Economist: In Ireland we should break free of the European Union as the United Kingdom has successfully done

The EU blinked.

Europe should celebrate the free trade agreement negotiated by Boris Johnson last month.

It is a vindication of what democracy is about — the implementation of the will of the people, expressed through free and transparent parliamentary institutions.

The Irish establishment had pushed back hard against the UK’s decision to Brexit. All of their efforts to undo the results of the referendum and to push back against the December 2019 UK general election have come to nought.

And even with teething problems in paperwork and logistics, a new era has begun.
The Republic’s political establishment has begun the rewriting of history — the attempt to justify its contrived and negative stance on Brexit. Suddenly, Scottish independence  has the Irish anti-Brexit seal of approval.

There is the mother of historic ironies in all of this. A generation of Irish politicians ceded to a EU superstate something once precious to Ireland — its sovereignty.

The UK, against whom Ireland contended for independence, is now, again, a sovereign country. Its parliament is, once again, accountable to the people, and not to Brussels, for upholding the national interest.

One hundred years ago Ireland’s political freedom and independence was tethered to the British Empire, its national identity suppressed.

Now it is Ireland that is tethered to a EU hegemony, from which Britain has broken free. Ireland’s establishment may be just a little embarrassed — and a little resentful.

It wasn’t supposed to end with UK facing down four years of unrelenting efforts by Brussels, aided by Ireland, to defeat Brexit.

The EU had rolled over Ireland and broken the heart of Greek democracy. It is difficult to go back just 10 years to the papers of that time and reflect on the oppressive and anti-democratic methods which the EU have used when it suited their purpose.

So it was with Brexit. Article 50 is embedded in the Treaty for a reason and is not an adversarial process. The EU made it adversarial and it made it personal.

It treated with incredulity the decision of David Cameron to hold a referendum on Brexit in 2013 — the EU doesn’t do direct democracy.

It regarded with disdain the decision of UK voters to vote ‘leave’ in 2016. It warned of the dire consequences of such a presumptuous decision.

It joined forces with the UK and Irish establishments to threaten the dire consequences for the UK if it persisted with such foolishness. There were calls for a second referendum.

Sound familar?

The EU laid down deeply oppressive terms for withdrawal and free trade agreements that would have left the UK dependent, still subject to Brussels. It had willing supporters in the mainstream media — and here in Ireland.

The ‘deal’ done by the hapless Theresa May was an embarrassment.

Professor Mervyn King, formerly governor of the Bank of England, said: “...There are arguments for remaining in the EU and arguments for leaving. But there is no case whatever for giving up the benefits of remaining without obtaining the benefits of leaving. Yet that is exactly what the government is now proposing ...”

Boris Johnson broke the fetters which had bound the UK to an increasingly authoritarian EU. Fishing communities deserved better. Even so, reclaiming fishing resources was a metaphor for the deeper and wider reclamation of sovereignty.

The ‘Backstop’ gave the EU huge moral leverage in the negotiations. Ireland could have chosen to play a constructive role in resolving the technical issues around the Irish land border. Instead, it chose to give legitimacy to Brussels’ power games. 

Relational autonomy among countries is necessary and healthy. But Ireland’s present dependency is deeply unhealthy.
The UK has still much work to do in managing an economy ravaged by Covid-19. But for now the political reality is that Johnson has delivered what UK voters had demanded — and what the Irish establishment feared.

The goal of independence should resonate with Ireland. But it has been muffled. The multicultural, open-borders technocracy that now drives the EU’s ‘woke’ agenda rejects sovereignty as ‘outdated’.

The presumption is that these non-elected forces which now exercise control via Ireland’s politics and fiscal space is better placed to judge what is in the best interests of the people of Ireland than those elected as ‘messengers to the Dail’ — even though they are hardly fully representative these days.

It is a seductive illusion. A Woke EU offers plush carpets and ‘respect’ — providing your political parties are ‘on message’ and dependent.

Sovereignty nurtures the authentic identity of a nation. It is the custodian of its natural resources to be used for the people —the trustee of its faith values, its culture and its history as a segue to its future.

Those who scoff would be well advised to re-read what is written on the monument to Charles Stewart Parnell, in O’Connell Street in Dublin (“No man has the right to set the boundary to the march of a nation”).

The UK has wrested control from an EU hegemony, including the ECJ, and an EU Commission that has lost its sensitivity to ‘the people’ and, instead, serves the bureaucratic needs of that same hegemony.

The EU and the Irish establishment still seek to reassure us that we in Ireland have a “shared sovereignty”. More like whistling into the wind, as we pass the graveyard of our once most cherished dream of Irish sovereignty.

The EU would rather we apply ourselves to their agenda of aggressive secularism and the militarism of the EU — ‘there will be jobs in it for us’, if we just sell out what we once held dear.

With Brexit, the UK, our nearest neighbour and largest trade partner, is now free of what a ‘Woke’ EU has become.

Ireland, deprived of the UK’s support for shared policy concerns in the EU, is now a small, peripheral province that was brought to heel a decade ago — an island of rural neglect and urban overcrowding.

We have a broken business model and are dangerously dependent on multinational companies, Brussels and the ECB’s printing presses. We have served our purpose in the EU’s failed struggle to defeat Brexit. We are now hostage to the agenda of the dominant countries at the centre and the ‘Frugal Four’.

Those who ceded the hard-won national independence entrusted to them are one and the same as those who were once loudest in proclaiming the Irish sovereignty.

Think back to the Troika years--the inflection point in modern Irish history. Lisa Hand, described in the Irish Independent how in “...Government Buildings on the desolate night on Sunday, November 28, 2010, as the packed room watched, a group of strangers from the IMF, EU and ECB settled into seats just vacated by the Taoiseach and two cabinet ministers. This Troika was our new government now — unelected, unwanted and absolutely indispensable...”

It is only when you are deprived of something precious, something that better men died for, that you truly value what has been squandered in the name of politics — but never (an authentic Christian) patriotism.

The truth of it is this. The Post Lisbon 2 Irish political establishment that bartered Irish sovereignty and austerity are still in power.

It is hardly a surprise that they have gone on to jettison faith values that were once interwoven with national identity and religious, as well as political, freedom.

Curbs on freedom of speech will be next to go, under the guise of being ‘sensitive’. 

Brussels will dictate to the tattered remnants of a once sovereign nation what it must do and believe — and the economic policies it must pursue, even as the needs of the country are blindingly obvious to voters, and the net contribution of our indebted country to the EU’s coffers approach a € billion annually.

We should break free of the Stockholm Syndrome that marks our relationship with the EU. We should affirm an authentic understanding of ‘Europe’, freed from the Woke hegemony that has captured it and uses fiscal pressures to maintain control.

We could do it. The UK has done, against all the odds.

• Ray Kinsella was Professor of Financial Services at Ulster University and taught at UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business. He co-authored ‘Troikanomics’ (2018) and is a media contributor

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