Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has been strikingly dismissive of Monday’s letter, described as from 1,000 leaders of civic nationalism.
The letter raised two sets of concerns about rights - the issues in the Stormont deadlock, which it blamed on the DUP-Tory deal, and EU citizenship after Brexit, specifically mentioning university fees, access to healthcare, cross-border recognition of professional qualifications and voting in European elections.
Only the last item, voting for MEPs, is a right in the legal sense and even that is debatable. However, every item is a legitimate concern and a political fact on the ground.
In his response, the Taoiseach said Stormont was the best place to resolve the Stormont issues - an unmistakable jibe at Sinn Féin to get back to work. You do not have to be a nationalist to find this harsh. The DUP has been the obstruction to devolution since February’s failed Stormont deal.
On EU citizenship, Varadkar cited next year’s referendum on extending presidential voting rights to Irish citizens outside the Republic. This is irrelevant to the point of insult as there are no plans to extend the franchise for EU elections. The Taoiseach did not address any of the other EU citizenship issues raised in the letter, beyond a general platitude that the interests of Irish citizens in Northern Ireland “are a priority in the ongoing Brexit negotiations.”
If they are a priority, why have they kept slipping down the agenda?
By most reckonings, Brexit affects eight categories of EU citizenship rights, entitlements, benefits - call them what you will. These include protection from discrimination and the ability to live, work and travel around the EU.
In last December’s EU-UK joint report, both sides committed to protecting all rights for Irish citizens “including where they reside in Northern Ireland” - in other words, a total solution. But by March’s draft Withdrawal Agreement this had been watered down to a more vague and limited promise, with only the preservation of Good Friday Agreement rights made legally binding. In a little-noticed statement two weeks ago, the British government said it would preserve all the rights it could under UK law, which should cover anti-discrimination but little else. Most EU rights for Irish citizens will by definition have to be secured via Dublin and Brussels.
The British and Irish governments have since been reported as saying the rights question will be pinned down in the next stage of Brexit negotiations, after the Withdrawal Agreement and in parallel with the future trading arrangement. That makes practical sense for most of the issues at stake - trade will be connected to free movement, for example - but this has still left needless political uncertainty. The Withdrawal Agreement could include at least as robust a commitment as that made last December to sort everything out, yet this is plainly not on the cards.
The pity of all this is that citizenship issues should be relatively straightforward to address. They are not legally unprecedented, technically challenging, a win/lose situation or in fundamental conflict with each other, unlike the border and backstop questions that have dominated negotiations to date. Everybody simply needs to sit down and work through the list of eight categories, hammering out answers one by one. That they have not done so appears, in a reversal of political norms, to be a case of putting something off not because it is hard but because it is easy. Brussels structured the withdrawal negotiations to require an answer to the hard part - the border - first.
That does not excuse how irresponsible it is to leave a political question hanging over Northern Ireland. Loss of EU citizenship rights has far more potential to antagonise, obviously, than extra paperwork in the shipping industry.
The subtext of the Taoiseach’s response is very much ‘don’t bother the grown-ups while we’re busy’. The view in London and Brussels is presumably similar.
Sinn Féin’s critics have been quick to describe this as a failure of northern nationalist leadership. It is certainly difficult to imagine John Hume allowing matters to slide to this extent - even in the absence of Stormont, he would have found partners in Dublin, London and Brussels to keep the issue on the front burner. Sinn Féin’s placard waving and abstentionism have not worked and letters are not working either.
But Brexit is hardly Sinn Féin’s fault, and unionists as much as nationalists should be concerned by the rights question the grown-ups have left festering under us all.
newton@irishnews.com
