NOBODY knows anything. Well, as yet nobody knows what Brexit will amount to, when it will happen and how much of an exit it will be, what it will cost in financial terms, or politically.
The psychological effects are plainer. Officialdom can say what it likes about no clear effects in the short term. People are fretting, and will go on fretting.
London and Dublin don’t know how the economy will shake down but financial shakes are obvious.
You can tell because the leading Brexiteers have for the most part had nothing to say about the effects.
That all this uncertainty has had a backdrop of chaos at Westminster, red in tooth and claw across both main parties if now firmly repressed by the Tories, plus the beginning of serious unrest about the Enda Kenny leadership - accompanied by an example from the Republic’s Central Statistics Office of what the economist Paul Krugman called ‘leprechaun economics’ - does nothing to calm the nerves.
Anyone with any wit knows we here hang off the back of both wagons, British and Irish. At the best of times they feel no more than grim duty towards us.
When the two states go into spins, the best we can do is hold on tight but with eyes wide open.
It would help if there was a comradely, unified ‘we’, of course. There could hardly be a stronger argument for pulling together - surely reason enough in risk to all, clear and present danger, a premium on making common cause and agreeing a pitch?
This could be the moment; probably not. What is more likely, and there are sneaky signs already, is that the DUP will make roundabout appeals to Dublin self-interest and the goodness of Enda’s heart, and Sinn Féin will back them up.
Disguised in both cases by little jabs at any Dublin inclination to overreach, this from the DUP, and jibes that they don’t do it nearly enough, this from Sinn Féin.
Plus goes at each other, just to keep their activists happy whatever the spectacle does to the general public.
Instead of complaining as you might have expected, that the Taoiseach had launched his notion of an all-Ireland forum without consulting Arlene Foster, there was Gavin Robinson MP the other day telling the News Letter that ‘on some EU matters the Republic of Ireland can be our voice on the inside’.
(Note the ‘can be’. If they’re nice about it, and behave as Arlene would like them to. Is this the way to make friends and influence people?)
There is a need for a ‘thoughtful and constructive cross-border discussion’, young Robinson figures, about how to handle Brexit, but of course there are worries about a forum ‘involving itself in the internal considerations of Northern Ireland.’
Not the traditional, characteristic DUP objection to the foreigners down the road barging in, nope. The problem is that a forum would give the Stormont opposition parties a role in negotiations.
Though for some reason the MP only got around to specifying and objecting to the SDLP which ‘is now very vexed by Brexit’. But parties which ‘exclude themselves and go into Opposition, it’s not for Enda Kenny to give them a role’.
To jeer in passing is a DUP tic. So a DUP manoeuvre urges a Taoiseach to help Northern Ireland, then stands on its dignity and has a go at him.
The Republic is now concerned, says Robinson, that through Brexit it is losing its ‘big brother’ in EU partnership.
No more than the truth, if tactlessly put in the circumstances. Maybe this is the way forward, all the same; a little light kite-flying in the unionist morning paper, garnished with a little light rudeness, while the party leader majors on insisting that nobody spends time regretting the vote.
As the only Brexiteer at Friday’s meeting in Cardiff she cut a lonely figure all the same. If there was ever any substance to the notion of Northern Ireland unionist/Scottish shared identity and empathy, the past few years have surely disproved it. If anyone is working on making it real, the effort is well below the radar.
Northern nationalist outreach in Dublin is also a skinny business. Kenny and Martin McGuinness side by side in Cardiff radiated no comradeliness, no surprise given that Martin’s president was down the road having at Enda, as Enda does at him on the least excuse.
Compared to those flaky Brits our politics are very stable, if no more suffused with fellow-feeling.
