All is changed, changed utterly: Starmer’s Downing Street reign presents chance to rebuild old ties

There were times over the last few years when efforts were made by Government Buildings in Dublin to organise calls with No 10 Downing Street between the respective heads in both buildings.

During Rishi Sunak’s term as prime minister, the calls usually took place, but not immediately and often not for a few days. Liz Truss was not around long enough for a call diary of significance to be kept.

During Boris Johnson’s reign, the calls sometimes did not happen at all, or, when they did, they were so perfunctory, or dismissive, that they added little to the efforts to sort out the problems of the day.

If nothing else, a new dawn has broken after Labour leader Keir Starmer’s arrival into No 10, with Dublin confident the damage of the last decade to Anglo-Irish relations can be repaired. A “great reset”, as Taoiseach Simon Harris put it.

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Though facing poor reviews in London, Sunak will be remembered in Dublin, if not warmly, then more favourably than his two immediate predecessors for agreeing the Windsor Framework with the European Union in February last year.

So what happens now? Raw politics and national interests will always triumph, but there is a basis for a relationship between Harris and Starmer, who knows Ireland well, even playing five-a-side football up to recently in a Donegal GAA jersey.

Meanwhile, his chief-of-staff, former civil servant Sue Gray, has long ties to and a deep knowledge of Northern Ireland, once taking a civil service career break in the 1980s to run a pub in Co Down.

More than 20 years later, she headed Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance for two years, before applying for but failing to get the job as the head of its civil service. Now, she is at the heart of Downing Street.

Meanwhile, Pat McFadden, the Scottish-born Wolverhampton MP who played a key role in Labour’s campaign and is expected now to hold a cabinet office ministry, has Donegal parents and is proud of his links.

Such ties are everywhere. Sue Gray’s son, Liam Conlon is yet another of the new crop of Labour MPs, while Macroom-born Morgan McSweeney was Labour’s campaign director.

Such connections are the lifeblood of politics, but there are no favours given freely, so national interests will ultimately decide the relationships that will exist between Dublin and London.

But there is hope, with some in Dublin pointing to Labour’s David Lammy’s Foreign Affairs article where he pointedly listed the relationship with Ireland, along with Germany, France and Poland, as the ones which London should “double down” on.

Labour will abandon plans to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Convention on Human Rights, while it has pledged also to do away with the Conservatives’ legacy legislation surrounding deaths in The Troubles.

Equally, it will abandon efforts to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, a Conservative policy that has sent significant numbers to the Republic, via the backdoor of Northern Ireland, to the delight of Brexiteers who saw Dublin getting its comeuppance.

Labour declares that it will honour the Windsor Framework in good faith and once again embrace the Good Friday Agreement as one of the most significant achievements of the last Labour administration.

So much for the rhetoric. In the short-term, it is hoped that Starmer will agree a deal with Brussels that will clear many of the veterinary checks that are proving an irritant in Northern Ireland-Britain trade.

Such a deal, if it happened, would not be primarily be about Ireland and Northern Ireland. Instead, Starmer can frame it as “a food agreement” that will bring products absent for months back on to British shelves.

That would be applauded by Dublin, but it is not in Dublin’s gift. And it requires Brussels “to think politically” in drafting such an agreement, lest it ignite fires from London critics that Starmer is drawing London back into the EU’s arms at the first opportunity

Such a deal is obviously in the UK’s own interests, since Brexit only began to happen really for British consumers on January 31st this year when the UK finally began to impose food checks on imports arriving at its eastern ports.

The rules have had an immediate effect: “Try getting Italian tomato paste in Manchester,” said one Irish trade expert, “you won’t find it, and you won’t find a lot of other stuff there, either.”

Significant numbers of Continental food companies faced with extra paperwork on the UK side have simply stopped selling to there, while Danish bacon imports landed at Lowestoft have collapsed. The list goes on.

“He could present this as a food deal that is good for British consumers, nothing to do with the UK’s relationship with Europe, or Ireland. Simply say that it is in the shopper’s interest,” The Irish Times was told.

The opening signals from Brussels early Friday were good, with European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen “looking forward” to working with Starmer in “a constructive partnership to address common challenges”.

A food deal, however, however, requires alignment with Brussels rules and oversight – however remote – of the European Court of Justice in cases of disagreement, and it would bar the possibility of future UK trade deals independent of the EU.

Such deals were the Conservatives’ much yearned desire, though they never produced one that fundamentally reordered the rules of the game, and Labour has shown little appetite to follow their lead.

However, a “fixation” on the implementation of Brussels rules could complicate matters, while the Commission will be in its own state of flux for months, with von der Leyen yet to secure her mandate for the next five years.

Meanwhile, Labour has pledged to get rid of The Troubles’ legacy legislation, that was uniquely condemned by Dublin and all of Northern Ireland’s political parties and would have kept hidden the sins of British security agencies during those years.

Pledging to “repeal and replace”, it will go back to the Stormont House Agreement reached in January 2014, one that requires Dublin, London and all of the Stormont parties to agree on a way forward. This will not be easy, however.

The Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery headed by the former Northern Ireland Chief Lord Justice Declan Morgan already exists with powers to investigate Troubles deaths between 1996 and 1998.

“How long will that take? It might take a year or two to get legislation through Westminster. If Hilary Benn wants to do an agreement with all the parties, it could take even longer. In the meantime, the ICRIR will keep going,” speculated one source.

In addition, such an agreement will place a demand on Dublin to offer more information about any knowledge held by gardaí, or intelligence quarters in the Republic about Troubles deaths. Opinion divides on how much there is, or ever was to share.

For much of the years since 2016, the Conservatives pursued the hardest form of Brexit with the active encouragement of the Democratic Unionist Party, despite a majority of Northern Ireland’s voters voting against the idea.

Indeed, the DUP’s then leader, Arlene Foster scuppered a nearly-made agreement between Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker in December 2017 by threatening to pull her MPs out of a confidence and supply agreement with the Conservatives.

Starmer does not need the support of the DUP now, and never will in this term of office given his majority, but, equally, he will want to be seen to be even-handed in his relationship with Northern Ireland parties.

Equally, however, Starmer wants to focus on the public service crisis in Britain, especially on the drive for economic growth, so he will want to avoid anything that opens up unwanted questions, such as the constitutional future of either Northern Ireland, or Scotland.

The huge increase in Labour MPs in Scotland has played a significant, up from one in 2019 to 37 today, has delivered a major blow to any hopes held by the Scottish National Party for an independence referendum.

Starmer is a unionist, a softly-spoken one, perhaps, but a unionist, nevertheless.

He will not want to see demands for an Irish referendum grow, either. Instead, the focus will be on efforts to make Northern Ireland work for the people living there, rather than constitutional questions.

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