Opinion: there is clearly no trust between the UK and the EU when it comes to the Brexit deal and the Northern Ireland protocol
Should we be surprised? Not really. The British government has unilaterally decided to extend a grace period for post-Brexit checks on some goods entering Northern Ireland from Britain, without even extending the courtesy of informing Dublin or Brussels. As far as the EU is concerned, this is a blatant violation of the Northern Ireland protocol that breaks international law - and not for the first time either.
The inability of the EU and the UK to work together and trust each other must be seen for what it is: a dismal failure. Four-and-a-half years after the Brexit referendum of June 2016, and only a few weeks after the Brexit withdrawal agreement between the UK and the EU was signed, there is still no trust between the UK and the EU. More and more, the creation of the EU many decades ago can be seen as a political miracle, an agreement built on an unlikely overlapping consensus between many different nations, each defined by its distinctive language, history and political culture.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney on the UK changes to the Northern Ireland Protocol
International agreements are grounded in contracts, and contracts are the nuts-and-bolts of international law. There is, of course, something profoundly technical and legalistic about the Northern Ireland protocol, but there is more to an agreement than a legal contract. Apart from the realm of law, the idea of a contract also conjures thoughts of a more metaphysical nature. That's what philosophers from the 17th century to the present refer to as 'the social contract'.
Contractualism, or the idea that we seek social cooperation for the sake of justice and mutual advantage, is perhaps the dominant contemporary approach to moral and political theory, which suggests that the way we think about agreements, not just legally but also morally, is an important question. In the NBC sitcom The Good Place, the moral philosophy of contractualism has centre stage, so much so that there are numerous references to Harvard philosopher T. M. Scanlon, arguably the most influential living moral philosopher today.
In his book What We Owe to Each Other (1998), also the title of an episode of The Good Place, Scanlon defends contractualism as a distinctive account of moral reasoning. He starts from the assumption that a good life depends on the positive value of a way of living with others, and that we have an obligation to other people in general. This obligation can be teased out in terms of what constitutes a wrong action: actions are wrong if a principle that permitted that action couldn’t be justified to the affected people, or to put it in slightly more technical terms, we should govern life with rules that other people cannot reasonably reject.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland. RTÉ Europe Editor Tony Connelly on how the EU are considering legal action in row over Northern Ireland Protocol
Right now, the UK and the EU are not in a good place. The alleged violation of the Northern Ireland protocol by the British government would indicate that they don’t see the value of respecting the treaty signed with the EU. They don’t feel an obligation to work with Brussels and are not prepared to be reasonable. Perhaps this move by Boris Johnson's government can be justified to Tory party backbenchers and Brexit Party voters, but not to the vast majority of people living in Northern Ireland, Ireland or the rest of the EU, and certainly not to the next generation of UK and European citizens.
It may be intangible and unquantifiable in financial terms, but the breakdown of trust between the UK and the EU is perhaps the biggest casualty of the latest stunt by Johnson’s government. Trust has, once again, broken down between Brussels and London, and it will take a very long time, even generations, to restore it. Of course, to trust is to risk disappointment, but in the words of the 18th century English poet, essayist and biographer Samuel Johnson, "it is happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust". Unfortunately the current UK prime minister has very different ideas from the other Johnson and he simply will not trust anyone with a foreign accent.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, EU Commissioner Mairead McGuinness talks about the UK decision to change the Brexit terms
Life without trust is a miserable state of affairs. In her 2002 Raith Lectures 'A Question of Trust', moral philosopher Onora O'Neill makes a powerful case for trust: "I believe that human rights and democracy are not the basis of trust: on the contrary, trust is the basis for human rights and democracy".
This is the real tragedy of Johnson’s decision not to respect the Northern Ireland protocol. Trust often invites reciprocal trust and when it does, we have virtuous spirals. At the moment, there is no trust between the EU and the UK, and so we are going down a vicious spiral, back to a Hobbesian state of nature where an atmosphere of deepest mistrust governs supreme. Everyone will suffer because of Boris Johnson’s lack of political vision and his dodgy moral compass.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
