Mr. Brendan Halligan:

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak. I will base my presentation on the synopsis of a book the institute is about to publish shortly on the changing relationship between Britain and Europe, entitled Britain and Europe: The Endgame. That expression is, of course, taken from chess and it signifies a moment when a very long game is about to come to the end. The institute’s UK project group believes this to be the case in respect of Britain and that we are coming to the end of a very long saga that began 70 years ago. We have built on two books we published previously on the matter, one in 1996 and one in 2000 under the leadership of Garret FitzGerald. Paul Gillespie was the editor on both occasions, as he is now. The current project group is being led by Dáithí O’Ceallaigh, who appeared before the committee very recently.

We take it that the common view is that Britain's very long and troubled relationship with the European Union is reaching a critical moment in history when the issue will be resolved one way or the other. We do not see this as another episode in the saga but the closing scene of a history that goes back over 70 years. There is no need to go into all of that. Members of the committee know the oscillating position, with one party in the UK being in favour of Europe and by nature the other party opposing it. One party changes its position and the other party changes its position. There is this constant oscillation of attitudes towards Europe.

To try to explain that to ourselves, we have created four scenarios to explain Britain’s relationship with Europe: a Britain that is fully in the European Union, supporting integration and participating in all policies; a Britain that is half in, generally supporting integration but not participating in things it does not want to; a Britain that is half out, opposing integration but accepting bits that suit at the time; and a Britain that is fully out, which is self-explanatory, reverting back to the pre-1973 position. For practical purposes nobody in the United Kingdom wants a fully in position. The Labour Party is in favour of being half in, while the Conservative Party clearly supports half out and many of its MPs and activists would prefer to see it fully out.

What the book is concerned about is that by a process of default, the current half-out position could morph into a fully out position without anybody noticing. In a sense we are saying this is a moment of great danger for Ireland and Europe. For that reason we end with a series of recommendations for other member states, for Europe as a whole and for us as people who are intimately involved.

We make one point on the referendum. We believe a referendum is inevitable in the immediate future irrespective of who is in government. Clearly it will happen under a Conservative-led government. The momentum is so great that we do not see a Labour-led government being able to withstand it. On the other hand, British legislation would require a referendum were it to be a substantial transfer of sovereignty from any member state to the European Union. In other words, we think this will happen.

Therefore, we had better prepare for the inevitable. We have started by looking at the demands the Conservative Prime Minister has placed on the rest of the Union. We are all familiar with his Bloomberg speech, augmented by the Daily Telegrapharticle. As far as we can see, there are seven demands in all: two relating to borders, two dealing with business and trade, and three focussed on the recovery and preservation of sovereignty. We believe these demands boil down to a simple proposition: Britain has no intention of taking on responsibilities for which it has already received or won a derogation, such as on the euro. It does not want to assume any new commitments, such as banking union, and it wishes to be relieved of some of its existing obligations, such as the free movement of persons. It wants to recast the rights and obligations of EU membership on its own terms. It is also clear that while changing its terms of membership is a central objective, membership of the Single Market is the overriding objective. It wants to stay inside the Single Market to have access to European markets. However, there is a problem in this regard because access to the Single Market has a price and, quite frankly, the British Prime Minister, Mr. Cameron, is not willing to pay that price.

However, there is more to it than the Single Market. As expressed in the Bloomberg speech and repeated in the Daily Telegrapharticle, the British Prime Minister, Mr. Cameron, does not wish Britain to participate any further in the process of ever-closer Union among the peoples of Europe. The problem with that is it goes to the very heart of EU membership since ever-closer Union is the first objective of the treaties and one to which Britain solemnly subscribed when it became a member in 1973. The key point is that British Prime Minister, Mr. Cameron, wants to freeze Britain’s membership of the Union at the point at which it is now. More than that, he wants to freeze the European Union at its current state of development. That is a complete misunderstanding of what the European Union is. It is an open-ended dynamic organisation, forever widening its membership, extending its policy agenda and deepening the interdependence of its member states, of which the euro is the most visible expression. The eurozone has become the real core of the European Union. As it furthers its integration, of course, and as Britain stays still, then the distance between Britain and the rest simply gets bigger.

The book suggests that the referendum offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to deal with this dilemma. We suggest coming up with a bespoke solution for the United Kingdom which will endure indefinitely and bring these repeated crises to an end. I think that people will need to swallow hard here and accept that Britain will never join the euro, the Schengen area, the fiscal compact and so on. That should be explicitly accepted by the other member states and would meet the demand that Britain, at least under the Conservatives, would not be required to go any further with closer Union. Where we really need imaginative solutions are on border controls. This could be done by marrying Britain’s desire to be a full member of the Single Market with the common need to protect the Union’s common borders from terrorist infiltration, as well as the common need to limit welfare tourism and control mass immigration. Bundled together and adding in energy and cyber security, we could have a "security union", of which Britain would be a full member. President Juncker has proposed to create a capital markets union and obviously the UK would be a member of that. All in all, the European Union would have four core functions of which Britain would be a member of three. It would not be a member of the economic and monetary union but would be a member of the Single Market, the security union and the capital markets union. That might be sufficient to keep it inside.

I have a word of warning about lists such as those to which we have referred. I said there were seven demands that we could identify from the speech and the article. Lists can be very misleading because they cloak the underlying reasons for Britain's opposition to Europe, which are cultural and psychological and are borne of a very complicated past and bred of a complex future. In politics we all know there are publicly expressed good reasons for doing or not doing something, but behind that there are always the real reasons, usually unexpressed. In the case of Britain, or more specifically England, the real reasons have been expressed by no less a person than Winston Churchill as long ago as the late 1920s and early 1930s when he said: "We are with Europe, but not of it." In other words, it wants to be in but out at the same time. If one was to be unkind one could say have one's cake and eat it at the same time. That is why the lists keep moving and it is very difficult to pin down what exactly the British Prime Minister, Mr. Cameron, wants.

If is self-evident that withdrawal would be a huge blow to the European Union and would cause particular difficulties not least for Ireland but Northern Ireland in particular. We believe that if Britain opts to leave the European Union, Scotland will almost certainly demand a separate referendum and it is almost inevitable it will decide to remain inside the European Union, at which point the United Kingdom will break up and the result could be the United Kingdom of England and Northern Ireland, which would make Northern Ireland an orphan. This would create a huge range of economic issues for Ireland, as detailed at length in a number of chapters in the book. Also examined in the book, and referred to earlier by Baroness Quin, is Britain's future relationship with the European Union. In this regard we have identified approximately seven models, all of which would be difficult for Ireland and many of which can only be regarded as fantasy solutions to Britain's problems.