Dear Jeremy,
In your conversations with your EU counterparts it seems to me that you are making the same big mistake as your predecessors. Fortunately, being Irish, I can help you with this.
Your mistake is based on a number of illusions, many of which we used to share. It took Ireland a long time to cure ourselves of these but, in a spirit of generosity, I offer you, in your hour of need, some insights based on our experience.
You see, as a nation, we too had to deal with a larger counterpart, with whom we shared a highly integrated trading relationship and much common culture and history.
Our first illusion was of our own importance. To us, we appeared to be a significant nation with a rich history and a voice to be heard. To our neighbour, we were a small country with an economy a fraction of the size of theirs, and all that our neighbour saw was this difference in scale.
On the current numbers it looks as if the UK GDP is about 17% the size of that of the EU without the UK. On the same numbers, Ireland’s economy is about 13% the size of its neighbour.
A second illusion was that because we had such a strong relationship with our neighbour, we thought that they would automatically consider us in decisions that had an impact on us. They frequently didn’t! Even recently, they committed themselves to something that not only affected our border with them, but endangered a civil peace that had taken decades to arrange. And the real sting with this was that it was pretty clear to us that it hadn’t even crossed their minds that this was the natural likely outcome of their decision.
Another illusion we had was that we could quite happily make our way in the world without our neighbour. History would count for something – there were lots of other countries who’d love to trade with us! For example, the Irish have a huge connection with the US, going back hundreds of years, and a strong sentimental bond. One might almost call it a ‘special’ relationship. Imagine our surprise when the only thing special in the relationship turned out to be the crazy tax deals we had to cut them so they’d invest!
Finally I have to tell you about a time early in the independent history of our nation, when we had the illusion that we could strike out on our own and in the excitement of our independence we refused to pay our neighbour money they felt we owed them. Disaster! Trade war! We came off the worse of course (did I mention that they were much bigger than we were?). Well, it took years to resolve and by the time we did sort it out our internal politics were so messed up that it took further decades of stagnation before we could really emerge as a successful economy.
I’m sure that could never happen here.
Best of luck!
Patrick
PS Should you want to pass on some practical advice to organisations dealing with the prospect of a hard Brexit, I have written something here.