That unsettled feeling!

A million people marched through the streets of London yesterday, asking for the chance to vote on the whole Brexit mess. Mist of the papers carry pictures of it.

Goodness knows what the outcome of it all will be. Some time in the future someone will look back at this time and shake their heads in wonderment.

According to George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, some are already calling for an enquiry:-

 “Peter Ricketts, the former national security adviser and former head civil servant in the Foreign Office, cited the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. “Chilcot took a long time, but it was cathartic,” he said.
 “The report was widely seen to have done the job and I think you can say the British system is better for it. I think the handling of Brexit has been such a failure of the process of government, with such wide ramifications, that there needs to be a searching public inquiry.”
 “What advice was given to ministers? Was it taken? Did the processes of collective cabinet decision-taking work? Were the right skills available, for example on no-deal planning and all the costs involved? They are all legitimate questions for an inquiry. It should have the powers of a judicial inquiry.”
One senior Tory peer said: “We want our Chilcot.”” 

Goodness! Even the Tories want an investigation!

And who will get the blame in the end?

Whatever happens the country will not be the same again.

 I read that the number of applications for Irish passports has risen to record levels with almost a quarter of a million requests since January. The Irish foreign minister said the 230,000 applications represented a 30% increase on the same period last year.

It puts 2019 on course for the highest level of applications in the history of the country, after a record 860,000 Irish passports issued last year, with around 200,000 coming from the UK. Apparently more than 70% of the 2018 applications came from “the island of Ireland” which includes Northern Ireland, where all citizens can carry both Irish and British passports under the Good Friday agreement.

Nobody is commenting on any “Brexit bounce”, but the remaining 76,000 came from the UK and the rest of the world.

This compares with the total for 2018, when 98,000 applications came from Great Britain.

There’s a strange kind of unsettled feeling around. I know people who are finding it hard to plan for the immediate future, on a purely selfish level finding it difficult to plan holidays. A friend of mine who is going to Sicily with us, a group visit from the Italian conversation class, is debating whether she should buy Euros now as there is no knowing what the exchange rate will have tumbled to by the time we go in May.

By then there is a remote possibility we might have an idea of what is happening but you never know. The whole things might rumble on for years yet!