Working the GFA/BA, now more than ever after Brexit

Bertie Ahern has a point when he notes that in the wake of Brexit there’s much less cooperation, even just contacts, between Ireland and the UK at government and diplomatic level. Though some of us would point to the situation changing when the Tories won in 2010. Labour – for obvious reasons, not least their input into the GFA/BA, were willing to work the institutions. Not so the Tories for whom, one suspects, it was always an inconvenience at best.

“Every day there were working groups, there were Irish officials going over to Brussels and London … and there was an interaction between the British system and our system, every day.”

He said he looked back at a diary from 2002 or 2003 and noted that there were 21 meetings in a week between British and Irish officials.

“That huge interaction is gone, is gone in its entirety. There’s nobody meeting. They’re not meeting for meetings, not meeting for coffee, not meeting in the bars,” Mr Ahern said.

“All that was hugely helpful. That is a huge problem. And it’s leading to all these difficulties, these ongoing difficulties, that are there every day,” he said.

And his solution?

The former Taoiseach added that the only way around that is to use the mechanisms of the Good Friday Agreement to have far more meetings. Far more north-south meetings and far more east-west meetings.

“You don’t have to set up a new structure. It’s all there. The only way we’ll get back to where we were pre-Brexit is to use the structures that are there … if that happens, we’ll get over these difficulties.”

Which makes sense. Though one also has to hope the likely change of government in the UK will bring some sense of change to this.