 Good afternoon everybody and you're very welcome to this lunchtime event with Tony Connelly of RTE. We all listen very carefully to what he says on RTE because he follows matters in Europe exceedingly well, he's well informed and he's got very good judgement. And he's only talked to us, I presume about his book and about Brexit and I look forward to it very much. The initial speech as usual will be on the record but the discussion in question and answer afterwards will be off the record. Can I ask you just to check that your mobile phones are either turned off or unsilent? So without any further to do, let's welcome Tony. Thank you Dahi, your Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to thank you first of all for giving me this opportunity to talk to the IIEA. What I'd like to do is to, I suppose, talk more about the behind the scenes diplomatic strategy of the Irish government from before the referendum right up to the events of December rather than talk about the sectoral impact of Brexit. I think that's been talked about a lot. But I'm just conscious that there may be people here who may not be Irish and who may not fully grasp all of the sectoral vulnerability of Ireland and Brexit so I'm happy to take questions after the talk. So I'd like to start just by bringing everybody back to June the 19th last year when the negotiations started in Brussels. David Davis and his team arrived. Article 50 had been triggered and the negotiations were finally beginning. One of the British negotiators brought in a copy of the Good Friday Agreement into the negotiations on that first day. It was his way of trying to impress upon Michel Barnier and the task force, the importance of Northern Ireland and the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement. A few days after the first day of the negotiations, I actually met this British negotiator and he said, we're conscious that these talks will be going on and there won't be any Irish voices in the room. These negotiators on the European side are fast learners but they haven't grown up with the Northern Ireland peace process like we have. So the more they understand it, the better. Now I think by this stage there are many people in Europe and the institutions and in the European capitals who do actually know about the Good Friday Agreement and they know the impact that Brexit may have on Ireland and the structure of the Good Friday Agreement. I think what I've concluded from covering this story for the last couple of years, the problem is that there is now a widening gap between Ireland's understanding of the Good Friday Agreement and Britain's understanding and that gap is getting wider. Now today we stand on the threshold of phase two of the negotiations. The lens has widened. The discussion now resonates with big picture ideas like trade, like security and defence, the World Trade Organization, Russia, America, the future relationship between Britain and the European Union. But to me, the 500 kilometre frontier that threads its way from Carlingford to Lockfoyle is still at the heart of the Brexit crisis and the issue hasn't been resolved and there will I think be a day of reckoning at some point. This issue has also changed the Anglo-Irish dynamic. Brexit has required Ireland to take sides and Dublin has detected that Britain has become somewhat irked by this dynamic. A sense on the British side that you and I, Britain and Ireland, we know what this is about and we know how we should solve this. But Brexit has forced Ireland to decamp completely to the European side and that has been difficult I think for the British government to accept. Now the core relationship at a diplomatic level remains strong. But if you move out towards the margins, the chemistry has definitely changed and we've seen that I think in some of the coverage of the Irish question last year, both at a tabloid level and at a social media level, the mutual hostility has increased and there was a clear effort at a higher political level to try and tone things down a little bit. But we've had a narrative I think take root in Westminster to say that the EU was actually imposing a hard border on Ireland and even in some senses that Britain was trying to protect Ireland from an EU-imposed hard border. Nevertheless, one senior British official has told me that in his view, Anglo-Irish relations are at their worst level since the early 1990s and that the border is now back in Irish politics. So how do we get to this point? In the months after the referendum, British officials and politicians knew that a chasm had opened up between Ireland and the UK. Now the impulse initially was to lean on those very strong historic bonds, bilateral bonds between London and Dublin. The first meeting in fact was between Home Office officials and Department of Justice officials on the common travel area. That took place about two days after the referendum. But it soon became clear that a rift was opening up between both sides. Irish officials grew exasperated at contradictory signalling from the British side and jockeying for position within the Conservative Party as to who was the real torch bearer of the Brexit dream. Ireland was looking for specific and explicit answers, but all they could get were reassurances from the British side and those reassurances were turning into blandishments. Britain and Ireland were saying the same things. We don't want to return to the borders of the past. We want to keep the common travel area going. But when Irish officials said, well, how are you going to do that? The answers weren't forthcoming. Now throughout the autumn, behind the scenes, there was a lot of traffic between Dublin and Brussels, civil servants and officials both from the Irish civil service and from the permanent representation in Brussels were beating a path to Michel Barnier's door. Room 201 on the fifth floor of the European Commission was where all these meetings took place. Now I think it's fair to say that Ireland had absolute privileged access in that process. The Irish government and Irish civil society, I think people like the IFA, ICOS, a lot of those organisations like Fisheries, were able to impress upon the European Commission task force that the Irish question was extremely serious and they needed to see what answers they could get. Across the board, in other countries, you could only get access to the task force if you were part of a pan-European lobby group, but in Ireland's case, they were taking everybody, the IFA, Finafoil, various other organisations, as I mentioned. Now the Irish would come along and pose the problems that were, they had identified that Brexit might give rise to with customs checks, with tariffs, with access, with regulations, with standards, and they were basically coming to the European Commission saying, how do we fix this? How do we avoid this? And the European Commission would say, well, we can do X, Y and Z, but it has to comply with the European rulebook. And at every turn, the request from the Irish side would go into the depths of the European Commission bureaucracy and somebody somewhere would have a potential answer or a suggestion. By early 2017, there was a definite shift in the whole process. Ireland would have to move unambiguously over to the European side. The bilateral contacts with Britain were not really going to be where the answer lay. And I think this was crystallised in an op-ed written by Phil Hogan, the Irish EU Commissioner in the Irish Times in January of last year. Now, there were three key reasons why this aircraft carrier was being turned around. First of all, the other 26 and the EU institutions were worried that Ireland was becoming a Trojan horse. In other words, Britain would use Ireland and the Irish dilemma and problems to somehow construct virtuous templates that they could then use elsewhere. So if they found a fix for the Irish border, they could say, ah, yes, we can apply this to Dover and Calais. And there was real suspicion in Brussels that Ireland was vulnerable. I even heard the word being verbalised, the Trojanisation of Brexit. That was the first. Secondly, Ireland was simply not getting the answers from Britain that it needed on how to avoid a hard border. Again, we heard either contradictory remarks from David Davis or Boris Johnson or Liam Fox. We got a sense of triumphalism at the European, at the Conservative Party conference in October. And at the same time, Irish officials were in touch with British officials in the civil service who were almost apologising for the tone and content of Theresa May's speech and saying, look, don't worry about it. It's a political party speech, party political speech. But through all of that process, they weren't getting answers. Of course, Ireland was hoping that Britain would stay in the customs union and single market. And there were signals that that might be possible, but not convincing enough to be banked and relied upon. The third and most, I think, significant reason why Ireland had to change its posture was that all of this technical activity that was going on, all the meetings in the task force between Irish officials and European officials, the scoping by the revenue commissioners, which famously found its way into a number of internal reports that RT reported on last year, the worry was that all of this was actually doing Britain's work for it. And that if Ireland and the European Commission presented a series of solutions to the Brexit crisis, as far as Ireland was concerned, this would be gift wrapping the solution for the British government. And it would get Britain off the hook. They wouldn't have to work out how they're going to avoid a hard border, which is what they were saying in public. In July, the new T-Shark League of Radker famously told reporters, what we are not going to do is to design a hard border for Brexiteers. Now, that was taken as a very hard line shift in the Irish government. But actually, it was perhaps a more blunt way of repeating what Andy Kenny had said in his speech, I think in this building, to the IIEA back in February, that this was Britain's policy and Britain was going to have to solve it. Now, while this aircraft carrier was being turned around, Ireland was going to have to formally embed its concerns into the European Union's formal response to Article 50. So the whole choreography was that Theresa May would trigger Article 50 with a letter at the end of March. And then the EU would respond by putting forward its negotiating guidelines. Now, the negotiating guidelines are a sacred blueprint for Michel Barnier. They are his instructions from the heads of government as to how to conduct these negotiations. Ireland's I think priority was to ensure that the Irish situation was kept prominent and in lights. The Irish officials went to the European Council in December of 2016. They had a draft of about 12 points. The European Council secretary had sent it back saying it was too long. Like every self-respecting student, the Irish government simply rearranged some of the paragraphs and sent it back. It came back from the European Council saying again, it's too long. But eventually, the Irish concerns were whittled down and distilled into a single paragraph. That's paragraph 11 in the negotiating guidelines. Now, when you start to report on these things, you read a European document. It's full of the normal kind of diplomatic text. And you can see that it's been drafted carefully. But the actual wording, every word is fought over. And there was one particular phrase that was fought over for a couple of weeks between Irish officials and the European Council. And it got down to this question of avoiding a hard border. So basically, Ireland wanted the European Union to say to Britain, you cannot have a hard border in Ireland. And that's got to be embedded in this paragraph, paragraph 11. When you read paragraph 11 today, you see the words, we need flexible and imaginative solutions, et cetera, et cetera, with the aim of avoiding a hard border. So you can see how the European Council were putting a bit of distance there between the Irish aspiration and what they could promise. So essentially, the European Council was saying to the Irish government was, we will protect you as far as we can. But we cannot tell you the world will not change because of Brexit. Because the world will change. And you have to be prepared. And there was some concern, I think, within the European Council, that the messaging in Ireland was a little bit more rose-tinted about avoiding a hard border than they could actually promise as diplomats in Brussels. Now, the reason why Ireland could get that paragraph in there is because Ireland was a lot more prepared. It had been to the European Council early. There were several key relationships, I think, in Brussels between the Irish perm rep and the European Council, personalities who had known each other in different embassies around the world. And the Irish were well prepared. Certainly next to the British side, they seemed very well prepared. And everybody began to know that the Irish were the most exposed country in Brexit. But there also was a lot of outreach between Charlie Flanagan and Andy Kenny going around the capitals. Andy Kenny would produce an A4 sheet of paper with the Irish map drawn on it and the border. So there was a pedagogical exercise going on. But I think ultimately with the negotiating guidelines and then the negotiating directives which flowed from the guidelines, Ireland's concerns were there and they were hardwired into the DNA of this process. And I think that really was the first victory by the Irish government in this process to get the Irish concerns written in in a way that those concerns would would be safeguarded throughout. There's another phrase actually that now that I come to think of it, the achievements, benefits and commitments of the Good Friday Agreement, what they call the ABCs. Now, when you hear that phrase, you think, well, that's obvious. But when you break it down, you realize it's actually code for a way of interpreting the Good Friday Agreement, that the Good Friday Agreement is not simply a bunch of ideas and rules about reconciliation. It's about societal progress. It's about the future. It's about cross border trade. It's about the interaction of people, the reconciliation of people. These are kind of dynamic things that need to be able to adapt to future policies and future events. So this brings us back then to the start of Brexit negotiations in June this year. Under the choreography, as you know, Britain would have to show sufficient progress on three things, the financial settlement, the rights of EU citizens, and the Irish border. Now, the talks lurched through the summer of 2017. These were not happy occasions. The news conferences were characterized by rather prickly exchanges between David Davis and Michel Barnier. David Davis had this cheeky, let's get on with it, demeanor. Michel Barnier was more head masterly saying, not until you've done your homework, Sonny, first. But throughout, I think it's fair to say that the fixation by the media both in Brussels and in London was that the big problem, the big crunch point was the money. And that was why Theresa May had to make that speech in Florence, where she finally promised that the EU would not be out of pocket as a result of Britain leaving. So in a sense, the Irish question did not seem to be the more problematic issue. There were a couple of key, I think, achievements at that stage by the Irish government. First of all, they did not want the Irish question to be a technocratic discussion in the negotiations, like financial, the financial settlement and citizens rights. They had two teams looking at the technical aspects. The Irish government insisted and said this be moved up the food chain to be handled by what they called the high level coordinating group, which was, excuse me, Ollie Robbins on the British side, and Sabine Way on Michel Barnier's deputy on the EU side. That meant the Irish question was being handled at a much more political level. They were not getting into technical details. This annoyed the British, I think, no end. But in any event, again, this was getting back to the Irish mantra, we do not work on technical solutions until we have a political contour of where this is going to land. The technical solutions will cascade from the politics, and they managed to get that, I suppose, that mechanism in at the start of the negotiations. The next, I think, very important issue that the Irish government managed to achieve in these negotiations was what was called a mapping process. Now, everybody knew that the Good Friday Agreement had to be protected. The British government negotiator that I spoke to, as I said, brought in a copy of the Good Friday Agreement into the first day of the negotiations. But the Irish government insisted on the EU Task Force supported them on this, that there be a mapping of North-South cooperation. And I think what happened was that the British government agreed to this, perhaps not realising how deep this mapping would become and what it would mean. Now, the Good Friday Agreement, when it talks about North-South cooperation, there are areas of cooperation that are delineated through the North, six North-South bodies. Now, the areas that they kind of largely look at are environment, health, agriculture, transport, education, higher education, tourism, energy, telecommunications, broadcasting, inland fisheries, justice, security and sport. Now, you could look at that remit of North-South cooperation and say, well, okay, here you have EU funding, there you have some other EU thing. And therefore, these are the basic circumscribed things that are going to be affected if Northern Ireland is outside the EU. But what the mapping process did was it went much deeper than the, I suppose, the explicit North-South relationship vis-a-vis mutual EU membership. Take, for example, health. EU funding supports a considerable degree of North-South health cooperation. But when you break it down, you see that you have patients' rights on both sides of the border or underpinned by EU regulations. You have medical devices that are used on both sides of the border that are underpinned by EU regulations. You have EU regulations that govern the way ambulance drivers work. And suddenly, when you look much more subtly and deeply at all these layers of North-South cooperation, they discovered that there were not six, but 142 areas of North-South cooperation. Now, the British government first produced their paper on the Irish question in August. It was 27 pages long. And they suggested that, of course, they would not accept a hard border in Ireland, but they would recommend a range of technical solutions. These were things like exemptions for SMEs who do regular cross-border trips, trusted trader schemes that would allow big companies to minimise their customs declarations because you had the famous technological solutions of cameras reading licence plates and so on. Now, that was given fairly short-srift by the European Commission. They said famously it was magical thinking. The Irish government was also cool on it, saying some good ideas, but these are not really going to work. In fact, Michel Barnier said that this paper from the British government threatened to undermine the EU's legal order. Now, the other element of the mapping exercise was that it drew the Northern Ireland civil service into the process because they could provide deeper expertise on North-South cooperation. That's a point I just wanted to mention there. About a month or three weeks after the British paper on Ireland, the EU presented its own paper on Ireland. It was three and a half pages long compared to 27 pages by the British government. Again, this was a subtle manoeuvre by the European side to keep the Irish question at the level of principle, not at the level of technical solutions. There were six guiding principles that Britain would have to sign up to if it was going to avoid a hard border. The British government looked at these six principles and said, yeah, we can't argue with that. Where do we sign? But in fact, what they wanted was not a signature. They wanted, again, Britain to come forward with explicit and detailed answers as to how exactly they were going to avoid a hard border without undermining the legal order of the European Union. Now, as we know, the October Council was meant to be the rendezvous for Britain getting over the line with sufficient progress on money, citizens' rights, and Ireland. And that rendezvous came and went. There simply was not enough progress by the British side on those three areas. Again, it's really useful and fascinating for a geek like me to look at the conclusions of the European Council. It's basically noted the progress on the financial settlement with the Florence speech. And noted for any diplomats here, it's a pretty dirty word. It means, yeah, you've done it, but we're not happy with it. They welcomed progress on citizens' rights and they acknowledged the progress on Ireland. Now, in the Council conclusions, there was a key word which was that Michelle Barnier would do a further refining of the mapping exercise on Ireland and of the principles that Britain had said they would sign up to the guiding principles that three and a half page paper that come out in September. Now, I don't know if any journalists picked up on the word refined or refining or would be refining. I certainly didn't at the time. But what that meant would be was that the British, that the European task force would, if you like, nudge the process forward. Okay, let's look at these principles. Let's look at the mapping. How are we going to crystallize this into a concrete demand that Britain meets? And that is why on the 8th of November last year, there was a working paper from the European Commission Task Force on Ireland. There had been no working paper like this on financial settlement or citizens' rights. But suddenly out of the blue, there was a working paper on Ireland. It was a one page paper and it was leaked and it was designed to be leaked and it was designed also in very close cooperation between the Irish government and the European Commission. Now in this working paper, there was a key bullet point. And this bullet point was explosive. The paper referred back to the EU's guiding principles paper. It said that an important part of political, economic, security, societal, agricultural activity on the island of Ireland currently operates on a cross-border basis underpinned by joint membership of the European Union by Britain and Ireland. Now this was again in effect crystallizing the Irish government's long held view and elaborating the effect of the mapping exercise. The final bullet point was where it got explosive. It seems essential, it said, that in order to guarantee no hard border, there would have to be no regulatory divergence on either side of the border on the rules of the single market and customs union. And it went further. These rules are necessary not just at present but may also be needed in the future. They would be needed for meaningful north-south cooperation and at this point the paper breaks new ground for the all-island economy. Now the all-island economy or the idea of an all-island economy had not crept into this discourse so far. Now London cried file, they were being ambushed but the Dublin government argued that this was the logical extension of Ireland's diplomatic strategy from day one. But the bullet point had the effect of suddenly waking up the British system, both political and media. And now it seemed that the big obstacle to moving into phase two was not the financial settlement or citizens rights, it was Ireland. Ireland which had seemed like an exotic honorary issue that was something between Britain and Ireland and would be sorted out. Suddenly Ireland was the key stumbling block for the UK moving into phase two. Now the reason Ireland, I suppose, raised the stakes at this point was that nothing they had got so far convinced them that the British government was really serious about avoiding a hard border beyond the rhetorical things that we'd heard from Theresa May and so on. Also months had gone past and the EU 26 did not have a paper to work on and December was approaching. There was a very difficult meeting between Theresa May and Leo Veradger in Gothenburg at the summit on the 17th of November. And the British were very angry at this point. They felt that it was about outcomes. We all want the same outcome. You cannot force us into something that is politically impossible because of unionism. Leo Veradger's response to that was, well, you guys took the single market and the customs union off the table. So now we want you to take a hard border off the table as well. And you can't expect us to take a leap in the dark. Because the messaging from London had been, well, look, you guys have a procedural veto in phase two. Can't you live with that? And the Irish response was, no, we can't. We need to use our reassurances and our leverage in phase one. So between the Gothenburg meeting and the 4th of December, there was a flurry of activity. The British side produced a few more papers. The Irish government didn't produce its own paper until the 30th of November. Now Jean-Claude Juncker had set the 4th of December as the deadline for Britain to get these issues over the line. There was the lunch arranged with, excuse me, with Theresa May on the 4th of December. And it was only the pre, that was a Monday, it was only the previous Thursday that the first Irish paper landed in the inbox of British negotiators in Brussels. And guess what? In there was the demand, no regulatory divergence. Now this was an extremely difficult thing for the British government to swallow. But up until that point the Irish had completely got on board the task force under Michel Barnier for that formulation. So there were, there was a full day of tough negotiating. The Irish side were not budging. Theresa May was getting involved. Eventually on the Sunday night there were more phone calls between Dublin and London and Brussels. And eventually no regulatory divergence, which to the British eyes meant Northern Ireland staying in the customs union and single market while the rest of the UK left. That formulation was changed to continuing regulatory alignment. Now even to someone like me who was following this closely I could not necessarily see the difference between these two phrases. But there was a key difference. And Britain wanted continued regulatory alignment. Now there was absolute lockdown. I can tell you as a journalist it was extremely hard to get information that weekend on what was happening. It was very sensitive. On Monday morning however I managed to talk to one source who was not Irish or British who was able to read to me the key paragraph in the joint report in the text that had been worked on all weekend and had as far as the EU was concerned been agreed in the early hours of Monday morning. And that paragraph read no regulatory divergence. And the source I spoke to said like this is amazing like Britain I can't believe Britain has conceded on this. And the source told me look this was the draft up until Saturday two days previously. So because this is very sensitive and RT will follow a policy of getting two sources on a story. I managed to contact a second non-I resource who confirmed that that had been in the text but that it had been updated to read something along the lines of continued regulatory alignment. So with the two sources I felt confident that we could run the story I checked with the head of news in Dublin in RTE. He says if you've got two sources and you stand by these sources then we can run the story. So I put out a tweet saying something like the the UK has conceded on the issue of no regulatory divergence according to a draft seen by RT news. I put out a second tweet four minutes later saying that the text had been updated to to have the words continued regulatory alignment. Now even at that stage I thought well these are kind of the same thing I can't see with the issues but to me the issue was that the UK had effectively conceded on a major issue that is that Northern Ireland remain tightly bound to the Republic when it came to the single market and the customs union. Now unbeknownst to me my tweets were being followed by Uckrep very closely the UK representation in Brussels. They were also being followed by DUP negotiators who at that very moment were meeting the British Chief of Staff Theresa May's Chief of Staff Gavin Barwell in London and the horses were spooked. Immediately both the British and the DUP thought that the Irish government were briefing and that they were claiming victory. And I can tell you and I've said this publicly that that wasn't the case certainly I wasn't being briefed by Irish sources. But to me this was a genuine and valid news story and that people were interested in what was going on. And the report that we ran on RTE that morning was highly conditional on language like you know these are drafts seen by RTE news. It's not clear if the Irish and British government have agreed to this but if they did this would go some way to reassuring the Irish government. There was then a flurry of conversations and phone calls and as Theresa May arrived in Brussels for her meeting with Jean-Claude Juncker she was told by Ollie Robbins her Sherpa that there was a problem and then the phone call started and she called Arlene Foster and the deal was off. Now at that point of the narrative I will take a pause because we've probably gone as far as we should on the talk and I'm happy to take questions on what happened next and what's the difference between alignment and no regulatory divergence and where we go from here.