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Opinion: Clearly there is no trust between the UK and the EU when it comes to the Brexit deal and the Northern Ireland protocol
Should we be surprised? Not really. The British government has unilaterally decided to extend a grace period for post-Brexit checks on some goods entering Northern Ireland from Britain, without even extending the courtesy of reporting to Dublin or Brussels. As far as the EU is concerned, this is a flagrant violation of the Northern Ireland protocol that violates international law, and it is not the first time either.
The inability of the EU and the UK to work together and trust each other must be seen for what it is: a dismal failure. Four and a half years after the Brexit referendum in June 2016, and only a few weeks after the signing of the Brexit withdrawal agreement between the UK and the EU, there is still no trust between the UK and the EU. Increasingly, the creation of the EU many decades ago can be seen as a political miracle, an agreement built on an unlikely overlapping consensus between many different nations, each defined by its distinctive language, history and political culture.
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Taken from RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland, Foreign Minister Simon Coveney on UK changes to the Northern Ireland Protocol
International agreements are based on contracts, and contracts are the basic aspects of international law. Of course, there is something deeply technical and legalistic about the Northern Ireland protocol, but an agreement is more than a legal contract. Aside from the realm of law, the idea of a contract also evokes thoughts of a more metaphysical nature. This is what philosophers from the seventeenth century to the present refer to as “the social contract.”
Contractualism, or the idea that we seek social cooperation for the sake of justice and mutual benefit, is perhaps the dominant contemporary approach to moral and political theory, suggesting that the way we think about agreements, not just Legally but also morally, it is an important question. On the NBC sitcom The good place, the moral philosophy of contractualism occupies a central place, so much so that there are numerous references to the Harvard philosopher TM Scanlon, possibly the most influential living moral philosopher today.
In his book What we owe to each other (1998), also the title of an episode of The good place, Scanlon defends contractualism as a distinctive explanation of moral reasoning. It starts from the assumption that a good life depends on the positive value of a way of living with others, and that we have an obligation to other people in general. This obligation can be deciphered in terms of what constitutes wrong action: actions are wrong if a principle that allowed the action could not be justified to the affected people, or to put it in slightly more technical terms, we should govern life with rules that other people cannot reasonably reject.
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From RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland 1. Tony Connelly, editor of RTÉ Europe, talks about how the EU is considering taking legal action followed by the Northern Ireland Protocol
Right now, the UK and the EU are not in a good place. The alleged violation of the Northern Ireland protocol by the British government would indicate that they do not see the value of respecting the treaty signed with the EU. They do not feel an obligation to work with Brussels and they are not prepared to be reasonable. Maybe this move by Boris Johnson’s The government can justify itself to Conservative Party supporters and Brexit Party voters, but not to the vast majority of people living in Northern Ireland, Ireland or the rest of the EU, and certainly not to the next generation of citizens. from the UK and Europe.
It may be intangible and not financially quantifiable, but the breach of trust between the UK and the EU is perhaps the biggest victim of the Johnson government’s latest stunt. Trust, once again, has been broken between Brussels and London, and it will take a long time, even generations, to restore. Of course, to trust is to risk disappointment, but in the words of the 18th century English poet, essayist and biographer Samuel Johnson, “it is happier to be fooled sometimes than not to trust.” Unfortunately, the current UK Prime Minister has vastly different ideas than the other Johnson and will simply not trust anyone with a foreign accent.
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From RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland, EU Commissioner Mairead McGuinness talks about the UK’s decision to change the terms of Brexit
Life without trust is a regrettable situation. In her 2002 Raith Lectures ‘A Question of Trust’, moral philosopher Onora O’Neill makes a powerful argument for trust: “I believe that human rights and democracy are not the foundation of trust; rights and democracy “.
This is the real tragedy of Johnson’s decision not to abide by the Northern Ireland protocol. Trust often invites reciprocal trust and when it does, we have virtuous spirals. At the moment, there is no trust between the EU and the UK, so we are going through a vicious spiral, back to a Hobbesian state of nature where an atmosphere of deep mistrust prevails. All will suffer from Boris Johnson’s lack of political vision and his unreliable moral compass.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the opinions of RTÉ.
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