Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: It will take judicious ambiguity to avoid a disastrous Brexit

Downing Street has insisted Prime Minister Theresa May would never agree a Brexit deal which “traps” the UK permanently in a customs union 
Downing Street has insisted Prime Minister Theresa May would never agree a Brexit deal which “traps” the UK permanently in a customs union  Downing Street has insisted Prime Minister Theresa May would never agree a Brexit deal which “traps” the UK permanently in a customs union 

Imagine, the Irish border causing trouble? None of the geniuses who demand the hardest of Brexits thought about the border, up to and including the present negotiating frenzy. Northern Ireland a problem? A backstop for the backstop?

Ambiguous language, this, but it will take judicious use of ambiguity about this corner of Ireland, this offshore part of the UK, to avoid a disastrous Brexit. Of course it will, since Northern Ireland is ambiguous. (Nice dictionary definition: ‘having an obscure or double meaning.’)

Sweet are the uses of ambiguity, which makes the world go round. However; to get a formula past those whom John Major once called bastards is difficult, because these are people without give and take in their thinking. A party utterly divergent from the British norm but permanently furious at the possibility that their patch might be treated differently – though they won’t have gay marriage or legal abortion? To stumble across the DUP alongside the pinstripes and bombast of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson is sore on metropolitan nerves.

No give discernible, only angry paranoia. Although to be fair to the paranoid, a plan has indeed plainly been in constant redraft. No wonder Dominic Raab was sent to tell Michel Barnier no deal is sellable for now.

Arlene Foster’s complaint that the urbane Barnier had been ‘difficult and hostile’ might please some DUP voters. Though by the sound of the angry disquiet Sam McBride reported in the News Letter - RHI, spads and presence at a GAA game on a Sunday, quite the charge-sheet - there is growing doubt at councillor level these days about their leader’s possible vote-repellence. That sentiment did for her predecessors, both Peter Robinson, perhaps ready to retire in the end, and party founder Ian Paisley, certainly not.

Foster’s default response as leader to criticism, substantial or slight, has been Robinson-style attack. Of course she found Barnier ‘hostile’. Clearly under intense pressure already, she could have done without having to sit across not only from him but the reputedly even more formidable Sabine Weyand, deputy chief negotiator, who describes her own job crisply as damage control for the EU.

This is where aversion to ambiguity becomes a drag on political progress.

Twinned with refusal to acknowledge dislikeable reality, politics becomes, as unionism’s has, a long drawn-out exercise in negativity, with only spasmodic, unconvincing pretences otherwise.

Faced with the possibility that the IRA were indeed edging towards putting away their guns, fear and loathing seized the entire political class. They did their best to block a lasting ceasefire. Formulae to save republican face were deemed repulsive, Jesuitical. There had to be disarmament, sackcloth and ashes, plain speaking; this from quarters who explained away loyalist violence as merely reactive, with no recognition of any ambiguity.

Its use can indeed lead to delusion, unless clear-eyed. For Sinn Féin to produce a document supposedly about the legacy of the Troubles, and deck it out with the whopper that Britain was the main protagonist in the violence, is not just offensive but also worrying. Their political thinking ought to be more developed by now.

To hear Gerry Kelly mock Gerry Moriarty of the Irish Times as dealing in ‘propaganda’, because Moriarty civilly reminded him that the IRA was responsible for by far the biggest death-toll, was dismaying. Like Michelle O’Neill’s robotic attempt at a put-down. Kelly at least is smarter than that. It also counted as a further blunder by party president Mary Lou McDonald, who started so well but must surely have okayed the document.

This is a party that seized its moment to move front of stage as the guns were phased out. They had major assistance for years in the form of constructive ambiguity, from John Hume, Albert Reynolds, Bertie Ahern, Irish diplomats, Irish-America, the Clinton White House. Disengagement from ‘the armed struggle’, for example, was not to be understood as surrender. Republicans’ finer feelings were cosseted in the name of winning peace. It went to some heads. Sinn Féin can revise how they like. They cannot rewrite the death toll.

In 1973 Richard Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler said: ‘This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.’ In a Ziegler obituary Harold Jackson, Guardian man in Washington at the time, remembered that ‘inoperative’ as ‘the first breach in the lies around Watergate.’ Nixon had finally crumbled, ordering his staff to give evidence to the Senate. So Ziegler ‘simply junked all his previous statements.’

But Foster’s blood-red lines, like those of May’s other tormentors, still look stolidly operative.