THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GIADA

Book Website

This is surely the definitive book on the EU and Northern Ireland at least for the period from the UK & Ireland joining the European Economic Community in 1973 up to pre-Brexit times with a serious concentration on the period from 1980 to 1998 when much of what is there is in this relationship was forged.

In terms of content, the emphasis, and some might say the justification, for the book lies in its theoretical underpinnings, the evolution and identification of metagovernance and its relevance in conflict situations.

For me, however, the most rewarding, and major part of the book, is the chronicling and analysis of the IRL/NI/UK/EU relationship. The value of Lagana's work here is that it is meticulously sourced and draws on a number of archives not previously in the public domain (Delors & Logue) but it is also informed by a series of intensive interviews with a carefully selected sample of the main surviving players.

Not being an academic myself and having been familiar with Northern Ireland through observation and participation, I found the theoretical aspect of "metagovernance" a tough one to come to terms with and I don't think I have yet managed a full understanding of it.

An essential element in the EU approach is its subtlety, the 'nudge' I refer to below, as the networks involved may in some instances seem to threaten to undermine the state. As the book puts it (p36)

In a way the concept of metagovernance offers a means for governments to loosen the reins without loosing control.

If you want to get to the bottom of this, you'll just have to read the book. Metagovernance takes up the first 48 pages of the book which I am not going to attempt to condense further here.

The broad idea, however, seems fairly straightforward. Where a situation has many sources and layers of governance, as in the NI situation, it involves standing back, analysing the governance strands, and then coming up with a strategy for a holistic approach to the situation nudging and drawing the various governing authorities into a consistent and constructive approach to development.

Thus, where EU programmes, such as PEACE and INTERREG are involved, the EU is the metagovernor attempting to get the biggest bang for everyone's buck. No doubt that description will have me expelled from academia for ever, but it might help the layperson's understanding of this uniquely ambitious book.

JOHN HUME'S JOURNEY

Giada Lagana & John Hume

I am on much more familiar and understandable territory once we get down to the situation on the ground and the thread of continuity here is the parallel story of John Hume.

John had serious street cred in the struggle for civil rights in Northern Ireland. Shortly after the explosion of the Troubles in 1968/9, both Ireland and the UK (including Northern Ireland) joined the EEC in 1973.

John was quick to spot the neutral ground that was the European Parliament which was organised on Europe-wide party, rather than national, lines. And though the role of the Parliament was marginal at that stage in terms of EU governance, he saw it as an arena where opposing forces within Northern Ireland could be got to cooperate in the interest of the North as a whole.

He ended up cooperating with his "mortal enemies" from the Northern scene, Ian Paisley and John Taylor (followed by Jim Nicholson), in promoting the Northern interest within the EU, and in a way which made no small contribution to the eventual emergence of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998.

But none of that came easy. The stage had first to be set to bring Northern Ireland onto the EU playing field.

As those of us who ever had dealings with the EEC/EU know, if you want to do anything at Community/Union level, you have first to find a legal base for it. Making speeches and the like is all very well, and pretty straightforward, but if you eventually want to mobilise funds, that is another matter, and by the time you get to that stage you will want to have your legal base sorted out.

Hume, and Colm Larkin in the Commission, set about trying to find a way to get the Community/Union involved in some way in Northern Ireland. The NI situation in 1979 was appalling and the case would have to be strong and decisivly presented.

They finally decided that the best approach would be to present the Parliament with a Motion for a Resolution calling on the Commission to involve itself in the Northern Ireland situation. This was an approach which had been rarely used in the past and the Preamble to the draft Resolution would have to firm up the legal base if it was to get any hearing at all. For a while they were stumped and could not find anything useful in the Treaty of Rome until Larkin had a Eureka moment when he checked out the earlier Coal and Steel Community Treaty. There it was, 'A wonderful almost biblical phrase':

Resolved to substitute for age-old rivalries the merging of their essential interests; to create, by establishing an economic community, the basis for a broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts; and to lay the foundations for institutions which will give direction to a destiny henceforward shared (...).

Colm Larkin

This, of course, referred to war-torn Europe after WWII, but it fitted Northern Ireland like a glove.

That phrase figured in almost every future European initiative that Hume and the EU/Northern Ireland network took over the years.

THE MARTIN REPORT 1981

The Resolution led in due course to the "Martin Report on Community Regional Policy and Northern Ireland", published in May 1981 in the middle of the NI hunger strikes.

The report reviewed the outlook for the economy of Northern Ireland and assessed the policies and resources needed to bring the region up to the Community average as regards living standards and employment. (...) The Martin Report constituted the beginning of what became an ongoing role for the EU in Northern Ireland.

The debate on the Report in the European Parliament tesified to the unity of the NI MEPs in that forum, but it brought out an aspect of UK in NI that was not welcome to the UK authorities but which strengthened the hand of NI in maximising expenditure in the North.

The rapporteur, Simone Martin, highlighted the lack of "additionality" in current EU spending in the North. The observance of additionality is vital in EU spending and is taken very seriously by the EU. It simply means that any EU spending should be additional to that already being spent by the national authorities. This was clearly not being observed in Northern Ireland where EU spending, in whole or in part, was subsituted for national spending. Martin's observation allowed Ian Paisley subsequently to accuse Whitehall of stealing NI's EU money.

If you want to follow all the subtleties involved in the lead up to the report you need to read the book where they are clearly set out. I must remark here that the text clearly shows the value of the one-to-one interviews carried out by the author.

THE HAAGERUP REPORT 1983

This report went a lot further than its predecessor which was only concerned with economic matters.

The objective was to 'explain a terribly complicated situation of conflict and strife, alienation and sectarianism to non British and non Irish members of the Parliament' and through them, maybe to a wider section of the European public at large. The explicit objective of the investigation, reflecting a belief growing in the Community, was to see if and how the institutions of the European Community (EC) could be of additional assistance to the people of Northern Ireland beyond the support already rendered within the framework of the Community's regional policy and Social Fund.

(...) the report recommended cross border cooperation at a time when regional policies were the priority of EU member states. Furthermore the report proposed that the EC assume greater responsibility for economic and social development and for improved intergovernmental cooperation on security issues. Both suggestions were in areas that related to constitutional affairs and that, some might argue, exceeded the EP's competencies.

I would think that last sentence an understatement and see why Unionists were not at all pleased. However, as the book points out, the UK authorities, despite their public protestations, were privately not at all unhappy at the prospect of additional EU funds coming into Northern Ireland.

The British Government, the UUP and the DUP refused to cooperate with the report. This resulted from a refusal to distinguish between the "political" and the "constitutional", and an ideological view of sovereignty which saw NI as an exclusively British matter.

The report is careful to point out that the conflict in Northern Ireland is not a religious war, particularly as this is often the beginning and the end of some people's understanding outside of the North.

... the conflict is one of culture and loyalties, of memories of historic struggles rather than disputes of doctrine.

This statement is set against the background of the history of the North and the observation that

it is crucial that the history of Northern Ireland is understood as a 'sequence of Irish rebellions and British suppressions'
...
Many people who had little understanding of doctrine and who seldom attended Protestant or Catholic services appropriated the terms 'Protestant' and 'Catholic' as badges.

It is interesting, particularly in the light of the ramifications of Brexit, that the Haagerup Report describes Northern Ireland as a "constitutional oddity" and "a place apart". That it had surely become after a half a century of repressive Loyalist rule studiously ignored by Westminister.

Lagana sums up the importance of the report thus:

The report consequently constitutes the first instance in which the architechture of the EU peacebuilding strategy for Northern Ireland was outlined. This included a territorial dimension, an active and supporting role for civil society, and a respect for the autonomous role of the two national governments involved in full conformity with the metagovernance perspective.

We will see these elements taken up later in the Peace programme.

Laying the Foundation Stone
Source

THE ANGLO IRISH AGREEMENT 1985

The book also deals with the Anglo Irish Agreement of 1985 although this did not directly involve the EU. It was, however consistent with one of the recommendations of the Haagerup Report stressing the need for increased cooperation between the British and Irish governments.

THE INTERNATIONAL FUND FOR IRELAND 1986

When looking at EU funding in Northern Ireland the temptation is to jump straight to the Peace Programme, or even to INTERREG if you're aware of it. But Northern Ireland will already have benefitted from the EU Regional and Social Funds by that stage. These, however, are funds which have EU-wide application and are not just directed at Northern Ireland. Even INTERREG applies across the EU though there was a special programme within the overall for Ireland/Northern Ireland.

However the International Fund for Ireland, which was set up in 1986 following the Anglo-Irish Agreement, focuses on the same area of operation as the later Peace Programme and includes the EU in its funders.

This Fund was project based and set the scene to some extent for the specifically NI EU programmes that followed.

STRUCTURAL FUNDS AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Lagana refers to the evolution of the concept of a Europe of States into a Europe of the Regions. This was useful on a number of fronts and it downplayed questions of state sovereignty by concentrating directly on the regions most in need of assistance. The establishment of the Regional Fund (1975) gave expression to this and there was intensive lobbying for funds from all quarters, though certainly at the beginning there were national quotas to be divided up between the regions

The European Social Fund was established in the Treaty of Rome in 1957. It's general aim was to compensate for the effects of the abolition of national protectionism with the advent of the EEC Customs Union, but I'm mentioning it here because, in conjunction with the Regional Fund, it became a source of funding for NI programmes.

Lagana brings up an important point here. It is one I was very conscious of, particularly in the administration of funding in the Peace programme.

However, Northern Ireland, as legally part of the UK, was not directly involved in the lobbying or negotiations within the Council and was not part of the committee system. This constituted a huge issue in terms of representations of interests because the UK administration's preferences often diverged from those of the region. Irish representatives, on the other hand, shared common interests with Northern Ireland in certain economic areas and were sometimes better disposed than the UK government to protect Northern Ireland interests. This absence of adequate representation of the political interests created an additional impetus for Northern Irish groups to lobby Irish ministers for support. The lobby was facilitated by the EU/Northern Ireland public network within the European Parliament (EP).

From my own experience it was not just Northern Irish groups which were involved. The Irish administration at various points was open to observations from the Northern authorities on sectoral matters coming before the ECOFIN.

THE SINGLE EUROPEAN MARKET (SEM) 1993

The Single European Market is the lynchpin of the EU. The freedom of movement of goods, people, capital and services, is the glue that holds the whole structure together. For a long time since its foundation the EU relied on the Customs Union and its only European policy, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and this eventually led it into some very strange territory such as beef mountains, wine lakes and green pounds. But the SEM was the major milestone in the development of the EU as an economic unit and was seen as finally facing up to "le défi américain" that I had become familiar with during my days at the College of Europe in Bruges in 1967/8 - the challeng of the huge integrated US market both in its consumer and producer aspects.

Here is Lagana commenting on its significance for Norther Ireland.

In sum the SEM provided strong economic incentives for actors in Northern Ireland to become more integrated with the Republic of Ireland. The implicit objective was to support local efforts to cooperate on both sides of the border, not only by increasing trade but also by incentivising local actors to develope business links to combat the SEM's risks. In this way, the EU strategically indirectly provided incentives for increased cross border cooperation as outlined in the 1984 Haagerup Report. The potential of the SEM to accentuate economic differences between rich and poor regions was used to argue for greater Commission emphasis on EU regional policy and to compensate these poorer regions for their losses. The consequent reform of EU regional policy in 1988 provided another good opportunity to impact on Northern Ireland.

INTERREG

The Regional Fund was for those regions in the EU seen to be disadvantaged, as defined by a set of statistics. The INTERREG took this a step further and concentrated on border areas within regions which were disadvantaged by their peripherality and this disadvantage applied on both sides of the border. The borders in question were national borders, so an INTERREG programme required the participation of two or more member states.

Monitoring Committees had membership comprising representatives of the national administration of the member states concerned and further membership tended to be limitied to various state departments, bodies and organisations.

Lagana sets out the problems with the IRL/NI INTERREG which included the highly centralised nature of the two administrations which stressed national rather than local priorities. This was more extremely felt in the case of NI where the UK DTI was the competent authority. There was rivalry between organisations on both sides of the border. Then, within NI, views differed as between unionist (to whom cross border cooperation was anathma) and nationalists (who welcomed it). Unionists eventually came to appreciate the benefits of the initiative.

THE PEACE PROGRAMME

John Hume had been intimately involved in all the efforts described above to advance the position of Northern Ireland within the EU. But in many ways, the culmination of his trajectory was the introduction of what became known as the Northern Ireland Peace Programme. This did not just emerge into the world fully formed. It was the result of a lot of carefully managed preparatory work and there were many difficulties to overcome first.

Lagana describes the gestation of the programme in great detail. I will just make a few points from my own involvement having responsibility for its implementation in the Irish border counties adjoining Northern Ireland and also as Co-Chair of the programme's Monitoring Committee.

It had a strong emphasis on cross border co-operation.

It strove to advance cross-community participation, one of the most daunting tasks of the day in NI.

It even included a Consultative Forum to cater for wider participation from among NI interests.

It did, however, suffer from some constraints. In particular, funding was provided through the Regional and Social Funds and came with all of those funds' strings attached. The preparedness of the two communities in the North to avail of the opportunities provided by the programme varied enormously, the Catholic/Nationalist side being best prepared. This often led to accusations of bias against the programme as more funding went to one side than the other.

However, looking back on the wider significance of the programme, Lagana observes:

... the first EU programme for peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland was the first major EU funding initiative aimed at specifically contributing to a political resolution of the Northern Ireland conflict from the bottom up. The programme was conceived as a way to complement the mainstream political efforts at peacebuilding undertaken by private actors, supported by the EU/Northern Ireland network.

THE GOOD FRIDAY/BELFAST AGREEMENT 1998 (GFA)

While the EU was not directly inolved in the GFA, all the work described above made an invaluable contribution to it and this has been recognised in various quarters. The EU was an important actor in sustaining the GFA both in funding underpinning initiatives, such as subsequent phases of the Peace Programme, but also in keeping open some of the channels described above.

BREXIT

Lagana has wisely avoided trying to deal with Brexit despite some pressure for its inclusion. Brexit is a separate and subsequent phase of EU/UK relations and at the time of publication of the book it was not clear what direction it was going in. She wisely left this to others and thereby protected the integrity of her own work.

CONCLUSION

I could do no better in conclusion than cite Lagana's own concluding paragraph.

Finally, the case of the EU role in the Northern Ireland peace process shows that any attempt to develop a strategic paradigm of peacebuilding must remember that its roots lie in the lives and the consent of real people and societies who have the capacity to make choices within their own context and aspire to it. To maintain its integrity, any EU approach to peacebuilding on their behalf must be able to offer a form of strategic peace that is rhetorically defensible across the range of platforms. Far from pursuing a utopian agenda, this book offers a realistic and pragmatic terrain, based on a historical analysis and never before seen archival sources, into which EU peacebuilding must evolve as it practically responds to the problems that have emerged in the current worldwide political context.

And my own overall conclusion on the book.

It is a magnificent work which should gain in publicity and popularity as time goes on. It is thoroughly researched, intensely referenced, contains a raft of original material, is well written and very readable. Lagana has put blood, sweat and tears into it. She must be very proud of it and rightly so. It is bound to become the go to book for the canvas she took on. Others may write up individual aspects but it is a magnificent panorama of NI/EU relations over its period of choice.

INSIDE THE DEAL

Britain is currently in the last phase of a post WWII nervous breakdown.

I am reminded of an interplay from Shakespeare's Henry IV that I did in school:

Stefaan de Rynck was the EU Brexit negotiators' point man on the British. It was his job to interpret this Alice in Wonderland for Barnier. In doing so he dug deep into the British psyche and in particular that of its current ruling class and what he came up with was very unpleasant indeed.

The dominant theme that comes across are empty British threats born out of a complete lack of understanding of how the EU works and what it is about. Add these to Theresa May's original contradictory red lines and you're really on another planet, as Stefaan points out.

At the end of the day, the Brits did themselves down. And when you added in the DUP, who are a bunch of troglodytal psychos, you get a really lethal mix.

If you take a brief look back to before and during the UK referendum on Brexit, the people did not know what they were doing when they voted for Brexit, nor indeed did their "masters" who were too busy leading them up the garden path with an agenda of their own.

They were lied to and misled in the run up to the referendum and right throughout the Brexit process itself.

This was the last gasp of a former inglorious empire. The final sunset clause.

I didn't quite get this during the process itself and I was constantly surprised at how, when the various factions at home had beaten one another into submission and sort of agreed a line that frankly didn't make any sense, they thought the battle was won and the EU (Johnny Foreigner) was duty bound to accept it.

This then led to standoffs, threats, and timewasting which could have been used in productive negotiation. That the outcome was suboptimal should surprise nobody.

But enough of me. This is Stefaan's book and not mine.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book every bit as much as I did Barnier's. Different styles, different personalities, and somewhat different tasks in the same process.

Barnier's huge achievement was to hold the 27 together. This was anything but a foregone conclusion at the outset of the negotiations and it took good judgement and an enormous amount of hard work. He also had to keep a cool head in his dealings with the British. This was not a foregone conclusion either under the circumstances. Barnier came through both with flying colours but Stefaan gives us a wee peek below the sang froid.

"The repeated rejections by the UK to engage failed to test that flexibility [on a future deal] fully. It also led to a rare outburst of emotion on Barnier's side, who once raised his voice in the negotiations to announce that he was very calm. [p. 243]

Stefaan's job was to interpret the British for Barnier and his team and, to his credit, he seems to have preserved his sanity in so doing.

He did a magnificent job and I hope many Brits read it and learn from it, and that they take this learning to heart and into their own political process before it is too late, if this point has not already been passed.

I propose to give you a flavour of the book by selecting quotes which particularly struck me and grouping them, not in chronological order but in some sort of thematic consistency. I may also add some comments of my own when I lose the run of myself.

Boris the Obstructionist

Just to be contrary, I'll start with something that is not in the book at all. I'm surprised that there is no reference to Johnson's attempt, in September 2019, to paralyse the EU by refusing to nominate a Commissioner in the context of a row over extensions. I'm not sure how this was resolved. I suspect some creative interpretation of the Treaty was discovered by the ever agile teams of Commission and Council lawyers.

On reflection, there is no reference either to Johnson's attempt to circumvent the Benn (Surrender) Act which effectively obliged him to seek a three month extension in 2019. He wrote the formal request as he was legally obliged to do but also wrote another letter saying he didn't want an extension. Tusk just ignored the second letter. It was during this mêlée that a Polish Conservative MP tried to persuade the Polish Prime Minister to refuse EU agreement to an extension.

I suppose Stefaan could reasonably argue that these attempted obstructions by Johnson were outside the actual negotiations process that the Commission was dealing with, but they do, nevertheless, give us further insight into the duplicitous nature of Johnson.

Commission Mandate

"The primary focus had to be to defend EU interests, not to accommodate the UK" [p. 85]

Because the British did not understand that the EU single market was the jewel in the crown, as the CAP had been in the early days of the EEC, they did not understand why they were not allowed to shatter it, in passing, on their way out the door. They did not understand that they were now a third country pitted against a combined membership of 27.

Solidarity

"The unity and solidarity between EU leaders meant that individual countries, most notably Ireland, amplified their power vis-à-vis the UK. This meant the outcome on Brexit had to adjust to the Good Friday Agreement and its North-South cooperation, not the other way round." [p. 246/7]

In fact, Stefaan actually mentions Daniel Ferrie, Commission Spokesperson on Brexit, and Declan Kelleher, Irish Permanent Representative to the EU, in a most favourable light. I am aware of Dan myself from his appearance at Commission press conferences during the negotiations and I have to say he was most impressive (in other words, he answered all the questions exactly as I expected him to !).

UK Civil War

Unlike the unity among the 27 which Barnier so assiduously cultivated, the opposite was the case in the UK parliament and Tory cabinet. The internecine squabbles within the Tory party had to be seen to be believed. I'm tempted to describe it as "cut throat ignorance". As I said above, when the Tories came to a final conclusion on the bloodstained battlefield, they felt the EU was honour bound to accept it. The level of ignorance, and indeed malice, was stunning.

Stefaan is fully aware of this and deals with it in some detail. It could be said to be one of the major themes of the book.

"Immediately after the speech [May's Mansion House Speech on 2/3/2020], Gavin Barwell, a former Tory MP and the PM's Chief of Staff, spoke to the 27 ambassadors and the European Commission representative in Europe House on Smith Square in Westminster. May was a "warm and human politician", Barwell stressed, who had managed to unite her cabinet and now the EU had to seize the moment she created." [p. 87]

[The Observer Sunday newspaper, took the view in May 2020 that] many in the UK 'did not need the Commission's gratuitous, self-defeating and deliberately punitive strictures to remind them of that chastening fact' that leaving the EU had a cost. It was time for the EU 'to get over itself' and accept that 'a democratic vote has torn up the rulebook'. National governments in the EU agreed however that a vote in one country did not tear up the rulebook for the other 27." [p. 202]

As Stefaan remarks

"The UK government played a game of chicken by itself" [p. 247]"

"Barnier received letters from Tory and Labour MPs alike who wanted to come to discuss a way out as if he was a broker between warring British factions." [p. 151]

The UK Press

"Commentators like Frazer Nelson writing in the Daily Telegraph depicted negotiations as a poker game and urged May to 'call out Barnier's bluff' at a time when all his cards were laid out on the table." [p. 7]

"[Barnier's] regular press conferences and debates at the European Parliament gave him frequent venues to advance his points, and yet reporters working in London did not always pick them up. In my own work, I was often surprised to see that what I said in public debates in London made considerable waves in British media, even when my points were merely things Barnier had already repeatedly said in Brussels for reporters there, ad nauseam. [p. 97/8]

Northern Ireland

"The EU compromised more on Northern Ireland than on any other withdrawal issue" [p. 185]

"Henry Newman, the Director of the think tank Open Europe, ... wrote that the four freedoms were indivisible only 'when it suited the EU' as it had already made an exception for Northern Ireland. so why reject an exception for the whole of the UK? The EU reasoning used the opposite logic. Barnier warned member states that the UK was trying to use the EU's concession on alignment by Northern Ireland as a bargaining chip to force the EU into abandoning its principles and compromosing on the indivisibility of the four freedoms for the whole of the UK. That concession was something the EU was willing to give for the sake of upholding the Good Friday Agreement and protecting Ireland's interests, but not for the EU-UK relationship as a whole because of the risks for the single market." [p. 95]

I know the above quote is a long one but I include it because I only recently understood the extent and motivation for that concession and am glad that Stefaan has set it out so clearly.

"This being said, was the principle that these four freedoms are inseparable a legal inevitability or a political choice by the EU? Ultimately it was a political construct." [p. 22]

The original arrangement for Northern Ireland was the Backstop which subsequently became the Northern Ireland Protocol as subsequently expanded by the Windsor Framework. The Backstop effectively meant the UK as a whole staying in the Single Market for goods and as the four freedoms were indivisable at the scale of the UK, the remaining freedoms would have to be respected. As this arrangement would be permanent in the absence of being made obsolete by a better deal, it did raise some questions over why the UK was leaving the EU in the first place. Anyway Theresa May didn't get that through parliament when her solicitor general revealed that it was likely to be permanent.

"Davis contested May's new backstop proposal of a 'temporary customs arrangement' with the EU for the whole of the UK, not just Northern Ireland. It deprived the UK of its autonomous trade policy and Davis only agreed to that after obtaining a cut-off date. Barnier told him a cut-off date plunged Northern Ireland back into uncertainty." [p. 95]

In some sense a lot of this appears academic, as if GB wishes to export to NI and there is any risk of goods entering the Single Market they will have to conform to EU standards. The same effectively goes for GB exports to the continental EU even if UK is not in the Single Market as such. Hopefully the "Brussels Effect" will make much of this less of a problem as GB producers opt for EU standards anyway.

"Barnier worried that May wanted to keep Northern Ireland in reserve as a bartaining chip to opt for regulatory divergence and an independent UK trade policy, creating inevitable trade friction in the eyes of the EU, and at the same time for seamless trade with the EU, by generalising a template for the border on the island of Ireland. The UK wanted to have its cake and eat it, or 'dance at two different weddings at the same time', as Barnier said later in a translation of a similar German expression." [p. 131]

I remember Barnier's own phrase in his book, "le beurre et le prix du beurre".

Article 50 Notification

" ... a few days after May had pulled the first vote in December 2018, the EU Court of Justice issued its Wightman ruling that the UK could unilaterally revoke its intention to withdraw, against the views of the Commission and Council lawyers. Article 50 of the EU Treaty was silent on this question of revocability. EU judges resorted therefore to international law to fill a hole and affirmed the UK's sovereignty to change its mind." [p. 155]

I must say that from the beginning I assumed that the UK could withdraw its notification as long as it remained a member and I was counting the days left for it to do so. In retrospect I can now see that was a false hope. Nevertheless, it is amusing from this perspective to see the ECJ asserting the UK's sovereignty.

Boris Johnson

"[Johnson's remarks were] more appropriate for a salesperson from a foodstore than for a political leader focused on global trade being a force for public goods" [p. 196]

"Another deadline came and went. The EU refused to buy a pig in a poke, to paraphrase a tweet by Charles Michel. Johnson's focus seemed to be more on process and announcing artificial deadlines to look tough in domestic media, less on building trust and a longer-term relationship." [p. 229]

This remark well captures the shallowness of Johnson.

Bad Faith

"[On the Political Declaration] A sword of Damocles loomed over this. Off the record, sources in London told Barnier's team about a prevailing school of thought in Downing Street that these talks were not for real but simply aimed at getting Brexit over the line. The government was not genuinely commited to the words it put on paper, even though 27 national governments endorsed that paper. Cummings revelations on Twitter later in October 2021 confirmed that theses sources had conveyed an accurate reading of the situation in 2019. He acknowledged it was all window dressing to 'get Brexit done'." [p. 214]

It should be remembered that the first thing Frost did when it came to the TCA negotiations was to take issue with the Political Declaration.

UK Civil Servants

"... the political uncertainty put the UK civil service in an impossible position, forcing it to come to Brussels and keep the process going while tensions in the government were at boiling point. In such situations, the best a civil service can do is to keep as many options open until the government is ready to decide, which is what the professionals of the UK civil service did." [p. 92]

"Preparatory work by a civil service cannot make up for political indecisiveness." [p.40]

Stefaan makes quite clear he viewed the UK civil service as very competent and knowledgeable about the EU but that the problem lay with their political masters bickering among themselves, most of them being completely ignorant about what they were at.

Pig Ignorance

"Dominic Raab, as Brexit Secretary, decided to try out whether the EU was ready to accept a model of 'no controls' in the negotiation round of 20 August 2018, contradicting the line of Downing Street. ... In case of no deal, the UK did not plan to impose controls, he told Barnier. Nor did the irish government want controls, he added, so only the EU was causing this 'artificial' problem." [p. 146]

I remember reading in Barnier's book that Theresa May threatened to remove all UK controls as a solution to the NI problem. How pig ignorant can these people get. Neither Raab nor May seem to have any understanding of where the EU was coming from in this matter. And wasn't it Raab who, just some weeks earlier, had belatedly discovered the importance of the Dover-Calais route in UK-EU trade. God help us.

But the supreme example of pig ignorance and arrogance combined has to be:

" It became more surreal on the phone afterwards when he [Frost] implied Barnier should make sure someone high up overruled the European Council conclusions" [p. 233]

I hope that this post and the above quotes have given you a thirst for Stefaan's book. Whether you are an EUphile or a UKphile, I suggest you make sure to have taken your blood pressure tablets before each reading. If you descend into total incomprehension, this is not necessarily a stroke, it may well be that you have suddently found yourself inexplicably treading water in the English channel, which sadly now separates Dover from Calais.

By the way, Chris Grey has done a very good review of the book with which I agree. My one comment would be that I found both Stefaan de Rynck's book and Michel Barnier's books equally riveting.

Je suis Charlie

JOHN SIMPSON

John Simpson

I remember John Simpson when he came south to participate in the meetings of the National Industrial Economic Council (NIEC). He was nominated to the Council, as a public interest member, by the Irish government. He was then a lecturer in Queen's to the best of my recollection.

The NIEC was set up in 1963 as part of the Irish planning process then being introduced. It consisted of representatives of employers, trade unions, and public representatives. It was chaired by TK Whitiker, the Secretary was Maurice F Doyle, with Jim McMahon and myself as members of the Secretariat which was located in the Department of Finance.

John Simpson has just died, aged 90. I have read a few pieces about him in the Northern papers today and none mentions his membership of NIEC which I would have thought very significant way back then, with Seán Lemass meeting Terence O'Neill in an attempt to thaw North/South relations.

John had a particular interest in the economies of Northern Ireland and the Republic and the interaction between them. He was virtually alone in this area in the North until Norman Gibson arrived later on the scene.

Norman made his name modelling the Northern economy (I think) and he certainly attracted attention with his calculations of what was known then as the British subsidy to Northern Ireland.

The subsidy was the UK exchequer contribution to bridge the gap between Northern Ireland's public income and expenditure, increasing the former to fund the latter. It was also a highly contested figure, particularly when the the cost of the UK military presence in the North after 1972 was included.

I used to calculate it myself in the Department of Finance over the years and that once got me into trouble with John Kelly TD, then a junior minister.

In the event, with the replacement of the NIEC in 1973 with the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) Norman replaced John as the government's Northern Ireland nominee.

Anyway, John carried on with a distinguished career and appears to have been contributing to the Belfast Telegraph virtually up to his death.

You can catch up on this to a certain extent in the Telegraph's piece on his death.

It's funny, I was just thinking of him out of the blue the other day.

May he rest in peace.