My Lords, I grew up in Ireland and most of my family still live there, so I want to concentrate on the practical implications of this Bill for ordinary people and ordinary traders on both sides of the border. A good example is Northern Ireland’s 3,000 dairy farmers: together, they produce 2.5 billion litres of milk every year, in turn enabling highly valuable exports. Northern Irish dairy goes to 80 countries around the world, and although the six counties represent just 3% of the UK population, they account for 31% of UK dairy exports by value. However, a third of the milk produced cannot be processed within Northern Ireland because of a lack of processing capacity in the Province. The milk needs to be processed in the only factories with adequate capacity, which happen to be located just across the border in the Republic of Ireland. However, for milk to cross the border, a vet from Northern Ireland’s food safety agency must certify that the milk meets EU standards over its whole life cycle. If it does, it can go into the Republic and come back again—pasteurised and processed—ready to go on to make money for the UK economy around the world.
However, if Northern Ireland operates a dual regulatory regime, as proposed in this Bill, products such as animal feed—some from the EU and some from the UK—are likely to be mixed up within the Province, making it impossible for vets to certify that an animal’s milk genuinely meets EU standards. This means that the cow’s produce will be unable to cross the border and unable to be processed. Noble Lords will be aware that you cannot just throw unusable milk down the drain because of the serious ecological issues that that would cause—doing so is rightly banned in British law. So, of necessity, a massive cull of one-third of Northern Ireland’s dairy herd will be needed. Leaving aside the extraordinary economic and animal welfare implications of that process, Northern Ireland does not have the vets or abattoirs to undertake such a cull. Since the animals will not be able to be certified for export—for the same reasons that their milk cannot be certified—they will not be able to go over the border for slaughter either. It will be a Catch-22 situation, full of crushing uncertainty for Northern Ireland’s farming industry. Indeed, the only certainty is that farmers will find themselves unable to repay loans they took out in good faith, in the expectation of profits from the sale of their milk. A collapse in farming incomes will follow, inevitably destroying the hard-won, peaceful sustainability of every local town and village in Northern Ireland.
The risk with which the Minister must grapple this afternoon is not just to the local economies concerned; there is also an inevitable risk that darker forces will exploit newly impoverished communities, fanning the
flames of resentment and driving a wave of renewed unrest. Brexit was not supported by Northern Ireland and was opposed by the Republic. Yet both sides did everything they could to make Brexit work, and the result was the protocol. Bits of these agreements cannot be cherry-picked away: each part of an agreement is a delicate building block of Anglo-Irish relations; move one part, and you risk the whole thing falling over. And for what? After all, if the Government are serious about not having lower standards for food safety and animal welfare than the EU, they surely have nothing to fear from a Swiss-style veterinary agreement with Ireland and the EU, and nothing to gain from this absurd mess of dual regulation.
It is time for a new approach prioritising practical trading relationships, prioritising local economies and, most of all, prioritising hard-won peace over the academic sovereignty that Brexit is alleged to bring. In short, it is time to ditch this rotten Bill.
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