Last Thursday, senior members of the Irish and British cabinets came together in what Taoiseach Micheál Martin called “the most extensive summit in a generation” between the two states.

The British media paid scant attention to the gathering and, perhaps surprisingly, it attracted no attention here.

For the Republic it was a big media deal, with Keir Starmer giving a long interview on RTÉ.

The event was the inaugural summit in what is to be an annual meeting between the two heads of government and cabinet members.

The plan was announced last July when Starmer met Simon Harris, then taoiseach, at Chequers.

It’s Starmer’s initiative. He is frank about ‘resetting” relations with the Republic (as with the EU).

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In his remarks at the start of the summit meeting, he said “we have turned the page on the turbulent years” – the May-Johnson-Truss chaos.

Ironically, the meeting happened at Inglewood Manor, a hotel in the Wirral peninsula not far from another hotel where Leo Varadkar took Boris Johnson for a walk up the garden path in the grounds and Johnson agreed to what would become the Irish Protocol, what the British now call the Windsor Framework.

Is it a metaphor that the hotel Varadkar and Johnson met in has since burnt to the ground?

Starmer brought some........

© The Irish News