Ordinarily, the arrival of April in the northern hemisphere is a time of rejoicing for the meteorologically burdened.
We welcome spring.
Nobody was ever going to call the events of a few years ago the Arab Winter, even though for most it reverted to something reflecting such a description.
No, spring is a time for loosening up a bit, looking forward to sunnier days.
Unless you are mired in the Brexit Spring!
The United Kingdom, if it yet be such, is mired in it. Europe is mired in it, and Ireland is absolutely up to its neck in the potentially dire implications of it.
Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, opened the new month by stating that Ireland needs to prepare for the "worst possible outcome" on Brexit.
Mr. Coveney, according to RTE, said that the British political system is "unpredictable and semi-chaotic at the moment.”
Coveney was being diplomatic.
He said that a no-deal Brexit had shifted from a "remote possibility" to a "real possibility."
A no deal Brexit, pretty well everyone agrees, would be a disaster for Ireland, and likely to lead to a hard border on the island.
The contradiction in the spring air is of course the desire of the British government and Brexiteers in parliament to quit one union while somehow maintaining another.
A united Europe is expendable in their collective view, but not the integrity of the United Kingdom.
Yet a consequences of a hard Brexit could well force the question of a united Ireland into the full light of day.
And Scotland might decide that its future is in Europe and not as part of an island entity floating in less than splendid isolation off the edge of the “continent.”
So it is April and all eyes are on May, not on the next month, but on Theresa who must wake up these spring mornings thinking that she is starring in some never ending episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
It’s a circus for sure, but it’s not flying.
Rather, it has crash landed and the survivors are wandering about the place looking for a way back home.
Europe anyone?
