UK crushes Ireland even as it moves away

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

You’re crammed into a car with your entire extended family, hurtling down a hill when the brakes fail. Pedal to the ground horror. Up ahead the road forks. One way heads up a hill towards a garage, the other downhill, straight for a cliff edge. One way your car stops and everyone is safe; the other you all crash to your deaths or, if you’re lucky, suffer unattractive painful injuries.

The car is the UK, and while we might hope that a nation powered by the fifth largest economy in the world would have the sense not to aim for the cliffs, the Prime Minster clings madly to her steering wheel.

Instead of asking the EU for more time, she hopes her car might fly.

In an attempt to keep in touch with feelings in my native country, I watch the audience on David Dimbleby’s BBC Question Time. Picked to represent complete cross-sections, these British people are erudite, intelligent and witty.

My English heart feels proud of this essentially British mix of cultures, creating a national and natural charisma, and then, like Nancy Sinatra, they go and spoil it all by saying somethin’ stupid like:

“I was a Remainer but now I don’t care. Just get on with it and Leave. I can’t bear it any more.”

Aim for the cliffs?

What’s the rush?

The British are famously a stoic bunch, so why don’t they think past their impatience, rather than destroying their childrens’ future?

Generally, if the Tories say they’ll do something dreadful, they do it, and it’s dreadful. Universal Credit springs to mind, but now they’re about to drive the entire nation over No Deal Cliffs, and few seem to care, because they are so wretchedly bored with Brexit, they just want it over.

“If it were done when ’tis done, t’were well it were done quickly!”

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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