This election was Ireland's "Brexit" or "Irexit" as you might call it. Sinn Féin won 73 out of 105 seats and therefore a mandate to form the First Dáil and withdraw from Westminster. As a retrospective validation of the 1916 Rising and its principles, it was a seminal point in a chain of events that would culminate in the establishment of the sovereign Irish State.
How fitting then that 100 years later, the State born out of that very upheaval would effectively torpedo Global Britain - that grand plan of a fantasist fringe to revive the Empire. Of course a false equivalence should not be made between the two events. The Irish people's exit from the UK was a necessarily unilateral act against an Empire that did permit anyone to leave, whereas the British withdrawal from the EU sees it freely leave a voluntary political association of member states (via Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty).
Nevertheless there is an undeniable symmetry and therefore irony. This is especially so when we consider recent comments from some in the British Tory party about the behaviour of the Irish government during Brexit negotiations. The BBC reports of a grandee in the party who believes that "the Irish really should know their place".
It seems it is only dawning on some that Ireland is indeed a sovereign state and as such has the right to pursue its own interests, which may very well diverge with those of the UK. That it would take this long for the penny to drop is not totally incredible. Afterall, having a right and having the power to enforce that right are two very different things.
One does not need to be a Europhile to recognise that membership of the EU has greatly empowered us here. This is not to say that EU membership doesn't encroach upon our sovereignty in other ways, that the EU does not act out of self-interest or that the EU is not capably of bullying us.
But at this point in time, there can be no doubt that EU membership has worked in our favour. And we need to be a sovereign nation to draw upon that power and use it. Scotland, for example, lacks the seal of sovereignty and as such can only watch as an apathetic political elite ignores its interests. Without EU membership Ireland would not have this power. More fundamentally, though, without the seal of sovereignty, there would be nothing to empower.
So let us raise a glass to Ireland's great victory in 1918, which continues to pay dividends a century later.
