Don’t take the Brexiteer attitude to Northern Ireland personally, it’s simply reality they can’t stand

As Britain prepares for the next stage of its Brexit negotiations, there is going to be a lot of yelling at clouds.

The attacks on the Good Friday Agreement by prominent Leave figures this week represented the latest bewildering encounter between reality and the fantasy version of Brexit or, as they sometimes call it, Brexit.

In this fantasy, the UK should already be free, negotiating trade deals around the world, delighting in the welcome it receives as it exports afternoon tea to Japan and whisky to Mexico.

But the effortless Brexit of their imagination hasn’t happened yet and this failure must be explained away as the result of meddling or sabotage.

Donald Tusk can tell the UK that their latest reported aims are 'pure illusion' and they think it is because there is something wrong with this man who keeps insisting you can't have your cake and eat it when, to a fantasist, that seems like a perfectly reasonable approach.

Anything that impedes the Brexit which exists in the powerful imaginations of the fervent Brexiteers must be questioned, including the Good Friday Agreement.

Post-Brexit, the Northern Ireland border will be the point where the EU and the UK meet, but since the vote two years ago, it is no longer the frictionless crossing that was one of the dividends of peace. Now it represents the awkward clash between reality and fantasy.

The entirely coincidental attacks on the Good Friday Agreement at this time could be seen as a chance to alter this uncomfortable reality.

To paraphrase Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good As It Gets, once you remove reason and accountability, there is no problem at all in believing that anything is possible with Brexit. 

In this instance, the Brexit fantasists have decided that if Northern Ireland is going to be an ongoing problem for Brexit, then it is time to destroy Northern Ireland.

Like the Church demanding that Galileo recant when he said the earth moved round the sun, the Brexiteers depend on their faith. The Church believed that the earth was the centre of the universe so Galileo found himself at the Inquisition in 1633 taking it all back to prevent himself being burned at the stake. The Church subsequently apologised. In 1992.

So it can be hard to let go of these core beliefs, no matter how intrusive reason becomes. The idea that the world - or at least the part of it which will be forever England - remains at the centre of the universe is difficult for some to abandon.

The evidence is saying otherwise, but then the evidence can be seen as heresy, the work of saboteurs and the enemies of the people. The truth is different. The truth is that it is an act of patriotism for many in Britain to question Brexit. It is nationalism which has been unleashed by the vote and, whatever form it takes, that is a disease which ultimately consumes its host.

But while the fantasy persists, reason is under attack. Sometimes it can appear as if it is not a choice between a Hard Brexit and a Soft Brexit, but between the real world and a Big Rock Candy Mountain Brexit.

On Tuesday, Boris Johnson, who had failed to mention Northern Ireland at all in his speech outlining his vision of Brexit last week, explained the issue in a way which suggested his initial omission was simply because it is all going to be so straightforward.

“There is no reason whatsoever why we should not be able to exit both the customs union and the single market, whilst maintaining frictionless trade not only north-south in Northern Ireland, but with the rest of continental Europe as well,” he said, before riding away on a unicorn.

But the political reality in Northern Ireland doesn't help. On last Friday’s Late Late Show, Mary Lou McDonald gave an unconvincing explanation for her clenched fist ‘Tiochfaidh ar la’ at the end of her Ard Fheis speech.

“It refers to that vision of a new Ireland,” she told Ryan Tubridy, but, unless Sinn Fein have abandoned a core belief, that vision was presumably for a United Ireland and it’s hard to see how Unionists would want to live in it if that is the rallying cry.

In doing it, McDonald demonstrated her core weakness, a refusal to herald real change because she can’t abandon the hard men who might say ‘show us your medals’ when they scrutinise her approach.

So, despite the usual noises about reconciliation, McDonald used a phrase that brought back memories of terror and slaughter. The unionist community might wonder what kind of reconciliation this is when it looks like those they most fear are being reassured in the speech’s payoff.

Into this world of distrust and unchecked nationalism blundered Dan Hannan with his views on the Good Friday Agreement.

Hannan is a man who believes that he is simply “calling it”. He will occasionally label his views ‘an unpopular opinion’, something that should make all reasonable people as wary as they would be of anyone who insists on calling themselves ‘wacky’.

Dan has got his unpopular opinions, which he cherishes and nourishes as if they make him daring, like the man standing at the golf club bar who insists ‘you can’t say that nowadays’ while he says what you can’t say nowadays very loudly as he has been doing for the past 35 years.

So Dan has concluded that the Good Friday Agreement has served its purpose, which is just as well as some of its purpose is getting in the way of the Brexit they all believe to be possible if reality only got out of the way.

But these are not the only transgressions. The level of political discourse has been so debased that Michael Gove can describe David Davis and Boris Johnson as the “Messi and Ronaldo of the cabinet” and he isn't immediately declared permanently unfit for office. So they continue to detach themselves from reason and it all seems to make sense in their heads. As Brexit moves closer, they now resemble the worried well, obsessive hypochondriacs who leave the doctor’s surgery reassured but doubts begin to emerge as they climb into their car. ‘What exactly did she mean by that?’

You can see this obsessiveness when they declare that the EU would be “mad’ to deny them a good deal, as if this is the time to be questioning the mental health of another body while the UK is howling at the moon.

They can all agree at Theresa May’s Chequers meeting on how they will move forward and maybe they even mean it. They are reassured as they skip from the surgery, but then they encounter reality and it all feels so uncertain so they start to worry what she meant by that.

Like all fundamentalists, they prefer certainty which is what makes the real world so problematic. As he was led away in the Inquisition, Galileo was said to have muttered of the earth, ‘all the same, it moves.’ He knew what he had discovered. He knew the reality. The earth moves, but there will always be people who believe it should move in the opposite direction.