Dear Editor, I was glad to see Martin Mansergh (‘Somme anniversary is sober reminder of essential role of European integration’, IC 07/07/2016) rightly drawing connections between the Battle of the Somme and the dangers posed by England and Wales voting for the UK to leave the EU.
Some will doubtless see this as hysterical scaremongering, but Mr Mansergh’s article could hardly have been more calm or restrained in its explanation of the realities of modern international relations or its highlighting of the importance of the EU to the peace process in Northern Ireland.
It is sometimes said that unlike the countries of continental Europe, the UK has only ever had a transactional attititude to the EU, rather than a transformational one, because for the countries of the mainland, the European project has always ultimately been a peace project.
Whether it was a coal and steel community, or an economic community, or a loose political union, its aim has always been to draw countries, communities and peoples together so they would work together for peace.
Supposedly this has never been an issue for the UK, which has not experienced a foreign invasion in centuries, but this ignores how the UK is bigger than Britain, with no part of Western Europe having been more afflicted by conflict since the end of the Second World War than Northern Ireland.
The EU has, of course, been vital in the building of peace in the North. Mr Mansergh says it is difficult to see how that peace can have been strengthened by the Brexit vote. He could, I think, have gone much further. The Good Friday Agreement explicitly identifies itself as a treaty between two partners in the EU, and clearly rests upon that fact not least in terms of EU backing for cross-border activities.
If only our British cousins had remembered this!
Yours etc.,
Maurice Connolly,
Clondalkin, Dublin 22
