IT is a strange thing to say but Brexit has dominated 2017 and Brexit hasn’t even happened yet.
Even stranger is the self-evident fact that Brexit isn’t even happening to Ireland, it is happening to Britain.
It is happening to you over there, not us over here. We will still be in Europe and you won’t.
Yet, on the other hand, Brexit is very much happening to us and in that way Brexit teaches us a very valuable lesson. It reminds us of something that we have always already known.
Britain and Ireland are tied together in so many ways that the reason we squabble is no wonder. We squabble like siblings in a family. We squabble because we are always aware of each other.
It seemed, on first glance, as if the DUP’s stance during the Brexit negotiations was an example of how different the Irish and the British are.
The DUP are nothing if not obsessed with asserting their Britishness and taking offence at assertions of Irishness. It seemed as if, even on the island of Ireland itself, the gap between Irishness and Britishness was there for all to see.
Here we are separated by an imaginary border on a very small island that you could travel the length of in under nine hours.
You could travel in a car from the most northerly spot on this island to the most southerly, and in doing so you will travel from one country to another or from outside the EU to inside it.
Yet, in a way, the DUP’s and the Irish Government’s negotiations around Brexit ended up appearing as a local row that outsiders must have been just a bit bewildered by.
For all their differences, negotiations between the DUP and the Irish Government looked like a local row (Image: iStock)I can’t help feeling that the whole thing must have just looked like the ‘Irish’ rowing over things no one else really understood.
The difference and the row over the difference merely ended up looking like an entirely Irish affair.
So even the most extreme differences between us ended up not being that different after all, ended up just looking like the Irish being Irish. Even the British ones.
My own children have an interesting take on the British and the Irish. They have an English mother and an Irish father from Birmingham.
They have the experience of a big Irish family around them with many Birmingham voices in it and they have, on the other side, a totally English family.
In the simple way of children they often say brutally honest things.
My eldest, who is now at university here – and socialising with gusto – says things like ‘I’m glad I’m Irish instead of English, because the Irish are much better craic’.
The English aren’t a lot of fun are they, they say. Is that true?
In many ways the Irish are a better night out but there are so many differences in class and region in the UK that I don’t think that is particularly fair.
Perhaps the Irish I grew up with, the generation from the '50s that I grew up with, perhaps the communities they made were better craic. Well, not just perhaps, they were.
I’m not sure the Facebook generation here in Ireland though is any different from the Facebook generation in Britain. I’m not sure the Irish and the British are that much different anymore at all.
So we will find it very strange when you are out of the EU. It will be very strange that our nearest neighbours have marked themselves so distinctly apart.
We will still be watching your football teams as if their results mattered as much to us as Kilkenny, Dublin or Kerry.
We will still be watching EastEnders and Coronation Street as if the lives of those soap characters in London and Manchester mattered as much to us as the Dublin characters in Fair City.
We will still be thinking that Birmingham, London, Liverpool and Glasgow are Irish cities as much as British ones.
We will also stop and wonder as to just how different we all are anyway.
We will envy you your social mix and your vibrancy and your urban experience. You will envy us our friendliness and our social joy and the craic.
And we will secretly think that the differences between the Irish and the English are good for a laugh and a joke at the other’s expense but don’t really amount to much.
And strangely, it might just be Brexit itself that makes us think all of that.
