Leo Varadkar portrays himself as Ireland’s lionhearted saviour — but is he?

Leo Varadkar is trying a little too hard to live up to his first name, which of course means “lion”. St Leo the Great, the 5th-century Pope after whom Irish Leos have traditionally been named, is famous for saving Rome from being sacked by Attila the Hun. The Taoiseach is trying to portray himself to the rest of Europe as a latter-day saviour of the Irish Republic from Boris the Brit.

This ruse won’t work. The reality is rather different from Varadkar’s claim to be defending the delicate status quo in Ireland against a British bid to impose a hard border between North and South, disrupt the Good Friday Agreement and plunge the Irish into a new recession with a no-deal Brexit.

What is actually happening is a desperate attempt by the British Government to find a solution that meets the demands of all sides, while factoring devolved democracy into the Northern Irish equation, as the Belfast Agreement requires. The plan tabled by Boris Johnson this week meets the DUP’s objections to the backstop by giving both unionist and nationalist communities a vote every four years in a revived Northern Irish Assembly. 

It is to this modest admixture of accountability that Varadkar and his allies in the EU object. So much so, in fact, that the Taoiseach has now dramatically raised the stakes by demanding a second Brexit referendum in the UK as the price of even discussing the British proposal. Indeed, it is reported in The Times that “Mr Varadkar, who spent yesterday visiting other EU leaders to rally support, raised the prospect of Irish unification as a solution to the border”.

Let us pause to consider what is being suggested here. One sovereign government (the Irish Republic) is demanding that another sovereign government (the UK) should not be permitted to leave the European Union without a second plebiscite and, moreover, putting part of its territory (Northern Ireland) on the negotiating table, potentially leading to its annexation by Dublin. If the British had proposed anything remotely like this to the Irish, the outcry against “colonialism” would have echoed across the Atlantic, with the US Congress and the United Nations up in arms to defend the integrity of the Republic of Ireland. 

The European Union was created to banish forever the Continent’s long and bloody history of land grabs by conquest or treaty. This history is quite recent: think of the huge upheavals during and after the Second World War, the Balkan conflict of the 1990s, and most recently the Russian annexation of Crimea. The British have had no territorial designs on the Continent (except for Gibraltar) since the Hundred Years War ended some five centuries ago, though European powers have threatened to invade the British Isles many times. The Anglo-Irish relationship has always been difficult, but for the last four decades it has been steadily improving — until Varadkar’s decision to play the unification card.

If the British have learnt anything over the centuries, it is that the complexities of Irish history, with its competing religious, ethnic and political identities, are not susceptible to coercion from any quarter. Some people in Brussels seem to have forgotten this, with an unnamed EU diplomat denouncing the “bad blood and aggressive language” of the DUP and warning: “The deal can’t live or die on the outcome of this sort of ugly politics.” In other words: those citizens of Northern Ireland who identify as British cannot be given a say in the destiny of their homeland. No wonder the EU is still struggling after sixty years with its most enduring structural defect: the “democratic deficit”

Let us hope that wiser counsels prevail in Paris and Berlin. The plan put forward by Boris Johnson at least tries to address the legitimate and principled views of the various parties to any eventual deal. The backstop only satisfied one side: Dublin. It is time that the EU tried harder to accommodate Belfast and London too. Leo Varadkar may portray himself as Ireland’s lionhearted saviour, but he is engaged in a tawdry land grab.