Ireland’s Irish Sea border plan is ‘pure politicking’ – but it’s working If you have to blame someone, you might as well blame the British. This fail-safe method of winning universal acclaim […]

If you have to blame someone, you might as well blame the British. This fail-safe method of winning universal acclaim has been used less in recent years, but it has still worked a treat for Leo Varadkar, the new Taoiseach, who has enjoyed a tsunami of praise in the Irish media in recent days.

His foreign minister, Simon Coveney, revealed last week that the Irish government “cannot and will not” accept a hard border “on the island of Ireland” – implying that the Irish Sea would, for the first time in 846 years, become the frontier.

Varadkar then took aim at the idea of an innovative technological border: “We’re not going to be doing that work for them because we don’t think there should be an economic Border at all,” he said. “That is our position.”

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Clean up your own mess, is the principled position of the Irish government one-sixth of the way through the Brexit negotiation process.

Get serious

It’s not a practical solution, but it’s a meaningful political manoeuvre. The obvious reading of the Irish churlishness is as a challenge: get serious about Northern Ireland and propose something we can work with.

Thus far it’s been vague from Britain. No border, invisible border, seamless border checks by camera. But Ireland effectively has a veto on any Brexit deal, and the clock is ticking. Vague promises don’t really cut it when it comes to Northern Ireland.

The border is a practical issue, certainly, but it’s an emotive one too, and one that requires time for all the interested parties – Ireland, Britain, Stormont, the EU and especially the nationalists and the unionists – to get their heads around

If you’re Northern Irish-Irish. then the situation since the 1990s has worked quite well. There’s free movement, the checkpoints are gone, you don’t have to think about the border if you don’t want to.

If you’re Northern Irish-British. then the status quo is alright too. Your community gets the economic benefits of unfettered cross-border trade, and there’s peace, but you’re still in the UK.

A balancing act

If Northern Ireland is still to be viewed as a balancing act, then the Irish Sea border idea makes no sense. It ties the nationalists more closely to the Republic, but leaves them, politically, in the UK, while symbolically cutting the unionists off from the country they belong to.

But the hard border is arguably worse, setting nationalists back a (very difficult) century and damaging the economy enough to worry even the most hardened unionists.

Brexit has opened up a can of worms, in short, and doing anything at all is going to change the political calculus. We’re seeing it already.

The reaction from unionists in Northern Ireland to the latest Irish Sea border sally has been understandably cool. The DUP’s Nigel Dodds, a man extremely familiar with the concept of politicking for his domestic market, noted that “what’s going on is pure politicking for their own domestic market”.

He’s right. But it’s working.

Varadkar’s PR goldmine

Politics is about solutions and governance, but it’s also about doing things that win praise without costing money. Varadkar is a master of this, having spent most of his time as health minister complaining to the media that the government he belonged to wasn’t spending enough money on health.

He has hit a goldmine here, and he’s going to keep mining it for as long as it keeps paying out.

Britain, for its part, needs to propose a serious solution to the border issue to head off any future attempts at showboating.

But the broader lesson could be more worrying for panglossian Brexiteers: Ireland is one of 27 countries that must approve any Brexit deal. In every one of those countries, there is a politician in power who might see an opportunity for either economic or PR gain from hammering the no-longer-popular Britain.

Some of what they say and do might be unhelpful or unfair, but there’s no referee here.

The Brexiteers who said it would be easy need to show us what they meant before this gets out of hand.