French Letter: The day France was stabbed in the back and I went to Dublin

Fans of the 1980 comedy-drama Airplane will recall the remarks of flight controller Steve McCroskey, played by Lloyd Bridges, as he realises that the day’s events are rapidly going from bad to worse, leaving him stranded in an impossible position. “Looks like I picked the wrong day to give up drinking/amphetamines/smoking/sniffing glue,” he tells us. 

I felt a little bit like that on Thursday morning when, as a journalist based in France, I woke up onboard the Irish ferry W.B. Yeats en route from Cherbourg to Dublin. For it turned out that I had picked the wrong day to detach myself from the news cycle.

As I undid the cap of my tube of toothpaste, Sky News informed me that the government in Canberra had abruptly abandoned a contract with the state-owned French Naval Group, worth €50 billion, to build 12 diesel-electric submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.

 Instead, a secret deal had been agreed with the United States and Britain under which the Australians would be equipped with an unspecified number of nuclear-powered hunter-killers.

Unsurprisingly the French had gone ballistic – unlike the newly promised Australian submarines, which will not, in fact, carry nuclear weapons. Yves Le Drian, France’s 74-year-old foreign minister, said he was “angry and bitter” over the decision, announced just as the French navy – La Royale – was preparing to celebrate the 240th anniversary of the Battle of Chesapeake, when French ships defeated a British squadron in support of the American Revolution. 

The celebrations, due to have been staged in the Chesapeake Bay, were cancelled, literally without ceremony. Le Drian could scarcely contain his rage. “It’s a stab in the back,” he spluttered. “We had established a trusting relationship with Australia, and this trust was betrayed.”

But then he really got going. “What most concerns me is the American behaviour. This brutal, unilateral, unpredictable decision looks very much like what Mr Trump used to do … allies don’t do this to each other … It’s frankly insufferable.”

Oh dear.

It was at this point that the captain of the W.B. Yeats interrupted Le Drian to inform me that the ship had entered Dublin Bay and would be docking on time at 10:45. There was just time for me to learn that the US, Britain and Australia had signed a defence pact, to be known as AUKUS, the clear purpose of which was to confront China in the Pacific and, by doing so, to reassert America’s role as the world’s number one superpower.

So where did this leave France, with its Pacific Territories population of 1.6 million? In the Tasman Sea without a paddle. As Bevan Shields, a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald later put it, slaps in the face didn’t come any bigger than this. 

Meanwhile, after two years of unbroken exile in France, my wife and I had made our way to the car deck, where we carefully assembled our papers in preparation for our arrival in Dublin. Our passports, Passes-Sanitaire and passenger locator forms were ready for inspection, as was the case of posh vin de Bourgogne destined for my oenophile brother-in-law’s extensive wine collection. 

I tried to keep up with the news on the car radio. But this proved impossible in the bowels of deck seven, so we passed the time saying hello to passing dogs and babies in their mothers’ arms instead.

By the time we disembarked and made our way slowly towards the customs lines, the talk on Irish radio in connection with Australia was not what I expected. In place of any assessment of AUKUS or of the insult delivered by Canberra to Paris, there was an interview with a Dublin man who worked in the nightclub trade in Sydney. He advised the Irish Government to change its mind about allowing clubs in Ireland, post-Covid, to remain open throughout the night until as late (or early) as 6 am.

 In Australia, he said, 70 per cent of the fights that broke out in clubs involved the Irish, and the more they drank, the more they fought. 

Well, he should know. In the meantime, it was our turn to talk our way past customs. The officer on duty was down on his hunkers so that his face was roughly level with ours. His knees were ready to give out, he said. But where were we going and what was the reason for our visit? 

Visiting family in the North, my wife said. “I hope it goes well,” he said. “Are you bringing any alcohol with you?” Just a case of wine. “That’s nothing,” the officer said, smiling. “You should see what some of them try to get past us.” And then he waved us through.

No one asked us for our papers. No one checked our QR codes, which we had in paper form and on our mobile phones. The passports we proferred out the side window were ignored. It wasn’t like France at all, where boarding the boat meant going through a series of hoops.

Three hours later, as we sat back on my sister’s sofa in Dublin, with her dogs on our laps, my brother-in-law asked if we’d seen the news about the French losing their submarines contract. “Slap it up them,” he said.

I was home.