OFTEN DISMISSED AS an urban myth, one truism about British diplomacy is that you’re never more than six feet away from a Winston Churchill quote.
This has rarely been on clearer display than this week, when UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer held the first big summit of his premiership.
The venue was Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, the birthplace of the wartime Conservative leader, and you couldn’t shake a microphone without someone saying something Churchillian into it.
Starmer was among them and he wanted to focus on Churchill’s recognition of shared European values. All part of his mantra of a great “reset” of relations now that his Labour party is in government with a huge mandate.
The 47-leader summit came the morning after a rather cosier affair where Starmer and Taoiseach Simon Harris supped pints for the cameras at Chequers.
The message was clear, that Ireland and the UK are friends again, and they’ve got the hangover to prove it.
The rot between the Irish and British governments can be traced back to when David Cameron first promised an EU referendum back in January 2013.
That now infamous ‘Bloomberg Speech’, which of course also quoted Churchill, saw Cameron arguing in favour of EU membership on the basis of prosperity and stability, two things that successive UK governments have squandered in the mire of Brexit.
Starmer can’t put the genie back in the bottle but what he can do is display the stability that has been absent for some time. That stability allows for consistency and trust, another two qualities that have been absent.
Simon Coveney, once foreign minister but now departing politics, said it himself at the height of the disastrous Liz Truss experiment, opining that what Ireland wanted from the UK was “solid and consistent and predictable leadership coming from the top”.
Coveney regularly sounded downbeat about the state of the Irish-UK relations but he was not alone, at one point then-taoiseach Micheál Martin said that the UK government “did not understand” the Good Friday Agreement.
That comment was made in the final months of Boris Johnson’s premiership in 2022, which represented somewhat of a nadir of relations this century.
As Paul Gillespie of UCD’s Centre for Peace and Conflict points out, there has always been more commitment to the GFA from Labour than the Tories.
It’s important also to say that the Good Friday Agreement was a Labour agreement and I think there’s just basically more sympathy and willingness to use the Good Friday Agreement institutions in the Labour Party than probably was in the Conservatives.
“At the same time, (David) Cameron and (Enda) Kenny did try to do some quite serious bilateral stuff before Cameron went down the whole Brexit route.”
I think Cameron’s willingness to sacrifice British-Irish relations for party advantage was something that annoyed them. I think very much that’s now behind us.
The focus on the GFA was evident on Friday when Harris addressed the Macgill Summer School in Glenties, saying that the two countries “are back in a space” where Ireland and the UK were “talking about being the co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement”.
“That’s exactly where we need,” he said.
Gillespie argues that the GFA already provides for vital North–South and East–West institutions, so in taking these more seriously there is already a forum to implement this great reset.
During the last few Tory administrations, he says that things just got “very difficult” because there was, he says, “just a lack of knowledge and sympathy and willingness to use the institutions that are there”.
“The new government is much better informed, and much more sympathetic.
The Irish people around Starmer, they take it really seriously. And they see Ireland also to some extent, as a bridge and a sympathetic bridge, on the European side of things, and perhaps also on the American side, certainly with Biden.
This point is one that has been made repeatedly in the past two weeks since the UK’s election, that Ireland could be an important ally for Starmer in improving relations with Europe.
Starmer has said he will seek closer ties with the EU in terms of foreign policy and defence matters. He has also indicated he wants to sign a veterinary agreement, which would ease restrictions on trade, particularly with the North.
All of these things are music to Irish ears and Harris will no doubt be keen to do what he can to help his British counterpart.
Gillespie warns, however, that Ireland can’t be seen by EU colleagues to be simply doing the UK’s bidding, and that there are plenty of other countries that will want the same thing anyway.
“The Irish government has to be quite careful not to be seen in Brussels as the kind of the chief advocate of the British.
There are other states that would like to see a cordial relationship, there’s the security and defence stuff obviously and there’s the Netherlands and the countries in the Nordic zone on trade terms, the Germans too. So Ireland is promising multilateral support, or support in multilateral settings.
“They’ve acknowledged that they have their joint interests, but I think there’s a limit on the extent to which they would become the bridgehead for British re-entry of some kind.”
Unity debate
On the British side, are there any guardrails they would like to put up in terms of relations with Ireland?
Gillespie says that Labour has recently retaken the mantle of the SNP as the biggest Scottish party in Westminster, so they certainly don’t want to do anything that may encourage more thoughts of Scottish independence.
“The one thing you have to look ahead at is that this is a more unionist Labour government,” he explains.
“They want to hold the UK together, they don’t want Scotland going, they’ve good political reasons to head off the Scottish nationalists.
“Therefore, any bleed over from an Irish unity debate to a Scottish debate is going to put them in a more Unionist position.”
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