Sipping pints of Guinness, swapping football shirts and purring about respect and new dawns, the British and Irish prime ministers seemed determined to inject long-absent warmth into the relationship between their countries when they met on Saturday. The thaw is overdue; Keir Starmer’s visit to Dublin was the first by a British PM in five years. In 2019, Boris Johnson’s visit came amid manifold anxieties about securing a Brexit deal, prompting a declaration from the Irish government that “the people of this island, North and South, need to know that their livelihoods, their security and their sense of identity will not be put at risk as a consequence of a hard Brexit. The stakes are high. Avoiding the return of a hard border on this island and protecting our place in the single market are the Irish government’s priorities in all circumstances.”
The distrustful atmosphere was a product not just of the June 2016 British vote to leave the EU, but a broader Tory ignorance about what the border in Ireland represented. The failure to consider that issue during the Brexit referendum campaign was compounded by simplistic distortions and assertions. The border was then resurrected as a touchstone, much to its discomfort, as imagined irascibly in the Twitter feed @BorderIrish: “I was just minding my own business, being a largely invisible little border that no one had thought about for years … after decades of misery … and then along comes Brexit, like some gobshite taking its first lesson, crashing all over the place.”
