Why Ireland Won’t Be Rejoining the UK After Brexit

Why 🇮🇪 Won’t Be Rejoining 🇬🇧 After Brexit

Some commenting on Neale Richmond’s piece in the FT still wonder why 🇮🇪 doesn’t rejoin 🇬🇧 after Brexit.

It’s worth seeing 🇮🇪, the continent and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿‘s inter-relationships in the context of their whole history.

🇮🇪 has the oldest written literature in Europe, apart from its peer 🇬🇷.

🇮🇪 King Aldrith’s (who ruled Northumbria from 685 — 705) “wisdom sayings,” incorporating 1000 yrs of oral transmission, were then preserved in various texts, incl the Books of Leinster, Ballymote, et al, were published again in 1999.

Old Irish law tracts (eg. Fergus Kelly’s work) include tenets from before the 1st C.

Myles Dillon, as head of the RHA, published a magisterial & convincing survey of the evidence linking Indo-Aryan and Celtish civilisation in his 1976 “Celts & Aryans”…

The explanatory argument for the continuities between the two cultures being that the pre-CE shared culture was preserved in many domains intact on the periphery (Ireland (and to some extent Wales)) and in India, while it was displaced on the continent and in what has popularly been called “Great Britain” since around 1800 CE by successive waves of cultural displacements.

It was from Ireland (and to some extent Wales) in the late so-called dark ages that Europe received its first textual renditions of very very very old tales such as those of Cuchalainn et al, which then, as mere echoes, found their way back via Arthurian and Lancelot type Romances from teuton and Walloon French territories: see for example WACHSLER, Arthur Alexander, 1938- THE CELTIC CONCEPT OF THE JOURNEY TO THE OTHERWORLD AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO ULRICH VON ZATZIKHOVEN’S LANZELET: A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF ROMANCE ORIGINS.

So, yes, Beowulf and the Faeryqueen themselves contain fragments of very old stories. But the direct links between Ireland and the continent themselves are much older.

Brexit, while extremely painful and traumatic for many of us who treasure unity between cultures, is merely a blink in the eye of this extremely long history of direct cultural, trade and ideological relationships between the continent and the island of Ireland.

Anyone who studies deeply German and French, particularly, work on philology and folklore/legends/myths from the 18th century onwards will be struck by how absent any reference to English culture is.

Through this perspective, the older-brother/younger-brother relationship some in England insist on projecting onto Ireland is a classic post-colonial viewpoint that privileges three centuries worth of ideologically lensed recent history over the totality of a history of direct contacts, unmediated by the island of Britain, between Ireland and the continent over two thousand years.

Looking at things from that perspective helps one understand the strength of feeling in Ireland about the European Union and its relationship to the EU.

1972 (joining the EU) and 1979 (the Irish punt’s decoupling from the GB£) was also an opportunity to decouple further itself from its former colonial overlord.

And Brexit, however painful, is an opportunity to consolidate the restoration of Ireland’s equal and direct relationship with its continental peers.