UK Edition
The government has made a serious and credible first stab at imagining Northern Ireland after Brexit. At its heart is peace, security and the Good Friday agreement. Disappointingly some in Brussels appear no more to have read Article 8 of their own Lisbon Treaty than anticipated Article 50 ever being invoked.
To remind Telegraph readers, Article 8 solemnly commits the EU to "develop a special relationship with neighbouring countries" based on "cooperation" in the interests of "prosperity", "peaceful relations" and "good neighbourliness".
Neighbour is what the UK becomes on 29 March 2019. We will need Article 8 common sense, pragmatism of the sort that in 1949 declared through the Ireland Act that the UK’s new neighbour, the Irish Republic, would not be a foreign country. Irishmen would not be aliens.
Few European neighbours are as close as the UK and Ireland. Difficult decades have yielded to the warmth of common interest, kin and culture. It is Brussels’ duty to facilitate good neighbourliness in the island of Ireland in accordance with Article 8. It can do so by allowing its remaining member some latitude in developing independently its special relationship with the UK, a concession that will become more difficult as the EU27, parted from a retardant UK, accelerates towards ever closer union.
As a minimum, the EU’s negotiators must distance themselves from those indulging the idea that even those bilateral arrangements like the tried and tested Common Travel Area that predate EU accession may no longer be valid. That’s dangerous talk, playing to dark forces on the island of Ireland that want to recreate border badlands that characterised the Troubles.
As the government’s position paper makes clear, the fundamentals are good. We should be able to readily default to the special relationship that predated both countries accession to the EU. Usefully in this context, neither State belongs to the Schengen arrangement that has dispensed with passport controls on the continent.
If along the 310 mile border the future free passage of people seems a relatively straightforward conundrum, the rub comes with goods and services. Brussels’ preferred solution – remaining in the customs union and single market – would make Brexit pointless and has rightly been dismissed by ministers.
With Sinn Fein snapping at his heals, Ireland’s estimable new Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has reheated the idea of shifting the border to the middle of the Irish Sea. As he knows full well, that’s also out of the question since it would look to Northern Ireland’s majority community like unification by the backdoor.
But equally the re-emergence of physical infrastructure at the border would have a huge psychological impact on the peace process. Keen to empire build in defence and security, the EU should focus on its duty to facilitate peace at its borders, starting with the one that will emerge in March 2019. UK ministers are pinning their hopes on technology to make the border both secure and invisible. Although the position paper is thin on detail, it is reasonable also to pin down the European Council on the "flexible and imaginative solutions" it anticipates in its Brexit negotiating guidelines. Solutions that will apply not just to the new EU/UK land border but more generally after March 2019.
Whilst this week’s paper claims that agreement on principles must predate the design of technical solutions, negotiators must comprehend what is technically feasible within their timeframe. It is unclear that they do.
The paper suggests that the UK might undertake customs checks for goods imported into Northern Ireland destined for the EU. The complexity lies in EU rules of origin in relation to the componentry of finished goods, particularly as Northern Ireland seeks to improve its manufacturing base.
The Cabinet is apparently now reconciled to a transition period but there is a particular danger for Northern Ireland. Business is risk-averse. The longer the uncertainty goes on and particularly if the pound recovers the more likely firms are to relocate. In Great Britain that’s difficult to do, but on the island of Ireland its relatively straightforward.
Understandably Dublin sees in Brexit shedloads of risk and little opportunity. A small country perched on the edge of Europe its economy will be heavily dependent on what happens in a UK that talks about a global trading future in almost buccaneering terms. And it’s not just about milk and stout. Take electricity. The Irish Single Energy Market, achieved without the EU, is a free trade triumph. Currently generators north and south feed into an island wide grid. What happens to energy production in the Republic if, say, a deregulating UK cuts the cost of generation in Northern Ireland?
The position paper studiously avoids contributing to the divorce bill but for the first time in this process we see a commitment to expenditure on EU projects post-Brexit – rightly, as it happens, on the successful PEACE IV programme and any successor.
Peace in Northern Ireland has been hard-won. It is easily lost. In the land of St Patrick, Article 8 is a great hymn sheet for the months ahead.
Dr Andrew Murrison MP is a former Northern Ireland Office minister. He was elected Chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee in July
Peace in Northern Ireland was hard-won. The EU must help Britain maintain it after Brexit