Leo stuck to the bottom line on Brexit and delivered at his end

The British, it is said, are a pragmatic people, the Irish a nation of dreamers. The British think (and govern) in prose, the Irish in poetry. The British are interested in concrete results, the Irish concentrate on process writes Fergus Finlay.

Anyone who has ever negotiated with the British knows that this is mythology. The Irish Government wanted one thing from the current negotiations on Brexit — a simple piece of paper. From the beginning, the Irish Government has insisted that there is only one outcome that can be accepted — an agreement that protects the inviolability of the Good Friday Agreement and that allows no return to the border of the past.

Leo Varadkar, Simon Coveney, and the entire government have stayed true to that simple objective. As I write this, the final shape of an agreement has not been published — and we all know there’s many a slip at moments like this. But it seems clear that our government has won the argument for now.

That doesn’t mean it’s over, not least because of the DUP’s position, because the second phase of negotiations on trade, assuming they start, will involve hugely complicated arrangements on trading and business relations between this island and the one next door.

But Varadkar and his team have put us in a much more powerful position now. It remains to be seen if Theresa May can deliver her side of the bargain, or even if she will survive the agreement she has signed up to. But that’s not a calculation we could ever afford to make. We had to stick to our bottom line.

It can’t have been easy. The British style, in situations like this, is to resist to the last minute any prospect of putting down something that can be published. The much more usual approach is to concentrate on personalities. They persuade and cajole, bully and intimidate, threaten one minute, offer blandishments the next. You could expect them, in the run up to the EU summit, to drive whatever wedge they could between the Irish Government and its EU partners.

We’ve had a taste of how they operate over the last couple of weeks. The stupidity and ignorance of some of the remarks coming from senior Tories has been matched by the sneering and contemptuous tone of a lot of the British media commentary. That’s all part of the softening up process. Shut your gob, Leo. Stop behaving like an

upstart, and start respecting your betters. It’s clear that our leaders saw it coming, and figured out how to react.

I heard Coveney on the radio yesterday morning, calmly and assertively dealing with the issues involved, and going to very considerable pains to ensure that the conversation was around the issues and not the personalities. A couple of times he was asked whether the British had tabled anything, and he said in reply that text was under discussion. I’ve no inside information, but I’d be ready to bet that the text being discussed was text we had written and put forward. That would be entirely of a piece with the way the British always operate.

And over the weekend it was put to Leo Varadkar on the Marian Finucane Show that he had been under a lot of personal pressure and abuse from the British media. He was calm and measured in his response — effectively paraphrasing Michelle Obama that when they go low, we go high.

Instead they concentrated on the two things that are absolutely essential. The first was that our Government had a clear, explicit, and unambiguous understanding of its bottom line. The second was that they had constantly communicated this — in European capitals, in the European institutions, in London and everywhere else that was willing to listen.

Of course London didn’t listen, and wasn’t listening. At least, it appears, until Donald Tusk came to Dublin last week.

I have to admit that I thought the ringing endorsement delivered by Tusk in Dublin last week had an element of double-edged sword about it. He effectively handed the Irish Government a veto over the entire negotiations, in all their strands.

But if it had turned out to be the case that the 27 member states were reasonably happy that the British have gone as far as they need at this stage in relation to the other two strands — the financial settlement and the issue of citizen’s rights — the pressure to get a deal on the border would have been excruciating.

That would have involved a huge test of nerve. When negotiations involve a range of conflicting interests that have to be reconciled, that makes them difficult enough. When they also involve issues of principle, or even perceived principle, there is a considerable mountain to climb. When you are the only one standing up for the principle in question, life gets very lonely.

If it had come down to the wire on the border question, the British tabloids would have a total field day in the run-up to the summit. Ireland and its young inexperienced Taoiseach would have been portrayed as out of his depth and unreasonable. And at the same time there would have been some in the opposition at home getting ready to present the Taoiseach as having sold us out.

But what seems to have happened instead is that Tusk’s visit to Dublin jolted the British government out of its usual approach. Suddenly, and it seems for the first time, it began to dawn on them that Ireland was acting on the basis of a lot of solidarity and support from our European partners. For the first time, they began to concentrate on Ireland’s bottom lines.

As I said, all sorts of things can still go wrong. The Tories could still try to make the first phase meaningless once they succeed in getting to the second phase. The DUP in the North — despite their insistence that they don’t want a hard border either — could force the British government into reverse.

As things stand though, any development of that kind would simply isolate the British further. The moment has effectively passed when we can be pressured into abandoning our fundamental position. Now, whatever happens, we occupy a position of strength. And we owe that to the Government’s clarity and sense of purpose.

Last week, Varadkar’s style of leadership was under a lot of pressure. There were all sorts of mutterings about how he has been shown to be weak and indecisive. I couldn’t tell you how many times I heard and read that Enda Kenny would have dealt with the issues around Frances Fitzgerald much more decisively.

I doubt that is likely to be said now. No leader can ever succeed unless he or she has a clear idea of where they want to go. In these negotiations, we’ve seen that in spades, from the very beginning. Other taoisigh might well have been tempted to go and look for whatever fudge they could get.

This Taoiseach concentrated on making the bottom line as clear as possible, on communicating it as simply and effectively as he could, and on never deviating from what had to be achieved. And his leadership delivered.

No leader can ever succeed unless he or she has a clear idea of where they want to go. In these negotiations, we’ve seen that in spades.