Ireland's prime minister, Leo Varadkar, talks about Brexit, Los Angeles and his advice, as an openly gay world leader, for Pete Buttigieg.
Sometime around AD 600, a handful of Irish monks decided that the rigors of fasting and penance on the mainland were not exacting enough.“Certainly what we’re doing is, in part, in response to Brexit,” he said, “but it’s something that I would argue we should be doing anyway.”
Brexit remains Varadkar’s most vexing challenge, largely because a so-called “hard Brexit” — one without a deal laying out a new relationship between Britain and the EU — would close the open border betweenNorthern Ireland and the Irish republic and impose a customs regime and tariffs on goods flowing between the two.
That could badly damage the economies on both sides, but Ireland has a greater worry: that the border will bring back the sectarian strife in Northern Ireland that largely ended with thewhich went into effect in 1999. That ended decades of bloody conflict known as “The Troubles” in the North, which is nearly evenly divided between Protestants and Catholics. The Republic of Ireland remains solidly Catholic.
“The biggest risk for us in terms of Brexit is divergence — that Britain becomes more different from Europe, becomes more different from Ireland, and that, therefore, pulls the communities apart in Northern Ireland too,” Varadkar said. That, he added, is “the fundamental problem of Brexit: The European Union [and] the Good Friday Agreement are all about convergence. They’re all about coming together, harmonization, standardization. Brexit is about diverging, splitting apart again, and that creates real risks for Northern Ireland.”
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