THE Euro vote backwash has had the brutality of self-absorption.
A cat-fight inside a cabal on the Tory side and the Labour Party’s implosion made ugly enough watching from across the Irish sea.
How the ex-Labour voters and other marginalised Brexiteers magnetised by ‘Boris’ and ‘Gove’ have felt is painful to imagine, as naked, narrow self-interest displaced sloganeering about taking control.
Not much self-control on show as supposedly close friends and colleagues hopped in and out of taxis with their ever-changing lists of supporters.
While Oxbridge brains (less impressive close-up) slug it out encouraged by the right-wing press, background static, only half-heard, is full of promises already ditched, like that red bus with the big fib on the side.
The cash for the NHS supposedly rescued from Brussels will not be forthcoming. Euro immigration numbers will go up over the next few years, not down.
Shouting go home in the street at ‘foreigners’ turns out to be born of wishful thinking as well as stupidity and prejudice.
It isn’t the first time and certainly will not be the last that the wishes of northern nationalists - and a minority of Northern Ireland unionists - have been so ignored by the states we separately hanker or hankered after.
This time there wasn’t room for politesse, no time and no inclination to phrase things delicately. Irish Euro lobbying and British internal faction fighting sucked up oxygen.
We got rubbishing as before from Theresa Villiers about the risk of a harder border, pieties from official Dublin about the risk to the peace process. At least Enda Kenny has come up with a cross-border ‘forum’.
Opinion-formers in both capitals rambled over the field noting sectional votes and reactions, either without reference to how the vote here turned out, or with pathetic inaccuracy.
London media notice of an ‘Irish’ desire for another referendum, for example, turned out to be a fleeting, confused awareness that some party on the island had called for yet another vote, on something or other.
Turned out this was Sinn Féin’s momentary pursuit of a border poll, not a call for a re-run of the Euro vote.
Several London reports, indeed the majority, recorded a Northern Ireland victory for Remain, then forgot about it.
Very few noted that the region’s first minister ignored how the vote went, none of them that within the following week she finally acknowledged it only in the course of urging ‘Remainers’ to ‘move on.’
The majority Remain vote in unionist North Down and East Londonderry stayed below the Arlene Foster radar, like the rush for Irish passport application forms.
What that will amount to in the long run, who knows. The smallest of straw polls turns up emotional and angry insistence on a declaration of European identity as well as hard-headed opportunism.
Mark Durkan’s demand that the Irish government should convene parties north and south who want to talk about the situation was met by insistence from Jeffrey Donaldson that Dublin could not negotiate for the north.
The DUP was well placed, said Sir Jeffrey, ‘close to the people who will be leading the negotiations, we were part of their campaign and we will have that influence.’
Did he mean Boris Johnson and Michael Gove? But he was probably only parroting the unionist fantasy of seamless British identity, even as the union begins to crack.
The historian Diarmuid Ferriter, a rare Dublin observer capable of judgment on the north unskewed by loathing of Sinn Féin, noticed the Donaldson claim that Brexit would mean ‘a lot more money within our own exchequer’.
Difficult to see that, said Ferriter, as ‘other than arrogant delusion.’ The Republic’s reaction to Brexit is complicated, and no wonder.
England’s struggle on trade now may well be Ireland’s opportunity, but the Irish economy is deeply intertwined with both UK and EU. Republican attitudes are also far from straightforward. Some may indeed have abstained, seeing Brexit as breaking up the Union.
Ferriter also thought that the desire of some younger unionists for Irish passports might reflect ‘something more than opportunism.’ It might.
It may also have been the whim of a moment. Early days yet, though nobody can recall another example of this much cross-community frustration with being misrepresented.
Sinn Féin called it wrong on the border poll, but had the wit to ‘move on.’ Today’s DUP only seems capable of reciting comforting myths. Little wonder.
Their heroes, leading Brexiteers, are far too busy gutting each other to focus on the ‘nation state’.
