Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of E-Sharp magazine. Go to e-sharp.com.

For free access to all our podcasts to date. This is Paul Adamson, and I'm in conversation with Tony Connolly.

Tony Connolly is the Europe editor of RTE, the Irish broadcaster. Yes, Tony,

we are going to talk about Brexit, I promise you, but I'd rather start by not looking towards

the future, even the short-term future, but actually the past. As you chronicle in your book,

Brexit and Ireland, now in its second edition of May last year, the Irish government, before

Article 50 was triggered in March 2017, had this wind of

opportunity, if you like, or nine months of anxiety when they weren't quite sure what would happen

from their perspective and what extent the EU 26 would handle the upcoming Article 15 negotiations.

I mean, as you say in your book, but maybe it's been a bit of our listeners who haven't read your book. Tell us a bit about how the Irish government approached that

period between June 16 and March 17. It was a difficult period because the result was shocking

to the Irish government, but they had almost treated it as almost like a domestic referendum.

The government had put so many resources into following the campaign, and they had sent

ministers over to the UK to try and campaign as far as protocol permitted for a remain vote. And Dekeney, the T- the time was over quite a few times and he had got quite a good relationship with David Cameron but I think it gradually dawned on the Irish government very shortly before the referendum that this could go the wrong way from from their perspective so they they had done a fair amount of contingency planning, but I think

it's fair to say that their instinct the day after the referendum was to have a bilateral track

with the UK to try and figure out how this would be managed.

I suppose the government had prioritised the Irish peace process as the main collateral damage if there was a leave vote.

But they had looked at all of the implications for customs, for the agri-food industry, for energy.

So they had been scoping a lot of the issues,

and they had quite a detailed contingency plan in place.

But I think because of the very strong bilateral relations

between the two countries that had been at their zenith,

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