UK

Dan O’Brien: We shouldn’t get our hopes up about our relationship ‘reset’ with Britain

No matter who wins the leadership race, Boris Johnson’s successor is likely to tread familiar Tory terrain, from regulation to the Northern Ireland protocol

At a time when it is universally agreed that Dublin-London relations are dire, any prospect of a relationship reset is welcome. Picture: Aidan Crawley/Bloomberg

Will Britain slash taxes and thereby become a greater competitive threat to Ireland? Will our neighbour lure Irish-based businesses away by putting costly regulation on a giant bonfire in Whitehall now that it has the freedom to ditch EU laws? Will the next British prime minister continue along the path of unilaterally breaching the Northern Ireland protocol?

The answers to these questions are, respectively: no, a little, and yes.

At a time when it is ...