Second Brexit referendum would be ‘very dicey’, says Bertie Ahern
A second referendum on Brexit could be “a very dicey scene” and far from the simple task some people think it would be, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has told an economic conference devoted to Brexit.
Mr Ahern, who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement, said his preferred approach would be one in which a few options would be quickly narrowed down to a final three to be negotiated upon.
Then and only then, could Mrs May go to Europe and successfully look for an extension of Article 50.
“If you went over today and said: ‘Can we have an Article 50 extension’, they probably would just tell you: ‘Take a hike’, and if they didn’t, they should,” he said.
Mr Ahern, delivering the keynote address of the second annual Killarney Economic Conference, said while the goings-on for the past few nights has been “better than the football”, Brexit was now “so boring” at this stage, that he wanted to broaden to speech to globalisation and took a number of verbal swipes at US President Donald Trump saying he is living in a world of “dog-eat-dog competition”.
“His view is that since the rules and obligations of multilateral organisations constrain the United States, these institutions should be ignored, weakened, or disbanded entirely,”
Trump’s actions were to destroy the architecture and institutions of “global governance “ which the US itself had built along with the UK.
Global governance included norms, rules, regulations, treaties, non-governmental organisations, international organisations and treaties, digital privacy, tackling a warming planet. World trade is now beyond the capacity of any one state, however large and powerful, he added.
Cooperation or multilateralism was necessary to solve the world’s problems, Mr Ahern said.
But institutions like the European Union and United Nations were under attack now in a “rising tide of populism and xenophobia”.
“This charge against multilateralism has been led by none other than President Donald Trump. The Trump world view is that we live in a world of dog-eat-dog competition. Power rather than ethical norms is the predominant virtue,” Mr Ahern said.
Since multilateralism constrained the power and the size of the United States, global institutions were being ignored and that’s why the US president was withdrawing from trade and climate change agreements, he said.
Mr Ahern also accused President Trump of coming from a standpoint of power politics based on “a jaundiced view of human nature”.
And at one stage, during questions, even said he would canvass for a candidate who stood against Trump.
Populism had grown in the last few years in Latin America also, and a number of new leaders were emerging who had gone to the same school as Trump in terms of their attitude and were becoming “wreckers”, Mr Ahern said during questions.
Trump was going down the list of international organisations “and stirring up trouble”.
The only good thing was his poll ratings were going down, he said.
“I would be tempted to go canvass for a good candidate in the next election,” said Ahern, before adding that he feared the Democrats would nominate 10 candidates and spend the next few years fighting each other.
