The Irish border issue is no mere sideshow – and UK ministers are mostly to blame

We may or may not hear news soon of a settlement of the Irish border issue that will allow Brexit to proceed without the calamity of ‘no deal’. Word this week was that Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar might offer a compromise ‘review mechanism’ for the ‘backstop’ which might otherwise leave the UK locked in a customs union — but like me, you’re probably none the wiser as to what that actually means.

History will judge this episode as a disgraceful example of politicians bluffing in the face of tough choices rather than explaining complexities or acknowledging hard facts — set out, in this case, in a Northern Ireland Affairs select committee report in March 2018 that said, among many other interesting things, ‘we have had no visibility of any technical solutions, anywhere in the world, beyond the aspirational, that would remove the need for physical infrastructure at the border’.

History might also say Varadkar was justified in his stubborn position that Ireland wasn’t going to help design a border it did not want; that Michel Barnier, as a former EU regional policy commissioner, understood the issue and its history far better than he let on, and should have been more pragmatic; but that British ministers were the most culpable, for pretending the obvious sticking-point of the whole negotiation was a sideshow that could be solved with the wave of a technological wand.