We send 3.6bn per year (and growing) to the EU...

I love how right-wingers like to construct imaginary bogus arguments designed to be easily knocked down so that they can enter a discussion to refute things that nobody in the discussion has said.

You only have to look at the progress of the Brexit process itself to see how EU membership has magnified Ireland's sovereignty, while Brexit has diminished the UK's. But that's a reality-based argument, so right-wingers don't feel any need to engage with it or learn anything from it.

I'm not evaluating the EU through a purely financial lens; I'm responding to (and rebutting) the purely financial arguments made by kermit in the first post.

I think it's rewriting history to say that "in the UK, it was a matter of parliamentary sovereignty, democracy, and border controls", given that economic arguments and claims featured largely in the Brexit campaign. There was the Brexit bus, famously, but also the claims about the trade deals the UK would make, the claims about the UK profiting by reorienting it economic relationships from stagnant Europe to rapidly growing China, the whole Singapore-on-Thames nonsense, etc, etc.

I accept, of course, that different Brexit supporters had different motivations. Not all were motivated by economic considerations, but many were, and the Brexit movement clearly expected and encouraged this, which is why they put such emphasis on the supposed economic advantages of Brexit in their campaigning. For obvious reasons, Brexiters now like to deny that such things were ever mentioned, but you shouldn't fall for that kind of gaslighting. The economic arguments for Brexit remain important if only because, if they hadn't been advanced in the campaign, it's unlikely that Brexit would have got over the line — with different people being motivated by different considerations, all the available arguments had to be pressed to maximise support and scrape over the line with 52%.

To the extent that Brexit was a matter of "parliamentary sovereignty, democracy, and border controls", I don't think you can say that the failure to realise the promises made is the result "successive UK governments rather than a failure of the concept itself." I've already pointed out the vivid illustration of how Ireland's sovereignty is maximised by EU membership, while the UK's is constrained by Brexit, and I think that does simply emerge from the nature of Brexit itself. Similarly the UK's issue with border controls is related to the fact that, with Brexit, they have fallen out of multilateral arrangements for managing these issues, and are reduced to alternating between begging and hectoring the French to solve their problem for them. And these examples could be multiplied.

I accept, of course, that Brexit was implemented astonishingly badly when, at least in principle, it didn't have to be. But even if it had been implemented less badly, I don't see how it could have delivered on the promises - economic and otherwise - that were made for it. I think the concept is fundamentally flawed.

You say that you "think Kermit is right to some degree, in that Ireland's relationship with Europe is not exactly ideal." I'm not sure that Kermit would accept that as a fair summary of his position; I think his views are rather more negative than that. But leave that aside. No-one is going to disagree with you that "Ireland's relationship with Europe is not exactly ideal"; all real-world relationships are less than ideal. And I honestly don't see anything to support your perception that advocates of EU membership "are unable or unwilling to even acknowledge the smallest criticism of the relationship between the two", not least because the discourse is rarely between those who think the relationship is fine as it is and those who think that it could be improved, but almost entirely between those who think the relationship should be one of membership and those who think there should be no relationship at all. The question of whether and how the terms of membership could be improved is rarely discussed, so nobody gets to deny that any improvement is possible.