A border poll must be only the opening part of the reunification debate.

Previously published by The Irish Independent.

It’s ironic to think that the single biggest outcome of Brexit could be the replacement of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland with Great England (featuring Wales and the Isle of Man.). But it’s not an unreasonable to see a domino track from Brexit to Scottish Independence to a United Ireland. This is a real live proposition and we need to start considering it.

So here’s the bit that will activate a thousand Shinnerbots and the usual Free Stater/West Brit name throwing: a border poll can’t just trigger a Brexit-style united Ireland without knowing the actual details of what a United Ireland will look like. 

Yes, I know, this is the bit where people jump up with well-worn copies of the Good Friday Agreement and a loud “Well, actually…” I get it. A border poll in the north (and only the north, something many in the republic don’t get) transfers sovereignty in principle.

Supposing Boris decides to honour it almost immediately, regardless of the size of the winning margin or any details, just ups and out in weeks, telling the Irish government that the salaries and pensions and health funding and all the rest are our problem from midnight of day X.

Don’t be ridiculous, you say! There are agreements and understandings between Britain and Ireland and words given and Boris…..Johnson…..isn’t…..like…..that….

See the problem.

Don’t forget, we can’t force the British to not give us the north of Ireland and all its public spending and pension liabilities and victim compensation responsibilities. It’ll be the first thing we’re asked by the former unionists and not an inconsiderable number of nationalists too. 

Will we meet all Britain’s spending liabilities?

But Britain has obligations, many Shinnerbots will cry, suddenly realising that it is they trying to convince me that I need to trust the British Tories to keep their word.  

Guess what: I don’t.

The Taoiseach will of course go on television that night and announce that the people of the north of Ireland do not need to worry. The Irish state will honour their NHS funding and pensions and all the rest.

Then the DUP will point out all the social welfare payments in the south that are higher than in the north, and demand parity of esteem. 

It’ll be at this stage that the minister for finance will be sending for a new pair of trousers. 

The Americans! The EU! The United Nations! Bill Gates! The National Lottery! The 2:30 at Chepstow! All will be declared to be the source of funding the ten to fifteen billion in extra spending we suddenly have to find. And all, suffering the same Covid ravaging of their national finances that we went through will say the same thing: sorry Paddy. You wanted it, you pay for it.

The minister for finance will know the reality. Yes, we probably can borrow for a while, the legacy of not going all Maduro On The Shannon back in the day. But it’s not sustainable. Either taxes go up, or spending is cut, but neither necessarily on either side of the former border. 

The minister, in front of a wall of tricolours announces that we, the Irish people, have always known that sacrifices would have to be made in the cause of unity, and so it has come to pass.     

By the way, speaking as a republican, I don’t regard Free State as an insult. I just like reminding people what it stands for: the section of the Irish people who actually defeated the British in our bit.   

What do TV ads say about us in the time of Covid?

Previously published by The Irish Independent.

Carrot Cannibals.

Has anyone noticed that Aldi’s Christmas ad? It seems to be about Santy delivering a carrot back to his family so they can all be boiled and devoured together in some sort of Tarantinoesque familial masochistic reverse cannibalism? That Kevin the carrot is giddy with excitement at the prospect of being eaten, along with his mum and dad Katie and Jasper, sister Chantenay and the youngest Baby Carrot? 

Maybe I’m overthinking it too much. You bloody well are, screams Aldi’s marketing department. 

Perhaps. I am watching a lot of TV ads. I like TV ads. In fact, as regular readers know, when I’m not shaking an impotent fist at our political system I’m a bit of an amateur TV history junkie, and I find TV ads can be a fascinating insight into a period in time, in that they’re not as rtepeated as TV shows are and so tend to be much more of their time. 

I grew up in an era where it was perfectly normal for a squarejaw in a black poloneck to swim through shark infested waters with a briefcase(A briefcase!) to deliver a box of chocolates, and don’t get me started on the simmering filthfest of coy “wait ‘til mother goes to bed and I’ll show you buttered spuds” looks that was the KerryGold ads. 

Funnily enough, in the time we are living in (“These challenging times” is, I believe, the official description) watching ordinary TV with its ads and the rest brings a strange sort of sociability and connection. 

You can’t go to the pub, or restaurants, or your local car-keys-in-a-bowl party if you live in Enniskerry, but you can feel part of something just that little bit bigger watching terrestrial telly as opposed to binge watching “Suits”. 

By the way, if you haven’t watched “Suits” it’s about a group of beautifully dressed beautiful lawyer people who are constantly too busy to talk because they’re going to a meeting or being unhappy in their beautiful apartments pondering how hard it is to be beautiful all the time. “Suits”? Should be called “Ungrateful Feckers”, but I digress.

We’re getting very accustomed to the Covid take on ads: the lonely piano playing as we are shown someone’s granny looking sadly through a window at her grandchildren. People learning new skills on lockdown, like how to speak Serbo-Croat or dismantle a tactical nuclear weapon. A lot of exercise. And that “we’re all in this together” thing. 

We don’t see much of the granny delighted the little feckers aren’t wrecking her house. Or the couple in their pyjamas hoovering through a box of Celebrations. Or the odd murder. Wait and see: when this is all over we’ll be digging people out from under the rosebushes: You can’t be showing locked down people “Midsomer Murders” on a perpetual loop without consequences. 

But that’s all OK. The Covid ads show us a glimpse of where we are and also our technical abilities, with so many ads now filmed by people in their own homes, showing customers of X or Y talking Christlike about the company if only because they’ve nothing better to do. 

Some ads do get me roaring at the screen, I’ll admit. 

Those ads for men’s and women’s fragrances, which have gotten so po-faced.

Take that one where Thor strolls very handsomely through some city announcing that “Success without integrity means nothing”. What does that even mean? 

If he’d said something like “Slamming your lad in a car door will make your eyes water” I’d at least nod at the accuracy of the statement. The women’s ads are even worse, the montage ones showing her laughing with friends, storming away from a man, driving a car erratically, having a good cry, giving some other fella a good seeing to. You can’t move for sharp cheekbones, and that’s just the men..

Then some vacuous saying, and the bit that makes me explode: where they announce the name of the product in a deadpan matter-of-fact but-of-course voice.  It’s the fake profoundity of it that kills me, that buying a bottle of “Tumescence. Chanel” is some sort of statement about who you are. 

But that’s not where I reserve my leap from the couch in finger-pointing denunciation moment: that’ll be for the bank ads. 

Please. Spare me the “Brave” or the “we’re just like you” from the banks. 

You know we’re not. We know we’re not. 

Just for once I’d love to see a bank ad that tells an unvarnished truth that is at least authentic.

“We at Consolidated Bailout Bank really like making profits, which we try to make by lending to you for a cost higher than the amount of interest we pay to people to let us mind their money. We like making profits, but we get that if we make too much, you might go to some other bank, so we promise we’ll charge you as much as we can but not enough to make you  go over to those other guys at Unified Golden Parachute Bank. And we won’t try that usual Rubik’s Cube account charges thing where we try to bamboozle you by varying the charges using variables like whether Gemini is in line with Jupiter, Sine and Cosine from your Leaving Cert log tables,  or dividing the fee by the span of an African elephant ear if it’s Tuesday or Thursday. 

Consolidated Bailout Bank: Moneylending, but without ending up in the Sunday World.”

The ad I’m really waiting for is one full of really tired non-cheekboney people with grey hair giving a thumbs up to the camera, then the slogan. 

Vaccine. By Pfizer.

The EU is doing pretty much what it says on the tin.

Previously published in The Irish Independent.

As with so many people, I’ve been spending time watching various boxsets, and recently finished “Star Trek: Picard” which tells the story of the further adventures of now retired Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, late of the USS Enterprise-E. (The fact I put E there is to confirm my Trekkie knowledge status, by the way.) In one episode, there’s a scene where Picard remonstrates with another admiral about the failure of the Federation (Think the EU with starships) to rescue millions of refugees from their former superpower rivals the Romulan Empire. The admiral (coincidentally resembling EU President Von Der Leyen) lays out the cool hard realpolitik of the situation: the Romulans were the enemy until very recently and that members of the Federation were threatening to leave the alliance (FedXit?) if the Romulans were taken in. 

In short, she said, the preservation of the Federation was more important.   

It was an unusual moment for “Star Trek”, which is usually (but not always) more comfortable with a straight goodies/baddies narrative.

It was also a timely scene, given the current travails that another multi-member political alliance (also with prominent French leadership) is going through, where principle meets pragmatism.  

It’s always entertaining to watch many in the now departed UK are still banging on about the EU and how doomed it apparently is. The Covid19 crisis is being used, in particular, as proof that the European ideal is some sort of gossamer-like substance that blows away at the first sign of a storm. One can’t help suspecting there’s a hint of the protesting ex-boyfriend about the Brexiteers, over their former girlfriend yet constantly hovering around Facebook seeing who she is now dating whilst adamant that they don’t care. 

Their criticism would be true if the EU were the cartoon superstate that Brexiteers always either believed it to be (through the wearing of an assortment of kitchen-foil based self-assembled headwear) or simply hoped it to be so that they could rail against it. 

The reality is that the EU is exactly what those of us supporting it always said it was: closely integrated but still a union of sovereign independent states. In a crisis, the EU is doing what it is supposed to do, clearing obstacles like relaxing state aid rules and negotiating “green lanes” through closed borders to get vital supplies through, whilst staying out of the way and letting member states do what they have to do to fight the virus at the most appropriate level, which in this case is mostly nationally.

The complaint that EU countries are putting their national interests first and foremost is a contrived one because that’s what EU countries invented the EU for: not to abolish sovereignty but to act as a de facto bionic enhancement of it, by giving national governments more tools to pursue the interests of their people. I’m a believer in freedom of movement but I also believe in the sovereign right of nations to control their borders and yes, close them in an emergency. 

Yet, even as they have done that, EU countries have been helping each other where they can, with medical resources where they can, caring for each others’ citizens, and helping to get each other’s citizens back to Europe.

The EU is not a federal government. Personally, I wish it was, but it ain’t. Instead it is a mechanism to assist cooperation. Nobody, including the Commission, wanted Brussels to be deciding who gets how many ventilators. 

Euroskeptics (and some pro-Europeans, it must be said) are complaining that the EU is not a top-down federalist superstate because, well, it isn’t. The robust debate over whether to have “Coronabonds” to fund our now eye-watering crisis debts is a healthy one, with all points of view being voiced. The EU will undoubtedly have failures during the crisis, but almost all will be because the EU institutions don’t have the power or resources to do what people now demand of them. 

That’s not a rupture in the union. That’s what a healthy democratic alliance does. 

By the way, there is one union of states where the central government has imposed orders upon the democratically elected heads of the national governments, and that would be the United Kingdom. 

I, for one, would be totally opposed to the EU being run in a manner similar to the centralised diktat of the UK, where the largest nation in the union can overrule all other members of that union. But that’s another day’s debate.  

It’s not that there aren’t lessons to be learned. The debate about a European army, or perhaps better named European Crisis Force, to be able to mobilise transport aircraft and rapidly build emergency field hospitals is a debate that has to be had. As is one about Europe’s seeming inability to rapidly manufacture emergency medical supplies.      

Then there’s Hungary, where the Orban regime is using the crisis to effectively create a dictatorship. Yes, every government has voted itself emergency powers, but Orban has form on this sort of thing, and has now suspended parliament and elections indefinitely, and there’s no place for that in the EU. 

There’s no system for expelling a country from the EU, but if the EU is anything it’s creative and it is time to call Orban’s bluff. I’m not paying my taxes for them to be used as some sort of Fidesz (Orban’s party) slush fund to keep a dodgy outfit in power.

Either Orban backs down, or Hungary has to go, by whatever means. Orban uses EU criticism as a means of bolstering power in Hungary. Maybe it’s now time for ordinary Hungarians to realize that Orban has created a Hungary that the rest of Europe does not want to be associated with, and act accordingly. 

Hungary is a sovereign nation entitled to respect. But so are the rest of us. 

For all the criticisms, Europe isn’t going away. It can’t.