My Lords, this amendment is also in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Alderdice and Lord Murphy of Torfaen. It will be noted that this is a cross-party amendment by two former Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland and a former Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
In a few days, the people of Northern Ireland will go to the polls for the second time in eight months, at a moment when Northern Ireland’s self-government is in a political cul-de-sac and unresolved legacy issues and the past, including the prosecutions of long-retired British soldiers, continue to haunt everyone. The settlement in Northern Ireland is built on the delicate balance of the three strands of the Good Friday agreement: relationships within Northern Ireland, between Belfast and Dublin and between Dublin and London. Brexit will test each of these relationships and, if the Government pursue a hard Brexit, they could do profound damage to all three.
When I was Secretary of State in 2005, I flew many miles by Army helicopter from east to west along the mountains and fields of south Armagh that mark the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Knowing what had afflicted that area over so many years, it seemed to me that it had what Yeats called, in a different but related context, “a terrible beauty”.
Frankly, the border was, even at the height of the Troubles with security controls, impossible to police. Then it was dubbed “bandit country”. It is estimated that along the entire 300-mile Irish border there are up to 300 crossings and countless additional paths, with 35,000 people crossing each day and each month 177,000 crossings by lorries, 208,000 by vans and 1.85 million by cars. Since family farms straddle the border, there are goodness knows how many animals on the move, from domestic pets to livestock, conceivably being forced to carry ID tags if they stray either way in future—all because the border will become the customs frontier of the European Union.
Bertie Ahern, who served three terms as Taoiseach between 1997 and 2008 and was a central player in helping to secure the Good Friday agreement and deliver power sharing, was reported in the Observer recently as saying that the establishment of an Irish land border could have devastating results, putting Northern Ireland’s peace process in jeopardy.
“‘I worry far more about what’s going to happen with that,’ he said. ‘It will take away the calming effects [of an open border]. Any attempt to try to start putting down border posts, or to man [it] in a physical sense as used to be the case, would be very hard to maintain, and would create a lot of bad feeling.’”
I would suggest that “bad feeling” is an understatement.
“‘Any kind of physical border, in any shape, is bad for the peace process’, he said. ‘It psychologically feeds badly into the nationalist communities. People have said that this could have the same impact on the nationalist community as the seismic shock of the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement on unionists, and I agree with that. For the nationalist community in Northern Ireland, the Good Friday agreement was about removing barriers, integrating across the island, working democratically in the absence of violence and intimidation—and if you take that away, as the Brexit vote does, that has a destabilising effect.’”
I agree with him. I am particularly aware that the consequences of a hard customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic are potentially immense, and are not addressed at all in the Government’s White Paper. Frankly, I am not convinced that the Government have even begun to grasp the political significance of it.
I, like Tony Blair and my predecessors—my noble friends Lord Murphy, Lord Reid and Lord Mandelson—was utterly non-partisan when dealing with the Northern Ireland parties, even though in the space of two meetings we would be accused by one of being for a united Ireland and by the other of being rabidly pro-union. But I built as close a relationship with Ian Paisley as I did with Gerry Adams, with Peter Robinson as with Martin McGuinness. I remain unaligned today—and that allows me, I hope, to talk bluntly, and some might even say inappropriately, about the politics of Irish republicanism and nationalism.
For these people, an entirely open border of the kind that has operated without security or hindrance of any kind for many years now is politically totemic. It marks an everyday reality to all republicans that progress, albeit in their terms slow progress, has been made, and is being made, towards their aspirations for a united Ireland. It has been as if the border no longer mattered. Citizens resident on either side can and do take advantage of the health and education services nearest to where they live, on a cross-border basis. Northern Ireland businesses invest without hindrance in the Republic and vice versa. The two economies are being steadily integrated: there is even a plan to cut corporation tax in Northern Ireland to synchronise with the low rate in the south.
Of course the island of Ireland has not been united politically or constitutionally—to do that would properly require endorsement by referendum, and the principle of consent is one of the cornerstones of the Good Friday agreement—but it is almost daily becoming united in everyday life. That is welcomed by unionists as well, secure in the knowledge that there can be no change in the constitutional position without their consent. Above all, it is a symbol of the normalisation of relations between the two parts of the island. The Government disturb that at everyone’s great and grim peril.
Those who maintain that because the Prime Minister has said that she does not want a return to a hard border it will not happen should be aware that the Irish Government, who do not want a hard border either, have nevertheless, as a contingency measure, begun identifying possible locations for checkpoints along the border with Northern Ireland in the event of a hard Brexit.
The Northern Ireland peace and stability process is very far from over. The current disturbing breakdown and impasse in the Northern Ireland Assembly and its Executive is a manifestation of the extent of unfinished business. I do not say that we will go back to the murder and mayhem of the Troubles, but I insist that the process could easily unravel. It requires continuous forward momentum; a reimposed border with any form of restrictions is the very reverse of that. If the
referendum means Brexit at any price, it might well be at dangerously high cost for the Northern Ireland peace process.
Apart from the politics, the post-Brexit border issue is fraught with practical problems. The excellent House of Lords report, Brexit: UK-Irish Relations, stated on page 65:
“The only way to retain the current open border in its entirety would be either for the UK to remain in the customs union, or for EU partners to agree to a bilateral UK-Irish agreement on trade and customs. Yet given the EU’s exclusive competence to negotiate trade agreements with third countries, the latter option is not currently available”.
The report added:
“Short of the introduction of full immigration controls on the Irish land border, the solution would either be acceptance of a low level of cross-border movement by EU workers, or allowing Northern Ireland to reach its own settlement on the rights of EU citizens to live and work there … which would require … an adjustment of the devolution settlement”.
In evidence to the House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on 1 February, international trade lawyer Michael Lux dismissed the Government’s commitments to an open border as “nice words” and warned that Britain’s departure from the customs union would require a significant enforcement infrastructure on the Irish side, possibly including cameras and helicopters. Lux calls for,
“a special status for Northern Ireland”.
In subsequent testimony to the committee, Irish Ambassador Dan Mulhall said:
“I just don’t think it’s remotely possible to think in terms of having a border that would really control every movement of goods and people”.
He also warned that it was,
“essential that Brexit does not affect the Good Friday Agreement, and that the people of Northern Ireland can have confidence that this will be the case”.
Experienced customs officials from both sides of the border have questioned the practicality of reimposing controls. Former UK customs officer Gerry Temple told the BBC:
“The border runs through many properties and it would be impossible for customs to check what comes in the southern side and goes out the northern side. The re-opening of the unapproved roads has changed everything and made the task for customs impossible”.
The Police Federation for Northern Ireland has also expressed concern about the consequences of a hard border.
“We are still operating under what the government says is a severe threat, which means an attack on our members could happen at any time and is highly likely”,
PFNI chairman Mark Lindsay told the Guardian. He added:
“If we are saying in the future that police officers could be deployed to customs posts and other fixed points on a hardened border then they would become static targets. They would in effect become sitting ducks for the terrorists”.
I am assuming that he is talking about the dissident IRA groups.
The outgoing leader of the Alliance Party and former Northern Ireland Justice Minister, David Ford MLA, observed that,
“the issue of the common travel area is not dealt with by people simply saying, ‘The CTA has existed since 1923’, because it had never existed when one jurisdiction was outside the EU and the other within it”.
Your Lordships’ European Union Committee has already highlighted the danger of exacerbating an existing smuggling problem on the border, a judgment that reflects testimony from Northern Ireland’s Justice Minister and police service among others. A hard Brexit risks a double windfall for paramilitaries from increased opportunities for fraud alongside growing political tensions. One wheeze, apparently emanating from the Government, is to have electronic controls of some sort.
“I haven’t found anyone who can tell me what technology can actually manage this”,
Bertie Ahern said. David Ford MLA observed that it was “utterly meaningless” to talk about electronic controls as a preventive tool against cross-border smuggling. He noted that there was already evasion of the different excise duties on either side of the border. The leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, Mike Nesbitt MLA, agreed that electronic monitoring of the movement of goods,
“just will not cut it”.
We need maintenance of the common travel area, the right of free movement within it for UK and Irish citizens, and their right to reside and work in both countries. We need the retention of the right to Irish, and therefore EU, citizenship for the people of Northern Ireland. We need a customs and trade arrangement between the UK and Ireland if the UK leaves the customs union. We need reaffirmation by both Governments of their commitment to the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and continued support for cross-border co-operation.
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One suggestion is to negotiate for Northern Ireland as a special zone with exceptional status within both the UK and the EU, justified by its turbulent history. An authoritative paper by Professor David Phinnemore of Queen’s University Belfast illustrated the complexities. He identifies what he terms the “reverse Greenland” option:
“This draws its inspiration from the departure of Greenland, which is part of Denmark, from the then European Communities in 1985. The idea of a ‘reverse Greenland’ envisages the UK remaining in the EU, but not all of its constituent parts doing so”.
Scotland and Northern Ireland—as constituent elements of the UK that voted remain—would, as was the case with Denmark, remain in the EU; England and Wales, following Greenland’s example, would leave. Gibraltar is another fraught problem altogether and, with 95.9% of the votes cast in the referendum for remain, it might also fall into such a category.
Phinnemore explains:
“Such an arrangement would require agreement within the context of a post-Brexit UK-EU relationship for the free movement of people to extend beyond the border of the EU into but not across the entire territory of a non-member state. This would be unprecedented, but it would not be unprecedented for special or bespoke integration and cooperation arrangements to be put in place for particular regions or territories of non-member states. Svalbard enjoys special status within the context of Norway’s participation in the EEA. The EU has also granted some restricted concessions to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad which is situated between two EU member states (Lithuania and Poland)”.
Special status might mean a hard border with Wales, Scotland and England, but at least these would be at ports and airports, which are in any event already monitored and sometimes policed. Travellers now present passports or driving licences to board aircraft, for example, so would similar arrangements for the Liverpool ferry be so much of a problem? If these kind of checks were on arrival in Great Britain, would unionists see that as a de facto border between GB and Northern Ireland for the sake of free movement within Ireland and object? Alternatively, would the Irish be prepared to increase controls at their ports and airports, with any extra security presumably paid for by Britain, rather like we do in Calais? I wonder.
Creative, lateral solutions will certainly be needed, but a solution there has to be, with give and take on all sides. The free movement of people, goods and services on the island of Ireland is critical to continued momentum and deepening of the peace process. Cross-border trade and tourism have increased on the back of the peace process, as have business activity and investment. Today, crossing the border between Strabane and Lifford, Derry/Londonderry and Letterkenny, or Newry and Dundalk, is just as simple as crossing the border between Wales and England. In fact, it is easier in the case of south Wales because there is no Severn Bridge-type toll. I do not really mind how an open border is achieved, but it must be, which is what this amendment insists on.
Ours is not a wrecking amendment. It does not obstruct Brexit. It is not tying the Government’s negotiating hand. All it is doing is insisting that, as Article 50 is triggered, it is only on the basis that the Government negotiate to secure what they already say they want—an open border in line with the Good Friday agreement. I trust that we never have to confront the stark choice between delivering on the Brexit referendum and deepening hard-won stability and peace on the island of Ireland.