I have not retrieved that gardening skill I had nurtured in my last four homes. My mother, a great gardener, will be tut-tutting in her grave. She never had any bother producing flowers out of season when someone special was expected to visit.

My gardening attempts here in the house I moved to nearly three years ago have been nothing short of disaster.

Maybe I should be more worried about my upcoming visit to the grandchildren living in Europe. Since I never gave in to signing up for an Irish passport to aid my visits to Europe I may, of course, be left at the end of the queue clinging to my British passport. I will grin and bear it. Freedom always has a price.