Today's Ireland is built on political compromise. The UK could learn from its success | Martin Kettle

The Northern Ireland protocol is messy but it can be made to work, and is better than the Brexiters’ zero-sum approach

Brexit wounds. Covid failures. Fairness in retreat. Nationalism on the march. It is hard to find reasons to be cheerful about this country’s future as a successful state in the modern world. Yet in the west there is a gleam of hope. To see the kind of politics that the UK needs to learn from in this time of troubles, look no further than Ireland.

To many, this will seem counterintuitive. The suggestion that Britain can learn from Ireland flies in the face of the former’s long self-image of dismissive superiority towards “John Bull’s other island”. It upends the centuries in which British governments saw Ireland as a problem to be mastered and controlled, not as an island offering solutions, insights or lessons.

Related: Empire shaped Ireland's past. A century after partition, it still shapes our present | Michael D Higgins

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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