IT’S SELF-EVIDENT (OR I HOPE IT IS) that any sensible New York-based media person should spend time in Europe. I’m now reflecting on almost two months recently spent in Ireland and France, which also included a brief look-in on the UK. 

The last-named is of course no longer a European country, following what The Guardian has eloquently described as the worst act of self-harm committed in the last one hundred years. In other words, the mutilation also known more prosaically as Brexit.

Using Europe’s media as a prism though which to assess Britain’s post-Brexit mess, may not seem wholly fair, but it certainly offers a fuller perspective than the British media themselves provide, strait-jacketed as they are by their partisan loyalties. These days, that partisanship amounts mainly to either savaging Boris Johnson for his indefensible behavior, or struggling to defend the indefensible all the same.

The French media are still reeling from the one-two punch of first a gratifyingly decisive Presidential election and then somewhat contradictory parliamentary elections. So for now I will leave them be, with their own domestic concerns, in the full knowledge they’ll soon return en masse to dissecting philosophically the travails of their now-divorced partner across La Manche. (While that divorced partner itself, Britain, will in its perennially insular fashion continue calling that body of water ‘The English Channel.’)

But now, the Irish media. Ah, the Irish media. They are always forthright. But interestingly in this case, given that Ireland undoubtedly has some skin in the game, they are being coolly analytical, thorough and serious-minded in their coverage of Brexit’s consequences. They have managed to avoid the hysteria of their opposite numbers across the (correctly named) Irish Sea, in England.

That Irish skin-in-the-game is considerable. The divorce agreement which Johnson’s administration negotiated in detail with the EU, and then Johnson himself signed, included the blandly-named Northern Ireland Protocol (above right). This document was designed to ensure that the border between UK-controlled Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to the south would remain the completely porous and peaceable border that it has it has now long been – thanks largely to the 1998 Peace Agreement that ended 30 years of bloody warfare in the north. During the negotiations no person of goodwill (or of any simple good sense, for that matter) ever wanted to see the creation of a so-called ‘hard border,’ resurrecting the old enmities as it all-too-easily could.

Now the Brits have published their plan to in essence tear up the divorce agreement they once accepted. And they’ll replace the Protocol with something designed to placate the North’s angry Unionists or so-called loyalists. These particular hardliners viewed the Protocol as a barrier, if only a customs barrier, erected between them and the mother-country of Britain. Johnson cared little about those loyalists when he was negotiating Brexit, or at any other time up to now. Loyalty has clearly been a one-way street.

THE IRISH PRESS HAS ACCURATELY REPORTED the effect of these Johnsonian maneuvers as “a new low in Irish-British relations.” How could it be anything else? The Republic’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Micheál Martin was quoted saying that the British “fundamental breach of trust” would create “very difficult times ahead.”  

There was a touch, too, of investigative reporting in the Irish coverage. Quite some play was made, in accounts from the Irish Examiner right through to the Irish Times, of a 12-minute phone call (a full, fact-checked twelve minutes!) that took place on the Monday morning before the British government unveiled in Parliament its draft legislation aimed at killing the Protocol. The call was between Ireland’s Foreign Minister Simon Coveney (above, far left) and Britain’s Foreign Secretary, the unfortunately named Liz Truss (above center). The language cited was crystal clear. While Truss claimed that the UK had tried for eighteen months to make the Protocol work, but would now be scrapping most of its provisions, Coveney said this would breach international law and would “deeply damage” the Anglo-Irish connection.

To the credit of Ireland’s journalistic community, reporters also went deeper than politicians’ rhetoric. They delved into the details of real, everyday economic life. With the Northern Ireland Dairy Council as their main source (yes, a UK institution, perhaps ironically) the reporters could show that while the North produces 2.5 billion liters of milk a year, 800 million liters of that (almost a third of the total) crosses the border into the South for various kinds of processing, before being – guess what? – exported globally to about 80 different countries.

There could scarcely be a more convincing demonstration of the border’s porousness, and of the sheer ridiculousness of British isolationism. It’s no wonder that Dr Mike Johnson, who heads the Dairy Council, has been adamantl in not wanting the Protocol changed.

Dr Johnson the dairyman is of course far from alone. As the Irish Independent has been reminding everyone, the United States has skin in this game too. After all, the US-nominated chair of the marathon talks that created the Peace Agreement 24 years ago was Senator George Mitchell of Maine. Not only has the Biden Administration been telling London it regards the Protocol’s survival as vital to the Peace Agreement’s continuance, but – the Independent tells us – Foreign Secretary Truss had already received, even before her 12-minute conversation with her Irish counterpart, a stiff letter from US Congressmen Bill Keating (foreign affairs Chair) and Brendan Boyle (European affairs Chair) urging her not to act unilaterally, but instead to “act in good faith, within the parameters of international law” and thus avoid the worst outcome from Brexit, which they foresaw as “violence and upheaval” in the North.  

Some in the Irish press are asking: will Truss’s boss, Boris, pay any attention to the global array of strong objections to his plans? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s probably the same as mine.