The attempted murder of Margaret Thatcher by the IRA has been raised by a former prime minister of Ireland as an example of the gravity of the violence that Boris Johnson’s plans for the Irish border could fuel.
John Bruton, who was the taoiseach between 1994 and 1997, accused Johnson of seeking to create a “no-man’s land” at the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland.
“This is an open invitation to criminal and subversive organisations who have financed themselves in the past by smuggling”, Bruton told MEPs in Brussels.
“Given that one such smuggling-financed criminal organisation attempted to murder one of Mr Johnson’s predecessors as leader of the Conservative party, one would would be forgiven for thinking that he has not studied the history of his party as closely as he should have done.”
The IRA attempted to kill Thatcher in a bomb attack at the Grand hotel in Brighton on the first day of the Conservative party conference in 1984. Johnson is due to appear at the Tory conference in Manchester this weekend.
The former prime ministers of the UK and Ireland who signed the Good Friday agreement, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, also spoke of their concerns about the destabilising effect of Brexit on peace. Blair said it was “tragic” that tension had also been “injected” into the relationship between London and Dublin.
In a damning critique of the UK government’s policies at a conference in Brussels, Bruton said Johnson’s recent letter to the European council president, Donald Tusk had been highly significant.
In the letter, the prime minister spelled out his need for the whole of the UK to be able to diverge from EU standards in order to benefit from Brexit.
Bruton said Johnson’s insistence that checks and controls would not be enforced in the event of a no-deal Brexit looked like an attempt to tie the EU into reneging on its duties to protect its borders.
“Does prime minister Johnson want to break up the EU single market? Is that what he really wants?”, the former taoiseach said. “Because in his letter to his colleagues he said this government would not put in place infrastructure, checks or controls at the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland: ‘We would be happy to accept a legally binding commitment to this effect from the EU and hope that they will offer such a binding commitment’.
“He seems to want the EU to legally bind itself not to enforce its own rules at its own borders. He thus seems to want some sort of no-man’s land in the vicinity of the Irish border where no controls or checks will apply.”
Bruton said Northern Ireland’s status was being changed without the consent of its people and that the prime minister had offered “no specific content” that lived up to the obligations of the 1998 Good Friday agreement.
Ireland’s ambassador to the EU, Declan Kelleher, told the conference that the current taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, had reiterated his government’s position on Monday that the UK proposals so far on the border failed to meet expectations.
The UK has said it can agree to a single all-Ireland regulatory zone for trade in agrifood but that there would need to be checks and controls for other goods, with a customs border in place between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Kelleher said: “The immediate challenge we have is to ensure that the objectives set out in the backstop are reached fully and in all aspects. That’s the approach of the Irish government, the approach the taioseach is taking. It is also the position he has made very clear to the British prime minister as recently as yesterday.”
Kelleher said avoiding a hard border involved more than the absence of infrastructure but maintaining the status quo for the benefit of the all-Ireland economy and north-south cooperation. “I think those who remember the Troubles will remember that when the border was its hardest, there was never any infrastructure at the border.”
The ambassador said Dublin was not open to a “slicing and dicing” of the current arrangements.
