Brexit, Ireland and the Churches
THE RATHER tired cliché that a week is a long time in politics is nonetheless true, and writing about politics in a periodical is especially hazardous. This article goes to press in January 2018, and much Brexit water will have flowed under the bridge by the time this issue of SEARCH appears. However, so pertinent are Brexit-related issues to all who live on the island of Ireland, and not least to Church members, that it is timely to bring what is at stake to the attention of our readers, north and south of the border. So grave have been concerns over the United Kingdom’s relations with the European Union that the very possibility of Brexit was being considered in the Republic before that term had come into common currency. As long ago as 1996 the Institute of European A airs (as it was then titled) published Britain’s European Question: the issues for Ireland in which the editor, Paul Gillespie, raised the question of whether Britain would remain ‘semi-detached’ or seek to exit its position at the heart of the European Union. “Would it even be tempted to leave the EU altogether rather than pool its sovereignty in order to build a more powerful Europe in conjunction with its war- time antagonists and allies?” And in his Introduction to that book Garret FitzGerald, Chairman of the Institute’s Project on the UK and the EU, and former Taoiseach, referred to Britain’s attitude to and relationship with the European Union as having become “even more problematic in recent years than in earlier decades” and “posing serious problems for its European partners... For its Irish partner these problems are particularly acute, both because of the close economic and social relationship between these two states and because of their joint involvement in the search for a resolution of the Northern Ireland crisis.” A decade later, the Institute published Britain and Europe, the end game: an Irish perspective. The co-editor, Dáithí O’Ceallaigh (a former Irish ambassador in London) wrote that the long saga of Britain’s troubled engagement with the European Union was reaching a critical moment. He suggested that “some, perhaps a majority of its voters, wish to withdraw altogether from the European Union.”4 As the referendum of June 2016 made clear, such was the case. What follows is not a post-mortem on the referendum but an attempt to identify those particularly acute problems with which we on this island are now faced. Before doing so it might be helpful to outline the path to Brexit on which the twenty-seven ‘remaining’ states (including Ireland) are engaged. The European Union is governed by law as set out in a series of treaties, the latest of which, ‘the Reform Treaty’ (known as the Treaty of Lisbon) broke new ground by including a provision, Article 50 of title VI, whereby any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union “in accordance with its own constitutional requirements”. (There is, incidentally, a provision whereby a request to re-join can be made.) The Prime Minister, Mrs Theresa May, ‘triggered’ Article 50 by her letter to the European Commission of 29 March 2017, and crucially, from the Irish point of view, she has committed her government by paying attention to the UK’s unique relationship with the Republic of Ireland and to the importance of the Peace Process.
* Full article available in printed copies.
Kenneth Milne
is a member of the Church of Ireland Working-group on Europe, Convenor of the European Affairs committee of the Irish Council of Churches, and Church of Ireland representative on the Thematic Reference Group on EU policy and legislation of the Conference of European Churches.