If Brexit means Brexit, what does Ireland mean?

Despite all the drawbacks, there are opportunities from Brexit. The opportunities are largely academic – literally. There are no recent parallels in the developed world for improvised statecraft on such a grand scale. There is a lot to study.

Countless Brexit-related PhDs in economics and political science have probably already begun. They will be completed long before the UK has agreed the final details of its new relationship with Europe. But the most useful area of academic enquiry is not politics or economics, but semantics – the study of meaning. Since Brexit has not yet happened, virtually the entire exercise has been an argument over the meaning of words. Not just the legal meaning of European Union treaties, but how to give political effect to campaign slogans and rhetoric with deliberately elusive meanings.

What does Brexit mean? Theresa May was once very clear: Brexit meant Brexit. That mind-bendingly circular statement was designed to create certainty for people – especially if those people were electors in the Tory leadership contest – that the extraordinary thing the UK had just voted for, against the wishes and advice of its elites, would definitely happen. But to many listeners, the phrase had another meaning: maximum extrication from the legal structures and obligations of the EU.

Clash

That definition of Brexit still reverberates now. British officials struggle to craft phrases which give meaning to it, while simultaneously allowing for a near-opposite interpretation by EU and Irish officials. Because at the core of the UK’s current problems is a clash between the contested meaning of two words: ‘Brexit’ and ‘Ireland’.

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What does Ireland mean? It means two things: an island and a state. One is a geographic entity, the other a legal and political construct. De Valera’s original Irish constitution claimed legal jurisdiction over the entire island, to the persistent objection of northern unionists, until the Belfast Agreement clarified that Ireland the state consisted only of the southern (and one far northwestern) 26 counties.

But it was more complicated than that. Some of the same Irish officials today working on Brexit worked to craft a set of replacement words for the displaced article two. “It is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish nation,” the revised Constitution said. Being born on the island conferred citizenship rights in relation to the state. The state and island were separate, but connected.

This ambiguity has always fascinated me. Being from Northern Ireland, one is from Ireland, but not from Ireland. In one sense the Belfast Agreement clarified the position of Northern Ireland, inside the United Kingdom until a majority decided otherwise. In all official documents relating to Brexit negotiations, by either the UK government or the EU, the two jurisdictions on the island are referred to as ‘Ireland’ and ‘Northern Ireland’. This is a reflection of the precise legal name of each entity, but it is also confusing. Indeed most unionists of past eras – as well as northern nationalists of all hues – would balk at the notion that a journey from Derry to Letterkenny involves travelling to ‘Ireland’.

Interminable debates

There is an oddly parallel question: does Britain include Northern Ireland? The answer is a neat obverse of the same question asked about Ireland. Northern Ireland is in the British state, but not on the island of Britain, just as it is on the island of Ireland but not in the Irish state. Inside Whitehall, civil servants still have interminable debates about whether UK government campaigns involving the word Britain should include a separate reference to Northern Ireland, or whether ‘Britain’ is commonly understood to include the northeastern corner of Ireland. One popular definition is that ‘Britain’ includes Northern Ireland unless the word ‘Great’ is added at the beginning. Quite what that is supposed to imply about Northern Ireland is left moot.

The Brexit negotiations are stuck with one with foot in this wormhole. The Belfast Agreement was built to contain this ambiguity and these multiple meanings: that is, as the cliche goes, a feature not a bug. But Brexiteers in May’s cabinet, and outside it, do not want Brexit to contain multiple meanings. They want it to mean an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and an entirely separate trade policy.

In the language of European institutions, this will mean Britain (including Northern Ireland) being treated as a third country by the EU (including Ireland).

In his book Modern Ireland, published in 1988, Roy Foster expressed the fair-minded hope that Ireland's EU membership would allow for "a more relaxed and inclusive definition of Irishness, and a less constricted view of Irish history". In many ways, it did – but one version of Ireland is now leaving the EU, forcing new and difficult questions over meaning and definition.

Pity the officials now facing the question: “If Brexit means Brexit, what does Ireland mean?”

Matthew O’Toole was chief press officer for Europe and economic affairs in the British prime minister’s office from September 2015 to August 2017. He now works for Powerscourt Communications