The Irish Times has unaccountably changed a sentence in the last paragraph from "Fool me once, shame on you" to "Fool us once, shame on us" - which it strange, as it is a well known saying popularised by (amongst others) President Bush!

Index of Frank's Diaries

Invoking Art. 16 would be too confrontational and the EU Commission would need to act. I expect both parties to circumvent that underwater cliff and accept a watered-down NI Protocol ... kicking the can down the road. The EU knows the Biden administration is pushing back on Boris Johnson and wonder how much of EU envoy Šefčovič's proposal was coordinated with Washington.

Lord Frost and Šefčovič discuss NI Protocol in Brussels

Furthermore both the UK and EU are in a stranglehold of extremist members. Johnson pushed by domestic issues and the EU by increased division amongst its members and some crucial elections and election results.

'Sapere aude'

I think the EU are playing a waiting game. They're not rising to the bait simply because they can legitimately respond to the UK that, "yes we are taking you seriously, hence the recent offer, but we have problems in our own backyard that require immediate attention". The diplomatic equivalent of a telephone answering machine message, "your call is important to us and an agent will respond as soon as one is available. You are currently....third in the queue".

But they can also read polls. they can take a reasonable punt on the unionists getting reduced to an ineffective rump in the next Stormont parliament, when the republican and unionist parties of ascendancy will be Sinn Fein and Alliance. That is going to deny Westminster a chorus in Stormont. The dynamic is flowing in the EU's direction if they're patient. They just have to ride out the next few months

keep to the Fen Causeway

soooo, one would be foolish to assume that Biden is "hostile" to BoJo, personally, or UK, generally. The more honest appraisal of US national interest, embodied by some in a POTUS, personally rather than officiously, is indifference to either headline parties to the NI protocol. And though the EU is not one of those in the vainglorious imagination of today's media-mediated immigrant nation, I promise, you the whole of the federal government is focused on balancing the perennial US-EU trade deficit--not intervening in "tribal" negotiations of the "ancestral homelands".

Money talks, bullshit walks: It's like an American motto.

The UK approach to Northern Ireland is one of casual political vandalism https://t.co/j0bHdMYwjR | opinion

— Financial Times (@FT) October 15, 2021

Brexit causes sharp fall in Irish lorry freight on Irish Sea ferries
Truck freight volumes fall by a third on Dublin-Holyhead route in nine months

n a further sign of Brexit affecting trade, lorry freight volumes on ferries between Holyhead and Dublin - the busiest Irish Sea route - fell by a third in the first nine months of year.

New industry figures to be published shortly will show a sharp reduction in the number of lorries moving between Ireland and Britain and across the "landbridge" to mainland Europe as companies prefer the certainty of direct routes without border checks and controls.

Dublin and Rosslare have recorded sharp declines in lorry freight traffic between Ireland and Britain but a surge in freight volumes on direct routes as traders avoid post-Brexit Britain.

There has been an increase in lorry freight moving on ferries between Northern Ireland and Britain as hauliers move away from ports in the Republic to avoid checks on goods.

Neither Dublin Port or Rosslare Europort have experienced the disruption to shipping witnessed in the UK where shipping companies have had to divert supersized cargo vessels away from Britain because of bottlenecks in the global supply chain and a shortage of lorry drivers.

The world's largest shipping company Maersk was forced to send ships bound for the English port of Felixstowe, the UK's largest commercial port, to Rotterdam and Antwerp after the port suffered a chronic build-up of containers and 20,000 container ships were waiting days to dock.

It is worth noting that as well as increasing north-south trade within Ireland, Brexit has resulted in an increasing east-west trade between Britain and N. Ireland. So much for the Protocol's alleged damaging of trade links between Britain and N. Ireland...

Index of Frank's Diaries

The Union will not survive the end of the NI Protocol - Brendan Heading - Slugger O'Toole

the peace process [...] is about stabilising the Northern Ireland state, parking the constitutional question to avoid it being a distraction, and governing it under cross-community consensus within the UK. Since Unionism by definition poses no democratic threat to the status of NI as part of the UK, it follows that there is a need to find ways to disincentivise the Irish unity case, which the NI Protocol achieves by ensuring there is no border within the island of Ireland [...]

To remove the protocol is therefore to remove a disincentive for Irish unity; [...] which would kickstart a future unity campaign. [...] Irish reunification would move from being a solution in search of a problem, to a solution that solves many problems, enabling full access to the single market to be reinstated for the whole island and finally an escape from the Johnson Tory party's political nihilism.

_{Schengen is toast!}

David Puttnam rues `pig-ignorance' of Ireland in British politics

Film producer David Puttnam has announced his retirement from the House of Lords, citing the "pig-ignorance" of some British legislators about Ireland among his reasons for leaving.

Lord Puttnam (80), who has lived in West Cork since 1998, said he watched Conservative ministers "malevolently twist, turn and posture in parading their prejudices", during the Brexit debates.

"In discussions regarding the Republic of Ireland, and the complexity of finding sustainable post-Brexit solutions, I was staggered at the display of pig-ignorance towards the fundamentals of Irish history, let alone sensitivity towards the reality of cross-border relationships.

"Had they really become so disconnected from the ghastly history of what we euphemistically call `the Troubles'?" he said on Friday evening in a lecture in honour of the late Labour and Liberal Democrat politician Shirley Williams.

"As someone who lives just across the Ilen River from the site of what is probably the largest and most recent mass famine-grave on these islands, I may well be ultra-sensitive to these issues, but with a few notable exceptions, the level of empathy and understanding on display in both Houses was truly shocking."

Lord Puttnam's films include Chariots of Fire, which won an Oscar for Best Picture in 1981, Midnight Express, The Killing Fields, The Mission and Local Hero. A member of the British Labour party, he was nominated to the House of Lords by Tony Blair in 1997 and has been active on committees, focusing particularly on regulation of broadcasting and digital communications.

<snip>

"Mirroring the anxieties of many of those angry Brexiteers in 2016, I feel I've had my country of birth, and the values I believed it to represent, stolen from me.

"It's worse than that, I find myself embarrassed by what, on an almost daily basis, I see it becoming - my old enemy Rupert Murdoch's dream made real. He never liked Britain, and he's kind of won; he's helped remake it in his own malevolent image," he said

Index of Frank's Diaries

Watching Claire Byrne dismantle Nigel Ferret in living color yesterday was highly entertaining.