 Hello and welcome to this IIEA hybrid event. I'm delighted to say we have a great turnout here in North Great Georgia Street, and we're also live streaming. We're delighted to have with us today Tony Connelly, who needs no introduction, is the Europe editor for OTA, though that won't stop me from giving a brief introduction in a few minutes, who has taken time out from his extremely busy schedule because not only is he, you know, the oracle and all things Brexit, but he's also now heavily engaged in reporting from Ukraine. And of course, we're here to talk about the evolving situation in the United Kingdom with a new Prime Minister, new lineup of ministers. And of course, the prospects which this has for Northern Ireland for the protocol discussions for Anglo Irish relations for relations between the UK and the European Union. Tony will talk for about 20 minutes in our usual format and then we'll go and take question and answers both from the from the audience and from people on online. I'll give you here in the room. I'm told to tell you raise your hand. I think we can, we can manage that right. That's not a very advanced technology. And for those of you online you use the by now painfully familiar Q&A function on zoom, which you will see on your screen and I'll send in your questions throughout the discussion and we will, we will pick them up when we get to the audience involvement part of the event. And both people online and people here in North Great Georgia Street can participate in the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IEA and if they paid their eight dollars for the blue tick. In accordance with the new arrangements. And I should remind you that today's presentation and the Q&A are all on the record. Two words about Tony. Of course, he's the European editor for RTE. He hails from Derry. He has reported extensively on Brexit. I can tell you, when I was in Washington, a colleague from the British Embassy said to me once there's only one person worth following on on Brexit and that's that guy Tony Connolly from RTE. So I knew then that Tony's coverage had definitely arrived as the definitive verdict. Exactly. He's been covering European affairs since 2001. And of course, most recently we've seen him covering the invasion of Ukraine and he was actually Ukraine on the day of the invasion. He's the recipient of a number of awards to ESP National Media Awards, a European Journalism Award, and a New York Festivals Radio Award. He was also awarded the Outstanding Achievement in Journalism Award by the UCD Smirfit Graduate School and the Irish Law Society Award for his coverage of the Brexit negotiations. My notes say he's the author of Brexit in Ireland, but I know he's also the author of another excellent book, which is Don't Talk About the War, which I know was produced in two editions because I have one of each, which I think Tony Connolly brought to me each time. And he's married with three children and he lives in Brussels. And of course, we're delighted to welcome you here Tony. Thanks a lot for taking the time. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on what's happening. Thank you very much, David. Great to be back in the IIEA. Thanks to Dara and Barry as well for making this happen. The last time I was here, I think Theresa May was the Prime Minister, so yeah. So we have five Prime Ministers in six years and we're still essentially dealing with some of the same issues. But I would like to just reflect a bit on what the arrival of Rishi Sunak means to the Brexit process and the relations between Ireland and the UK and the UK and the European Union. And to try and bring things up to date. I mean there's obviously a lot of things happening in various quarters in London and in Belfast and in Brussels. We've obviously seen a tremendous amount of upheaval and churn within the British political system, a lot of instability, which can really be traced back to the events of June 2016. And I think it's fair to say that people now see Rishi Sunak as drawing a thick line under a period of populism and ushering in a new sobriety into British politics. But I think we really have to question how true that is because he hasn't really been tested yet on the issues around Ireland, the Northern Ireland protocol, the Northern Ireland protocol bill. I'm told that he has only ever once been on the island of Ireland and that was during the Conservative Party hostings in Northern Ireland during the summer, compared to Liz Tross who's actually been at a hen party in Cork. So in terms of credibility, I think Liz Tross wins hands down in terms of understanding the Irish situation. But I think overall, if we step back and look at the past six years, we've had five Prime Ministers Cameron, May, Johnson, Tross and now Sunak. And we can trace all the problems back to the fact that Brexit wasn't really properly prepared for or understood. People in the UK system didn't fully understand or anticipate the Irish question. And then in the crucible of the negotiations from 2017 all the way up to 2019, it seems that in the vacuum of the system in the UK, they were not fully comprehending what people had voted for and what they voted for would mean in terms of relations with the European Union and what kind of Brexit they would end up with. Into that vacuum steps, the right wing of the Conservative Party, and that grip has not really been loosened. And we have had these spasms of really almost violent upheaval within the Conservative Party that everyone is kind of hostage to and also a spectator to. And, you know, we are back now with yet another Prime Minister. I mean, Rishi Sunak is known as a true believer. He was a Brexiteer from the get-go, but he doesn't have any, as I say, real experience of Ireland or insight into it. Now I know that he has had dealings with Pascal Donahue. That seems to be a fairly good relationship. But his background would not lend you to lend any major credibility to the idea that he would have a nuanced and instinctive grasp of the complexities of Ireland and the Irish question. What we've had in that vacuum, as I say, over the past number of years is almost like a hammer and anvil scenario whereby you could only really lay claim to being a true Brexiteer if you fulfill certain criteria, if you had certain expectations, if you had an unblemished past. And this has led to, you know, a really chronic misunderstandings and a breakdown in communication between Brussels and London and Dublin. And, you know, we're still really recovering from that. What we can say, going back to Theresa May's time, is that she voted remain, but then she obviously had to assert her Brexit credentials when she became Prime Minister. We had that famous Tory party conference speech, which was pure boosterism about how great Britain would be with Brexit. Brexit means Brexit. We're going to make a success of it. But yet, at the same time, Theresa May understood the trade-offs between Brexit and the British economy still having access to supply chains and an integrated relationship with the European market. And she also understood, I think, through a very painful process of the joint report and the negotiations with Brussels and Dublin. She understood that if you were to avoid damaging the union, then there would have to be compromises at the level of the Conservative Party and in terms of the Brexit true believers. In a sense, Theresa May placed the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland ahead of global Britain. And that was why, in a very tortured and ultimately doomed to fail bid, she went for this UK-wide customs union with the European Union. That would avoid a customs border on the Irish Sea. And just to remind people of what was involved there, it would be that you would have this interim customs union between the UK and the EU avoiding a customs border on the Irish Sea. And then the free trade agreement between the UK and the EU would be so close that you wouldn't need to have a border on the island of Ireland. And remember the backstop, the famous backstop was like the third option. There were so many names to it, but they called it the safety net. So if the free trade agreement wasn't as free and close as possible, then the backstop would kick in. But she was a believer in a close trading relationship with the EU because during all of this period, we're talking 2017, 2018, there were automotive companies beating a path to Downing Street saying, we need to be part of the single market in some shape or form. And you can see that she didn't really have fully formed ideas about what the relationship should be. She talked about some kind of associate membership of the customs union. And that's actually at the time kept Irish government hopes alive that whereas she had said in her Tory party speech about Brexit, meaning Brexit, that somehow she would tilt back towards some closer relationship with the single market, even though it wasn't fully formed in her mind. And even though the European Union were saying, well, you can't have some kind of associate membership of the customs union, that simply doesn't work. And then eventually through a very painful process, she pushed for this UK wide customs arrangement. I mean, the EU was really resisting going down that road. And then once they did have it in the body of the treaty in 2018, where it would have legal force, then that's when member states were going, well, hang on a second, if we're going to give the UK access to the customs union, then we need a level playing field. So all the stuff about the level playing field from the trade and cooperation agreement actually predates that it goes back to when the UK wanted the UK wide customs union. And of course, we know what happens. That was then seized on by the Brexit ears in the Conservative Party and the DUP. Let's not forget as a betrayal of Brexit. And she ended up paying a very heavy price. It was rejected three times in the House of Commons. She was booted out and then Boris Johnson came in and he came in on a blaze of glory and promising to rip up the backstop. And he then ended up in the world in Thornton Manor Hotel with Leo Veradker completely selling out his long held principles and pledges during the election campaign to be Tory leader. And he ended up with what essentially we have today, which is the protocol as is. And again, this is part of the problem of Brexit is that the people who are given the power to manage the negotiations and manage the relationship don't really know in detail about how the EU works or how the customs union works. There was a famous meeting between Boris Johnson and Michel Barnier and Jean-Claude Junker in Luxembourg. And he was kind of sat down in the room and explained to Stephanie Rizzo, who was a senior official in Barnier's team, who sat him down and explained to him the principles of the customs union and single market. And this was in 2019. Even three years after the Brexit vote, he still didn't really understand them. So that was again a function of why we've had this instability and problems in the whole evolution of the Brexit process. Boris Johnson signed up to the protocol. We all know that. The big part of that trade-off was he had come in saying we're going to have a, okay, we're going to have an all-island single market for animal food and agri-food and so on, an epidemiological single unit, which we kind of have at the moment, or we've had historically. But we're going to have a customs border or back from the land border. And it's going to be high-tech. And he had the whole alternative arrangements thing going on where they would find, they would have drones, or at one point they were looking at facial recognition for sheep. I kid you not. They had a government appointed alternative arrangements operation up and running. They had a privately funded alternative arrangements thing up and running. But in the end, he of course had this pivotal phone call with Angela Merkel, and she was saying we are not having a customs border on the island of Ireland, and that's kind of final. That was the famous phone call that was leaked by Dominic Cummings. And so then he agreed to a customs border and a regulatory border on the Irish Sea. And in exchange, Leo Veradker agreed to a consent mechanism, which wasn't there before. Now in the negotiations, the DUP had demanded that they get the consent mechanism before the treaty was concluded. And the EU were not going to buy that, even though Boris Johnson put it forward in the negotiations. What they agreed to and what Leo Veradker agreed to in the end was a consent mechanism that would happen four years after the protocol comes into effect. And if it got a particular form of consent, then you would have another vote four years later. But if it got an even bigger form of consent, then there wouldn't be another vote in the assembly for another eight years. And this was also a kind of a time limit. You might recall that back then a lot of conservative ministers were saying we need a time limit to any arrangement around a protocol. In a sense, if you have a, you know, a rendezvous at Stormont where you can have a consent vote, then that's kind of a time limit. Because you could say, well, if people don't want it, then the arrangements will have to be replaced or most of the arrangements will have to be replaced. So that was how things kind of panned out. And then in January 2021, the protocol took effect. And David Frost, of course, was the main protocol negotiator. Sorry, it was Michael Gove at that time. But I think history will bind a very, very key pivotal moment. And David will recall this as well, probably intimately, the events on the 29th of January 2021, because that was when the famous so-called triggering of Article 16 by the European Commission happened. I remember I was traveling to Rome that day and when I turned my phone on, when I landed, it just nearly melted because there were like thousands of text messages and calls. And essentially what happened was that there was a big concern in the European Commission that AstraZeneca vaccine doses were being gobbled up by the UK when they should have gone to the EU. And of course, the EU was struggling to keep up with the vaccination process of the UK. And what they did was they handed over the handling of vaccination exports to Dumbrobskis, Valdus Dumbrobskis and DG Trade to make it not a health issue, but a trade issue. He was apparently very miffed at this. But what they agree was that if doses that were being manufactured in the European Union were being exported out of the EU, then they would have to have an export certificate. Whereas if they were just being exported to another member state, they wouldn't need to have that certificate. Somebody in DG Taxhood identified a loophole. Ah, we've got this Northern Ireland protocol, which means Northern Ireland is regarded as part of the single market. Therefore, doses can flow straight to Northern Ireland, but there has to be unfettered movement of goods from Northern Ireland into Great Britain. So then you could end up having vaccine doses channeled through Northern Ireland into Great Britain. I mean, it was quite a sort of fanciful and far-fetched scenario, but the commission being the commission said, ah, if it's a loophole, we need to fix it. So some bright sparks said, ah, well, you've got Article 16, you can write that in there into the regulation. So what they did was they wrote it into a draft regulation that should the circumstances arise where shipments of doses of vaccines are going to Northern Ireland and then potentially on into Great Britain where they shouldn't be going, then we can trigger Article 16. But it was just a provision, but of course it got out that it was in there and suddenly the EU had triggered Article 16 and all hell broke loose and it was a really damaging moment. But the importance of it from this perspective is that it was seized on by the hard right of the Conservative Party as an excuse to turn back the clock to December 2017, which is when the joint report happened and which is when the whole idea of solving the Northern Ireland problem and the border issue could be dealt with by keeping Northern Ireland aligned to the single market. David Frost, who had taken over from Michael Gove at that point, made no secret of the fact that he thought this was an appalling betrayal by Theresa May at the time to give in to the beastly European Union in Ireland by capitulating in this way. And they saw the invocation of Article 16 by the Commission as a crime because the Commission, they said, had spent years saying you couldn't have any controls on the border, land border north and south. And suddenly here they were putting controls in blocking vaccines from crossing the border, you know, as if there would be mobile European Commission patrols driving along the border looking for doses of vaccines. But whatever way they interpreted it, this was seen as a gift to the hardliners in the Conservative Party to turn back the clock. So initially in 2021, whereas it was a case that the protocol was being applied to strictly now it was the protocol itself. And then of course we had the command paper in 2021, July 2021, which didn't set out to fix the protocol, but to replace it completely. And then the Commission's response to that was October the 13th, I think, 2021 when they brought out their four proposals for medicines, customs, agri-food and governance. Now there's a key moment and this whole kind of came to light was as researching this earlier this year in the light of the Northern Ireland protocol bill. If you follow all of David Frost's speeches and appearances before committees, he made it clear that, again, it wasn't that the protocol was being applied to strictly, it was the protocol itself, it had to be replaced. But in 12 days after the Commission came out with what it called a generous offer to try and make the protocol more amenable to Unionists and to businesses. 12 days after those papers came out, David Frost was speaking to the European scrutiny committee in the House of Commons and he says, all I will say that it is possible that amendments to our own domestic legal order might be necessary to provide total clarity for economic actors in Northern Ireland. Now from contacts I have in Whitehall, it was made clear to me that they were already drafting the Northern Ireland protocol bill at that stage. They knew they wanted to have this retained EU law bill. This was another kind of Brexiteer wish list, a bonfire of EU regulations that were still enshrined in British domestic law. And in the same legislation that they were started drafting at that time, they would have the seeds, the germination of what we know now as an ordinary protocol bill. Even though Liz Truss had come along in December, January of this year, there's a whole new reset with Maro Shevchovich, there was the meeting in Chavening House in Kent, everybody was optimistic. And that's why people are somewhat cautious at the moment when talking about resets. Already the seeds were being sown for the Northern Ireland protocol bill at that time. And really that's where we are at the moment, the protocol talks, which were spun out of the commission's response to the Joint, to the command paper last summer, and then the October proposals. They ran into the sand in February, then we had of course the Northern Ireland assembly elections and then we've had the standoff ever since. And now we have the resets, the new optimism with Liz Truss, sorry, Rishi Sunak now being Prime Minister. And again, who knows where this is going to go, but I'll obviously try and answer that in the question and answers. And just to say that from what I gathered just from talking to contacts this morning. Chris Heaton Harris, the Northern Secretary is going to probably next week say that under the legislation of the new decade new approach legislation, he's obliged to do X, Y and Z and he will try and find some tweak to the legislation that will allow him to make the elections for for some time. So what I predict is that there won't be elections on the 15th of December. It'll be delayed because nobody wants an election. And most of all for the negotiations. It's very difficult to have negotiations if there's an election in the background if there's any breakthrough in the negotiations they will be seized on by the parties and everyone will go into their trenches, and therefore we won't get progress. I'll leave it there and