At this stage of the exit negotiations, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is not a technical issue but a political one, argues Katy Hayward (Queen’s University Belfast). She explains exactly why the Northern Irish/Irish issue is a block preventing the Brexit talks from progressing, and provides suggestions on how to shift it.
It is quite clear from communications from the EU this past week that there has been insufficient agreement across all three of the priority issues (citizens’ rights, financial liabilities, Northern Ireland/Ireland) for the Brexit negotiations to move into the next phase of talks. Of these three areas, the one centring on the Irish border appears to be particularly complex and thorny. In order to assess the prospects for (and means of) progression on this matter, it is important to acknowledge what has already been achieved.
First, we should not underestimate how significant it is that the EU and UK government share several core principles when it comes to Northern Ireland/Ireland issues. They are agreed on the need to protect the peace process, to uphold the 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement ‘in all its parts’, and to avoid a hard border across the island. Although each side may interpret these aims differently, the fact we have the same language being used is a strong starting point for negotiation.
Added to this, we also seem to have had significant progress on the preservation of the Common Travel Area. Agreement on the Common Travel Area means that there will be no new immigration controls for British and Irish citizens moving between these islands. It also allows for necessary bilateral cooperation between Ireland and the UK on these matters. Although not comprehensive (the question as to what rights these citizens will enjoy in the different jurisdictions is still to be decided), it is welcome progerss.
Now to the topic that appears to be growing as an obstacle to progress: the Irish border. The UK government believes it quite impossible to offer further detail on the subject until the future customs relationship is clear; it sees the EU’s intransigence as mere game-playing. For its part, the EU believes that it has already made a significant concession in being willing to allow a ‘flexible’ solution for a region that will be outside the EU; it is waiting for the UK to reciprocate with a flexibility of its own.
There is a logic to both positions; the reason they are failing to meet in the middle is that they are coming from fundamentally different interpretations of two core elements in those shared principles. First, the meaning of a ‘hard border’ and, secondly, what is needed to ‘uphold’ the Good Friday Agreement.
To take the matter of a ‘hard border’ first. The logic of the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union has been to create frictionless and seamless borders; it is the common rules and standards (and the means of enforcing these) that have removed the need for border checks on goods.
Despite propositions for a ‘customs partnership’ or ‘streamlined customs arrangements’, the Prime Minister explicitly stated in her Florence speech that the EU and UK will have different economic goals, achieved through different means. She also said, “when we differ from the EU in our regulatory choices it will be because we want rules that are right for Britain’s particular situation.” Not ‘if’ but ‘when’.
If Northern Ireland is wholly part of the UK’s economic choices there has to be a hard border across the island of Ireland
If Northern Ireland is wholly part of the UK’s different economic goals, means and regulatory choices, there has to be a hard border across the island of Ireland as a means of protecting the integrity of the EU’s internal market. The only way of avoiding such a hard border is to allow for rules (and their enforcement) in NI that continue to match those operating in the EU.
This does not automatically mean a block to goods moving from NI into the rest of the UK, nor does it mean the imposition of barriers to all goods coming from GB into NI. The details as to which goods this would apply to (and how) can be worked out in Phase II of the talks, Barnier has conceded this. Instead, what is sought from the UK government is acknowledgement in principle of the need for (limited, specific) flexibility in the treatment of NI.
Such flexibility can be seen as correlated with the means of moving the second blocking point, that of interpretation of the 1998 Agreement. The EU’s guiding principles on Ireland/Northern Ireland published in September states:
“A thorough understanding of the other issues beyond customs arrangements which are relevant to the border is also required in order to move forward”.
The EU is looking for the UK to directly address the political, security, and societal dimensions of the post-withdrawal arrangements for NI.
There are resonances here of the standoff between the UK and the rest of the EEC regarding the Haagerup Report of 1984, in which the European Parliament made its first venture into addressing the conflict in Northern Ireland. The British government loudly protested such external ‘interference’ in what it considered to be a ‘domestic’ matter. However, within a short time, it too was recognising the necessity of an ‘Irish dimension’ in any ‘solution’ to the conflict; the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 encapsulated such an approach, much to the anger of Unionists at the time.
The EU wants the UK to directly address the post-withdrawal arrangements for NI
Unionists have been much happier with the 1998 Agreement and its successors. The 1998 Agreement formally recognises the strands of relationships – Nationalist/Unionist, north/south, British/Irish – that together determine the stability and peace of the region. It is with this in mind that the Agreement should be centre stage of the next steps in moving the Northern Ireland/Ireland issue on in the Brexit negotiations.
The longer this issue remains a block on talks, the deeper the uncertainty among peoples most directly affected by any change to the UK/EU relationship. The UK government has an incredible responsibility here, and the economic and political future of Northern Ireland depends on how it is exercised.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Brexit blog, nor the LSE.
Dr Katy Hayward is Reader in Sociology & Senior Research Fellow, Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast.
After twenty years of the GFA being in place there has yet to be an effective co ordinated Anglo-Irish political answer to the ongoing everday terror inflicted by various paramilitary gangs that still hold absolute sway in most parts of the Province.
There has yet to be any serious political movement on the underlying faultline of Northern Ireland’s deeply sectarian educational system.
There has yet to be any answers from the British government or their Troubles counterparts local Northern Irish terrorists, for the thousands of families and their close friends across this society whose lives remain frozen in trauma as long as the truth about exactly how and why and by whom their loved ones were casually raped and beaten and murdered with continuing criminal impunity.
Although there are small pockets of extreme privilege, where it is peaceful and michelin star restaurants and spa hotels are as common as they are across the rest of the globalised countries visited by tourists, most are in or near where the highly paid middle class public sector machine live and work. These areas largely untouched by the Troubles are receiving the bulk of the Peace economic dividends.
There remain heinous levels of economic deprivation across the Province which local politicians by their daily actions seem to want to keep oppressed and in cultural conflict in order to garner votes. It is a mess.
Quite frankly, the border issue whatever way it turns out may well be seen by the technocrats and its handmaiden the mass media to be the spark to light to fires of a new hot civil war but really, the torch is the twenty years and counting of terrible political neglect by smug conflict junkie apparatchiks too busy trying to garner the Peace gravy train whilst the bulk of the Province and its people is simply left to fester and rot.
“The only way of avoiding such a hard border is to allow for rules (and their enforcement) in NI that continue to match those operating in the EU.”
Patently untrue — the EU and UK could decide to mutually recognise each others’ product standards, and set up some mechanism to help ensure that neither party’s noses get out of joint. This is obviously what May is diving at. The EU already makes extensive use of this mutual recognition principle, and as the article notes, the situation in NI requires them to be rather flexible.
There is — of course — the other option of taking up that great Irish invention at Shannon, and turning all Northern Ireland into a unilateral free trade zone. As long as EU product standards are accepted in NI, there would be no need for tariff, standard compliance or rules-of-origin checks on goods entering NI from Ireland. Thus there would be no need whatsoever for a land border on the British side. Goods of whatever standards are permitted in NI, and from every country in the world, could enter NI tariff-free; and, well, it remains to be seen whether the EU would, and could, order the patrolling of the border on their side. I trust this would satisfy the “principle of the need for (limited, specific) flexibility in the treatment of NI”?
The bottom line is this: unless the EU can persuade Ireland to physically partition the island, or is prepared to in some way limit Ireland’s access to the rest of the Single Market, it is massively reliant on the UK to safeguard the “integrity of the Single Market”.
The UK wants tariff-free, frictionless access to the Single Market; and the article expects it to jurisdictionally sever NI from the mainland it does far more trade with than with Ireland simply in order to prevent the rest of the UK also enjoying tariff-free, frictionless access?
Bonkers.
As a side issue I am glad to see Dr Hayward’s acknowledgement of the importance of the much-maligned Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 in leading to the Good Friday concord. I think history will show that the standing shoulder to shoulder of the British and Irish Governments that commenced in 1985 was a crucial factor in pushing both sides in the conflict towards compromise.
As to the effect of brexit on the Irish border, only the UK remaining in the Customs Union could provide a full solution. In the absence of this I think Dr Hayward is right to say that we must look to politics rather than technical measures. Might it be that in the end both EU and UK will decide that the Irish border is a very small part of the totality and in a sense turn a blind eye to the trade and immigration anomalies in the cause of upholding the Good Friday Agreement?
Dr Lanier rightly points out the immense work still needed to transform Northern Ireland into the progressive and integrated society that we must all hope for. However I think the main responsibility for that rests with the politicians of Northern Ireland itself. How long will the citizens of the province tolerate the play-acting and petulance of the DUP and Sinn Fein?
I have to take issue with you view that it is ok for the EU and the UK to turn a blind eye to trade anomalies, From the point of view of one living in Ireland, the idea that we could have to endure a drop in standards in goods – and no one on the Leave side has ever suggested that a reason to leave was to increase regulation – is simply not on. Clearly this approach would leave Ireland exposed to whatever agreements the UK made on market access with third countries. As I would have far less belief in the UKs clout than the more vocal Brexiteers have, I would be very concerned that Ireland would be losing the benefits of being in a highly regulated single market – a loss that would be sustained through a vote that it had no part in and whose extent would be down to the performance of a Government it had no influence with.
The UK staying only in the customs union is no solution at all. For full frictionless trade you need both. This is the reason why the single market was invented all those years ago.
Customs union – no customs checks for tariffs or rules of oigin
Single market – no customs checks for regulatory compliance.
So if the UK was just in the customs union (legally impossible) then there would be checks at the border for regulatory compliance.
@ralphmalph
I accept your point. I was merely drawing particular attention to customs union membership in this context.
Yes, a Customs Union alone would be insufficient. But to stay in the whole of the Single Market just to ease the NI border would be overkill — vast amounts of the SM have nothing whatsoever to do with cross-border trade: regulations governing housing, utilities, railways etc. etc.