The Islands That Forgot Themselves

It’s time we British and Irish people got our act together

There’s a group of islands off the northwest coast of Europe. They share a language, a legal tradition, a literary canon, and a sense of humour dark enough to power a small city. Their people have been intermarrying for centuries — a significant chunk of the Irish population has a granny from Birmingham, and a significant chunk of Birmingham has a granny from Cork. They do about €100 billion of trade with each other every year.

One civilisation, more or less. Acting, institutionally, like two people who’ve been through a messy divorce and are communicating exclusively through solicitors.

Take the nurse. Irish woman, trains at a perfectly good British university, gets a perfectly good British nursing qualification. Comes home. Can she practise? Not automatically, no. Since 2021, mutual recognition of professional qualifications between the two countries no longer applies, so she now has to navigate a separate accreditation process as if her degree were from somewhere genuinely exotic. Meanwhile the UK has quietly signed mutual recognition deals with Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Two islands that have shared medicine, law, language and about four million family members apparently couldn’t manage what London sorted out with Reykjavik. You couldn’t make it up, except someone did, and then legislated it.

Then the phones. Citizens of both countries can move freely between them under the Common Travel Area — an arrangement older than either state, guaranteeing the right to live, work, vote locally and access public services on either side of the Irish Sea. Cross from Rosslare to Pembroke and you’re legally at home. Your phone, however, thinks it’s on a package holiday. Roaming charges apply. Two governments who’ve guaranteed each other’s citizens the right of indefinite residence can’t be bothered to sort out a basic telecoms arrangement. It’s a small, pointless, self-inflicted tax on a relationship that neither side seems particularly motivated to improve.

Nobody designed this. Nobody sat in a room and decided the islands should be less connected than they were thirty years ago. These are just the barnacles that accumulate when larger arguments — about Europe, sovereignty, history, the usual — get resolved without anyone asking “and what about the actual people?” The answer to that question has consistently been: we’ll get to it. Reader, they have not gotten to it.

Which is a shame, because here’s what we actually are when you look past the institutional faff.

The British and Irish watch the same television. Not similar — the same. Mrs Brown’s Boys, Normal People, Derry Girls: the cultural traffic flows so naturally in both directions that nobody notices the border crossings, because at the level of culture there aren’t any. The comedy is the tell — the same love of absurdism, the same weaponised understatement, the same instinct for finding the joke in the catastrophe. You can tell a room of mixed British and Irish folk a good joke and it lands identically. Try that with any other neighbouring countries in Europe. France and Germany. Spain and Portugal. Not a chance.

Rugby selects from both jurisdictions without anyone blinking. When Ireland beats England at Twickenham, the pubs in both countries are loud — differently loud, but loud. There’s no other pair of countries anywhere with quite this texture: combative, warm, historically loaded and fundamentally affectionate. We’re family, basically. The irritating kind you can’t stop loving.

So here’s the question. Given all that — the shared language, the shared culture, the shared legal tradition, the shared families, the €100 billion in annual trade — what exactly are we doing with it?

Because the answer, economically, is: not nearly enough.

London is the third most valuable tech startup ecosystem on earth. Ireland hosts serious European venture capital infrastructure and the European HQ of half the American tech industry. Between them, these islands produce genuinely world-class founders — and then watch them get acquired by Americans before they reach any serious scale, because neither domestic market alone is big enough to sustain them. This isn’t a UK problem or an Irish problem. It’s an archipelago problem, with an obvious archipelago solution: a genuine single space for scale-up capital, talent mobility and regulatory recognition that would make the British Isles the third largest English-language tech ecosystem on the planet. Behind only the United States. Ahead of Canada — which has, it must be said, been considerably more sensible about treating itself as a coherent unit than we have.

None of this requires constitutional upheaval. No flags come down. No sovereignty gets pooled. No referendums, no treaties, no ceremonies. It requires two governments to decide that building something serious together matters more than maintaining bureaucratic separation as a point of historic principle.

That is, granted, asking quite a lot.

The British and Irish have been arguing about sovereignty for eight hundred years.

Meanwhile, the Dutch got rich.

AI Disclosure & Transparency Note

This article was created using an extensive AI-driven workflow for initial research and drafting. The text was subsequently edited, rewritten, and polished by me to reflect my personal writing style and remove typical AI phrasing. While the tone and structure are entirely my own, please note that the core data points and background research have not been rigorously fact-checked. The content is intended for general informational purposes and does not target or defame any individual.