Bertie Ahern: Brexit deal possible ‘as long as Boris doesn’t have more dinners’

DUBLIN — Bertie Ahern, the former Irish prime minister renowned as a backroom negotiator, says clinching a Brexit deal should be only a matter of time and trade-offs.

Ahern, who in the 1990s worked closely with then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair to achieve the Good Friday peace accord for Northern Ireland, told POLITICO in an interview that key principles from those marathon Belfast talks should apply now.

He sees a possible Brexit deal if the EU gives Britain what it wants on fishing rights, and, in exchange, Britain gives the EU commitments on aligning with EU standards so as not to undercut the bloc.

“In any negotiations, when you come down to a handful of issues, it is unrealistic to think that one side is going to give in on all three or four of the key items that are left,” said Ahern, a plain-spoken Dubliner who was Ireland’s leader from 1997 to 2008.

He oversaw negotiations of a national wage pact between Ireland’s key employers and unions, then spent most of a year in Belfast working alongside Blair to coax unionists and nationalists towards compromise that often involved splitting the difference on seemingly intractable issues.

Ahern now sees London and Brussels reaching a similar finish line in negotiations “as long as Boris doesn’t have any more dinners and makes a mess of it again.” He said Johnson’s “bluster” plays badly in Brussels, but the British are right to seek a bigger slice of the fish pie.

“They’re being asked to stick to a system that dates to 1973. Denmark, Holland and France catch about 550,000 tons of fish in U.K. waters, and the U.K. catch only 94,000 tons in EU waters. It seems to me that if, with a bit of give and take, the British will get the balance on the fisheries against the EU’s level playing field.”

But Britain’s call for “sovereignty,” he says, cannot mean it can export into an EU single market “worth billions and skillions” without paying its proper dues.

“If you and I were members of a golf club and we paid our fee for the year, and then we went out every Saturday morning to find somebody else who pays nothing and is not a member ahead of us getting preference, any reasonable person would reject that,” he said. “That’s effectively what the British are looking for.”

Ahern said the long-term solution for U.K.-EU trade could well be third-party arbitration that avoids the Court of Justice of the European Union. This would reflect a distinctive feature of the Good Friday negotiations: While the governments of Britain and Ireland were key players and co-signatories, talks were overseen by neutral chairmen from the U.S., Canada and Finland.

“The arbitration issue on future U.K.-EU trade is quite sticky, because the British have such a hate for the European Court of Justice. The solution could be to find another arbitrator,” he said. “The British have a point here. You can’t impose a penalty without having some mechanism. By the end of the week, I believe you’ll see the British and the Europeans agree on such a mechanism, so that when new issues on trade come up, there will be a way of refereeing those disputes.”

Ahern said it would make good sense to reach a flexible Brexit trade deal that kicks unresolved issues into 2021. He noted that the Good Friday “agreement” required several years of follow-up negotiations to achieve core goals.

“It was a huge mistake, particularly when the pandemic hit, to insist that the Brexit transition period ends on the 31st of December. Trade deals can take years to conclude,” he said. “Trying to do this in a single year in the middle of a global pandemic was never a good idea.”