Irish Examiner view: New reality with Brexit deal will test old relationships

Release of classified papers helps to complete first draft of history

The release of classified papers at this time of the year is almost a second Christmas for historians and political nerds. 

Each year’s tranche of papers, their unknown contents, unexpected details, and unanticipated context, always go some way to completing the first draft of history. 

This year we discovered that in 1990 then taoiseach Charles Haughey intervened to block a plan for Nelson Mandela to address the joint houses of the Oireachtas because Mandela was not yet a head of state. 

Papers from 1990 also showed that Gerry Adams privately warned John Hume that he was “worried” the IRA might assassinate Margaret Thatcher just weeks after it had murdered one of her closest friends, Ian Gow. 

It is not difficult to speculate how such an event would have derailed nascent peace talks and refuelled old toxins. 

Adams’ offering is reminder of how heavily the shadow of the gunmen fell across any efforts to stablise this island in the recent past. 

The Birmingham Six outside the Old Bailey in London after their convictions were quashed. Picture: Sean Dempsey/PA Wire

That reality is seen through another 1990 prism when America’s President-elect Joe Biden brought further pressure on the British government to re-examine the conviction of the Birmingham Six for the largest ever IRA bomb attack in Britain. 

Wrongly convicted in 1975, they were to stay in jail until 1991, a year after Biden’s interventions.

Each of these files goes some way to completing one jigsaw or another but they all speak to one principle. They show how politics — and in a conflict situation, hope — are dependent on functioning relationships even if suspicion and mistrust are part of those relationships.

If those relationships exist in a power vacuum or in an environment where power is being contested, they are even more important and challenged.

It would be at least naive to imagine that the collegiality sustaining relationships, through thick and thin, across these islands has not been weakened by the Brexit agreement. 

Despite the very best intentions, despite the very best motives, and despite an almost universal understanding that when politics fail far darker forces take to the stage, we have reached a new, less attractive reality. 

Premature calls for a border poll will colour that reality negatively, maybe not as darkly as the assassination of Thatcher would have 30 years ago but they nevertheless feed a narrative that has some distance to travel before it might be made even plausible.

Brexit and its fallout must have implications for one of our sacred cows too. 

Can neutrality, whatever that really means today, mean the same as it did when Britain was a part of the European Union? When America was guarantor for Europe’s peace and safety? Hardly. 

Maybe, as was the case during “The Emergency”, we can adopt a flexible, ambiguous kind of neutrality when we inevitably have to choose on one issue or another, between supporting the objectives of our nearest neighbour, our EU partners or that source of so much cherished investment in Ireland, America.

It will be interesting, when 2050 rolls around, to open the files and see how these issues were addressed, to see how statecraft was exercised, but in the immediate future it might be prudent to review the hand we have been dealt before we are asked to play it.