There is something faintly absurd about a family in Wexford unable to catch up on Bargain Hunt online, given that they can already watch it live on Virgin Media. Two islands, one natural broadcasting market, a shared language (mostly), centuries of intertwined history — and the streaming servers say: not for you.

The Invisible Wall

Let us be clear about what is and is not already happening. BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Four and Channel 4 are on the Virgin Media Ireland and Sky Ireland channel lists. Irish pay-TV subscribers can watch British television live. This is not a new development; cable operators in Ireland have been relaying BBC since 1963, when the signal was already reaching forty per cent of the population via rooftop aerials. The idea that Britain and Ireland share a broadcasting culture is not a proposal. It is a historical fact that the current arrangements are busy trying to undo.

What is blocked is catch-up. The BBC iPlayer is geoblocked at the Irish border. ITVX does not operate in the Republic. My5 is absent. A viewer in Cork who watches Countryfile on Sunday evening and wants to see what they missed at the start cannot do so. The programme was available to them live. The same broadcaster has decided, for reasons that dissolve under scrutiny, that the catch-up version is off limits.

The BBC made that geoblocking decision. It can unmake it. This requires no Irish government cooperation, no treaty, no intergovernmental working group. It requires the BBC to stop doing something pointless. Similarly, ITV and Channel 5 choosing not to operate streaming services in the Republic is a commercial decision, not a legal necessity. The combined Irish market is not negligible. The decision to ignore it is, at this point, simply habit.

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What the Programmes Could Do

Beyond the streaming fix, there is a larger question that broadcasters have simply declined to ask: what would British television look like if it acknowledged that Ireland exists?

Bargain Hunt films across the country — Coleraine, Harrogate, Wetherby, Shrewsbury. There is no editorial reason it cannot film in Wexford or Kilkenny. The antiques are there. The auction rooms are there. The enthusiastic amateur dealers who make terrible decisions are emphatically there. A Bargain Hunt episode in Coleraine followed by one across the water in a comparable Irish market town would barely register as a format change. It would, however, register with viewers on both sides as a signal that the programme considers them part of the same world.

Countryfile covers farming, landscape and rural life. The island of Ireland has all three in abundance. The agricultural policy questions facing an Irish hill farmer and a Welsh hill farmer are, post-Brexit, more divergent than they were — which makes them more interesting, not less. A Countryfile that occasionally crossed to Connemara or the Wicklow uplands would be a better programme as well as a more honest one.

A Place in the Country, Escape to the Country, the whole apparatus of aspirational rural property television: Ireland is one of the most obvious destinations for the British buyer priced out of the Cotswolds. It already happens in large numbers. Television has simply decided not to notice.

Then there is the celebrity dimension. I’m A Celebrity is one of the most-watched programmes across these islands. When The Edge is sitting in the jungle eating something unspeakable, that is a moment of shared archipelago culture. It should be available to a viewer in Galway on the same catch-up terms as a viewer in Guildford.

Sport: The Most Scandalous Omission

If any single issue illustrates the absurdity of British-Irish media separation, it is sport.

The GAA is the largest sporting organisation on the island of Ireland, with a diaspora presence across Britain that is substantial and comprehensively underserved. Gaelic football and hurling finals are followed avidly in Birmingham, Glasgow, and London — there are more GAA clubs in Britain than in several Irish counties. Yet BBC and ITV give them essentially nothing. TG4’s coverage of Gaelic games — genuinely world-class production on a fraction of the BBC’s budget — is invisible to a British audience that would, in considerable numbers, watch it.

Then there is the Six Nations. This is an all-islands event by definition — Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, all in it together, every February and March. Yet Irish viewers trying to catch highlights are told the content is not available in their region, as if Wales were on the far side of the moon. The tournament exists precisely because of the relationship between these nations. The broadcast infrastructure should reflect that rather than working against it.

Politics: The Coverage Gap Nobody Talks About

British news programmes cover French elections, German coalition negotiations, and Italian governmental chaos as a matter of routine. Irish politics gets essentially nothing, despite the fact that the Irish state is a closer neighbour than any of them, shares a land border with the United Kingdom, and is bound to Britain by the Good Friday Agreement, the Common Travel Area, and several hundred years of shared and disputed history.

The Andrew Marr Show, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Newsnight, Question Time: none of these treat Irish political developments as a standing item. The formation of a coalition government in Dublin, a Dáil debate on housing or immigration, a controversy at Stormont — these appear, if at all, as brief foreign-desk mentions. They should be part of the furniture, in the same way that Scottish and Welsh political developments are.

The Britannic Association makes no apology for saying so plainly. We are not a body that frames these arguments through the lens of historical grievance or post-colonial obligation. We say it because it is practically true: what happens in Dublin affects Belfast, and what happens in Belfast affects the rest of these islands. The coverage should reflect that, not out of sensitivity, but out of accuracy.

The Streamers Have No Excuse

Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, Amazon Prime: these companies operate as single entities across both islands. Their content libraries — less justifiably — do not. Licensing agreements mean that a show on British Netflix may be absent from Irish Netflix and vice versa. Viewers know this. They resent it. They route around it with VPNs, which puts them in the faintly ridiculous position of technically breaching their terms of service to watch a programme that was available to them last Tuesday in a different postcode.

The streaming platforms should be required, as a condition of operating in either jurisdiction, to offer a unified British-Irish library. This is a regulatory ask that both Ofcom and Ireland’s Coimisiún na Meán could pursue in parallel — and it is precisely the kind of practical, non-constitutional cooperation that the British-Irish relationship needs more of and gets less of than it should.

TG4: The Underused Asset

TG4 is one of the great quiet success stories of European public broadcasting, and most people in Britain have never heard of it. Operating on a fraction of the BBC’s budget, it produces drama, sport, music and documentary content of consistent quality. Ros na Rún has been running longer than The Wire ever did. Its GAA coverage is outstanding. And its Irish-language drama has attracted serious international attention — the kind of critical warmth that BBC Four used to generate for Scandinavian imports, before someone decided that was too niche.

The BBC should carry a TG4 strand — subtitled, scheduled intelligently, not buried at midnight. Language is not a barrier here. It is a feature. An audience willing to read subtitles through six seasons of Danish crime drama is well capable of following Irish-language drama with the same assistance.

These islands share a climate, a coastline, a sporting calendar, a diaspora, and in large part a language. Their broadcasters behave as though they share nothing.

The iPlayer should work in Dublin. ITVX should work in Cork. Irish politics should be on Sunday with Laura Kuenssbergwhen something significant is happening in the Dáil. Bargain Hunt should film in Wexford. Countryfile should know that Connemara exists. The GAA final should be available in Glasgow, where there are enough people who care about it to fill Hampden twice over.

These are not grand ambitions. They are, when you set them out plainly, rather modest ones. The only remarkable thing about them is that nobody has done them yet.

There is a special kind of institutional stupidity reserved for countries that are very good at creating things and catastrophically bad at keeping them. Britain has refined this into an art form. We invented the worldwide web, the jet engine, and the programmable computer. We currently do not own any of them in any meaningful sense. You’d think at some point we’d notice the pattern.

We haven’t.

The Britannic Association

The UK managed 18 IPOs in 2024. The United States managed 216. DeepMind was born in London and is now a division of Google, which is based in California, which is not London. Revolut and Monzo — built here, staffed here, regulated here at considerable expense — are both eyeing the New York Stock Exchange with the expression of people who’ve just discovered the local pub has been converted into luxury flats. The UK Parliament’s own Communications and Digital Committee has formally concluded that Britain is becoming an “incubator economy.” A creche for American venture capital. A very expensive research facility with someone else’s name on the door.

The remarkable thing about this catastrophe is how thoroughly optional it is.

The obstacles are not geological. They are the accumulated consequence of regulatory timidity, pension fund rules written by people who appear to believe that British growth companies are somehow riskier than Chilean copper futures, and a support infrastructure so labyrinthine that founders require consultants to navigate the application process for help they are theoretically entitled to receive. This is not bad luck. It is bad government, which is a different thing, because bad government can be fixed.

The combined English-speaking market of these islands is roughly 72 million people. Large enough to prove a product. Large enough to sustain a company through its awkward teenage years. Large enough, in short, to stop being a feeder system for Sand Hill Road. We are not short of talent, ideas, or capital. We are short of the institutional architecture to connect them. Here is what that architecture looks like.

First: The Britannic Scale-Up Passport. A company incorporated in the UK should be able to raise capital, hire talent, and operate commercially without drowning in duplicate regulatory compliance every time it crosses a border or opens a new market. Not harmonisation — nobody needs to surrender their framework. Mutual recognition of standards, the same arrangement the UK has already made with a dozen countries for professional qualifications. The City of London can extend this unilaterally to any jurisdiction willing to reciprocate, starting with the ones two hours away by air. If it works for Liechtenstein, it works for Cork.

Second: unlock the pension funds and build a proper growth vehicle. British pension funds are sitting on hundreds of billions in institutional capital, almost none of which flows to British growth companies. The Canadian pension funds — operating under rules that actively encourage long-term domestic investment — keep turning up on the shareholder registers of British infrastructure and British technology companies as if to make a point. We wrote the model they adapted. We declined to apply it to ourselves. Change the rules. Set a target. Then task the British Business Bank with a specific mandate: a fund of funds, capitalised seriously, that targets scale-up rounds in British companies and treats co-investment with allied institutions as a feature rather than an afterthought. This is not foreign aid. It is the government investing in its own tax base, which is the whole point of government.

Third: eliminate the friction, all of it, immediately. Roaming charges between the UK and Ireland are a self-inflicted tax on integration that costs nothing to remove and would be noticed the same day by every person it currently annoys. Remove them. Beyond that: automatic mutual recognition of professional qualifications across these islands, so that an engineer or doctor or lawyer qualified in one jurisdiction can work in another without a two-year reaccreditation odyssey. These frictions are not protecting anyone from anything. They are the sediment of administrative inertia, and inertia is not a policy.

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The talent is here. The ideas are here. The capital is here — it’s sitting in pension funds that have been given every regulatory incentive to look elsewhere and no compelling reason to look home.

That is a choice. It can be unchoiced.

We are not asking for vision. We are asking for competence. At this point, the bar is not high.

There’s a group of islands off the northwest coast of Europe. They share a language, a legal tradition, a literary canon, and a sense of humour dark enough to power a small city. Their people have been intermarrying for centuries — a significant chunk of the Irish population has a granny from Birmingham, and a significant chunk of Birmingham has a granny from Cork. They do about €100 billion of trade with each other every year.

One civilisation, more or less. Acting, institutionally, like two people who’ve been through a messy divorce and are communicating exclusively through solicitors.

Take the nurse. Irish woman, trains at a perfectly good British university, gets a perfectly good British nursing qualification. Comes home. Can she practise? Not automatically, no. Since 2021, mutual recognition of professional qualifications between the two countries no longer applies, so she now has to navigate a separate accreditation process as if her degree were from somewhere genuinely exotic. Meanwhile the UK has quietly signed mutual recognition deals with Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Two islands that have shared medicine, law, language and about four million family members apparently couldn’t manage what London sorted out with Reykjavik. You couldn’t make it up, except someone did, and then legislated it.

Then the phones. Citizens of both countries can move freely between them under the Common Travel Area — an arrangement older than either state, guaranteeing the right to live, work, vote locally and access public services on either side of the Irish Sea. Cross from Rosslare to Pembroke and you’re legally at home. Your phone, however, thinks it’s on a package holiday. Roaming charges apply. Two governments who’ve guaranteed each other’s citizens the right of indefinite residence can’t be bothered to sort out a basic telecoms arrangement. It’s a small, pointless, self-inflicted tax on a relationship that neither side seems particularly motivated to improve.

Nobody designed this. Nobody sat in a room and decided the islands should be less connected than they were thirty years ago. These are just the barnacles that accumulate when larger arguments — about Europe, sovereignty, history, the usual — get resolved without anyone asking “and what about the actual people?” The answer to that question has consistently been: we’ll get to it. Reader, they have not gotten to it.

Which is a shame, because here’s what we actually are when you look past the institutional faff.

The British and Irish watch the same television. Not similar — the same. Mrs Brown’s Boys, Normal People, Derry Girls: the cultural traffic flows so naturally in both directions that nobody notices the border crossings, because at the level of culture there aren’t any. The comedy is the tell — the same love of absurdism, the same weaponised understatement, the same instinct for finding the joke in the catastrophe. You can tell a room of mixed British and Irish folk a good joke and it lands identically. Try that with any other neighbouring countries in Europe. France and Germany. Spain and Portugal. Not a chance.

Rugby selects from both jurisdictions without anyone blinking. When Ireland beats England at Twickenham, the pubs in both countries are loud — differently loud, but loud. There’s no other pair of countries anywhere with quite this texture: combative, warm, historically loaded and fundamentally affectionate. We’re family, basically. The irritating kind you can’t stop loving.

So here’s the question. Given all that — the shared language, the shared culture, the shared legal tradition, the shared families, the €100 billion in annual trade — what exactly are we doing with it?

Because the answer, economically, is: not nearly enough.

London is the third most valuable tech startup ecosystem on earth. Ireland hosts serious European venture capital infrastructure and the European HQ of half the American tech industry. Between them, these islands produce genuinely world-class founders — and then watch them get acquired by Americans before they reach any serious scale, because neither domestic market alone is big enough to sustain them. This isn’t a UK problem or an Irish problem. It’s an archipelago problem, with an obvious archipelago solution: a genuine single space for scale-up capital, talent mobility and regulatory recognition that would make the British Isles the third largest English-language tech ecosystem on the planet. Behind only the United States. Ahead of Canada — which has, it must be said, been considerably more sensible about treating itself as a coherent unit than we have.

None of this requires constitutional upheaval. No flags come down. No sovereignty gets pooled. No referendums, no treaties, no ceremonies. It requires two governments to decide that building something serious together matters more than maintaining bureaucratic separation as a point of historic principle.

That is, granted, asking quite a lot.

The Britannic Association exists to ask it anyway — loudly, specifically, and with running documentation of exactly what’s being thrown away. We’re not a heritage society. We have no position on flags, constitutions, or any of the other questions that have historically made cooperation between these islands a blood sport. We have one position: that this archipelago is capable of considerably more than it’s currently managing, that most of the barriers are self-imposed, and that saying so is a service to the 72 million people who live here.

The British and Irish have been arguing about sovereignty for eight hundred years.

Meanwhile, the Dutch got rich.