The Irish Boundary Commission (Irish: Coimisiún na Teorainne) met in 1924–25 to decide on the precise delineation of the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. The 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which ended the Irish War of Independence, provided for such a commission if Northern Ireland chose to secede from the Irish Free State, an event that occurred as expected two days after the Free State's inception on 6 December 1922. The governments of the United Kingdom, of the Irish Free State and of Northern Ireland were to nominate one member each to the commission. When the Northern government refused to cooperate, the British government assigned a Belfast newspaper editor to represent Northern Irish interests.
The provisional border in 1922 was that which the Government of Ireland Act 1920 made between Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. Most Irish nationalists hoped for a considerable transfer of land to the Free State, on the basis that most border areas had nationalist majorities. However, the Commission recommended relatively small transfers, and in both directions. This was leaked to The Morning Post in 1925, causing protests from both unionists and nationalists.
In order to avoid the possibility of further disputes, the British, Free State, and Northern Ireland governments agreed to suppress the overall report, and on 3 December 1925, instead of any changes being made, the existing border was confirmed by W. T. Cosgrave for the Free State, Sir James Craig for Northern Ireland, and Stanley Baldwin for the British government, as part of a wider agreement which included a resolution of outstanding financial disagreements.
"When the proposals were leaked to the media in November they provoked outrage in the south. The humiliation of losing parts of Donegal and Monaghan in return for minimal gain elsewhere was too much for Dublin and MacNeill tendered his resignation from the Commission. There was speculation that the Government could lose a motion of no confidence in the Dáil and that Éamon de Valera could be swept to office in a republican backlash. A meeting between the two remaining commissioners and the Prime Ministers of Britain, Northern Ireland and the Free State was arranged. Joined by Winston Churchill, who was then serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the commissioners were told in no uncertain terms that their report was best “burnt or buried”."
This was then ratified by their three parliaments. The commission's report was not published until 1969.
Update 2019
This update reflects the increasing public interest in Ireland concerning this border and its formation. As it stands, Brexit proposals and agreements politicize, and then threaten the existence of the present invisible border, so vital to the ongoing Good Friday Peace Process, and the status quo of the international treaty.
The Irish Times published this article by Conor Mulvagh How was the Irish Borderdrawn in the first place? in the Culture section Mon, Feb 11, 2019.
Nearing a century in existence the Irish Border has become the defining feature of Ireland’s political geography. The Border was established in law in December 1920 but as an exclusion zone between two parts of the United Kingdom chalked for devolution, not independence.
When the Anglo-Irish Treaty was ratified in 1922, the boundary line became an international border. But who drew the line in the first place and what thinking lay behind the decision to go for full six-county exclusion?
In the spring of 1914, the British government secured secret approval for a strictly time-limited exclusion of an undetermined portion of Ulster from the leaders of nationalist Ireland – John Redmond, John Dillon, T P O’Connor, and Joseph Devlin.
Once the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party had been locked in, the British government began in earnest to draw up possible schemes for the exclusion of Ulster.
The stark reality of the Irish Border is that it was never intended to be an international boundary
The Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, called upon three senior Irish civil servants to draw up a boundary for an Ulster exclusion zone. These were Birrell’s undersecretary, Sir James B Dougherty; W F Bailey of the Estates Commissioners Office; and Sir Henry Augustus Robinson, vice-president of the Local Government Board for Ireland. Birrell set May 6th as the deadline for receipt of proposals from his three advisers.
When submitted, each scheme included a justification for why certain communities were left north or south of the dividing line.
Ultimately it was Dougherty whose boundary scheme was adopted. On the eve of the first World War, Redmond and Edward Carson faced each other down for their claim to Fermanagh and Tyrone but following the 1916 Rising, Redmond abandoned his claim to what would become Northern Ireland’s two Catholic-majority counties.
Historian Roy Foster has described Redmond as “desperate . . . to achieve any settlement going” after the Rising.
Returning to 1914, the texts for the three exclusion schemes give unparalleled insight into the conceptual underpinnings of the modern Irish Border. Two stark points emerge.
Firstly, decisions unsympathetic to large borderland communities were taken in the name of administrative efficiency.
Secondly, the Border’s architects explicitly bowed to force and the threat of violence. Decisions were made to leave substantial communities on the “wrong” side of the exclusion line because of the perceived strength of minority paramilitaries and agitators in their midst.
The Bailey scheme
Taking Bailey first, his was the most disruptive scheme and it paid the least heed to existing administrative boundaries.
Instead, Bailey relied on physical geography to craft a more visible border. In Fermanagh, Bailey cut straight through both of the county’s parliamentary divisions, running his boundary line directly up the middle of the Erne waterways system.
Of the three schemes, Bailey’s was the only one in which his accompanying notes made no acknowledgement to the scheme’s temporary nature. Bailey’s use of physical geography to create a visible and less permeable boundary line further suggests he had a permanent settlement in mind.
Further down his boundary line, Bailey proposed the inclusion of the entire parliamentary division of North Monaghan within the unionist area.
Monaghan was a county nobody else was even considering and North Monaghan had a two-thirds Catholic majority.
Because his boundary line sliced through existing administrative units, it was impossible for Bailey to accurately estimate how many of the almost 1.2 million people he planned to exclude from the jurisdiction of the Home Rule parliament were Catholics and Protestants.
The Robinson scheme
By far the most thorough of the three exclusion schemes was that devised by Robinson. In drawing his boundary line, Robinson took local government boundaries as his operational unit: a method his undersecretary would later dismiss as unworkable.
The Robinson scheme proposed the exclusion of 26.85 per cent of the population of Ireland and 28.58 per cent of Ireland’s land by valuation. Robinson’s exclusion zone was two-thirds Protestant and one-third Catholic. Of the three, Robinson’s boundary line was the only one which explicitly considered infrastructure such as road and rail connections.
Even though Robinson’s line was not ultimately adopted, his justifications are highly instructive in explaining the thinking underpinning the final shape of the Irish Border, especially the inclusion of the two Catholic majority counties, Tyrone and Fermanagh, and the majority Catholic city of Derry.
On the eastern end of the boundary line, the Robinson scheme showed considerably more sympathy to Catholics than simple six-county exclusion. Robinson left south Armagh and south Down, including the heavily Catholic town of Newry, within Home Rule jurisdiction.
One can only imagine how differently subsequent Irish history might have played out had south Armagh been under Dublin rule from the outset. In the western half of Ulster, Robinson made a number of sweeping decisions regarding large swathes of territory with solid Catholic majorities.
In drawing his line, Robinson factored in “the degrees of obstreperousness in the rival sectarian factions on the border line”.
All three schemes recommended that Ulster’s second city, Derry, which had a 56 per cent Catholic majority, be put into the exclusion zoneIn terms of appeasing volatile sectarian communities, Robinson bent to both nationalist and unionist extremists. Of Crossmaglen nationalists, he opined that they “are about the warmest lot I know”.
In Fermanagh, Robinson’s justification was even more illuminating. Here he justified the inclusion of an area with a 3,000-strong Catholic majority because “there has been more money spent on armament and drilling here than in any part of the county and these Enniskillen and Lisnaskea protestant farmers are the most blood-thirsty set of ruffians I know”.
Fearing a contagion effect in Cavan and Monaghan, Robinson defended the exclusion of these districts as “there would be no peace or settlement along the whole border line if these people were left out”.
Bailey had applied the same logic to justify the inclusion of North Monaghan and the whole of Tyrone, the Protestant minorities of which he described as being “very strong and . . . better drilled and armed than in almost any part of the Province”.
Despite all of his careful work and calculations, Robinson all but threw away all his careful cartography at the end of his letter to Birrell stating: “I expect you will find that the Ulstermen’s minimum will be six entire counties in and no option . . . Personally, I agree about no option [putting the matter to a plebiscite]. It will indeed mean riots when this crucial issue is announced.”
The Dougherty scheme
The third and final scheme to be submitted was that of Dougherty, the highest-ranking civil servant in Ireland.
Dougherty first wrote on May 7th explaining that it would be “a difficult, if not impossible job to construct these pens” and that “the policy of exclusion, whatever plan may be adopted, bristles with difficulties and . . . I do not see how they are to be surmounted.”
Dougherty’s full memorandum was submitted on May 11th. It considered the merits and demerits of dividing the province by local government areas, parliamentary divisions, and full counties. Of these, Dougherty’s preference was for the scheme which was ultimately adopted: county option.
Dougherty’s rationale focused largely on the administrative headache he foresaw in dealing with an otherwise excluded area in which local government boards, county councils, and existing parliamentary constituencies would be split across two jurisdictions.
All three schemes recommended that Ulster’s second city, Derry, which had a 56 per cent Catholic majority, be put into the exclusion zone. Robinson argued that it was “impossible to keep the maiden city out of the parent county”.
Dougherty reminded his chief secretary that “the city of Derry has strong sentimental attractions for the Ulster Protestant, and it is the headquarters of the county administration” adding that “it is unlikely the ‘Covenanters’ will now consent to see the city excluded from Protestant Ulster.”
Despite declaring for the whole-county option, Dougherty fudged his answer to the question of whether four or six counties should be excluded.
His rationale for four-county exclusion was based on the fact that such a scheme would create “a tolerably compact area” but he seems on balance to have conceded that six counties would be the more realistic outcome due to the fact that “it is difficult to see how the Ulster Covenanters in the four included counties can abandon their brethren in Tyrone or Fermanagh”.
No more than Robinson, Dougherty was conceding to the power of force and threat in making his decisions over Ulster. Historian Brendan O’Donoghue makes a convincing case that copies of various maps, including Robinson’s May 6th map, were circulated among attendees at the Buckingham Palace Conference in July when it came to discussing permutations for an area for exclusion that might be acceptable to both nationalists and unionists.
The stark reality of the Irish Border is that it was never intended to be an international boundary. What began as an idea for a temporary demarcation line between two devolved United Kingdom parliaments evolved into something much more significant.
It has seen customs posts, cratering, spiking, checkpoints, and militarisation over its lifetime. The Irish Border has never been “softer” than it is at the present moment. Equally, there has never been such uncertainty over what the future holds in its chequered history.
This history is continued in the Irish Central article by James Wilson (Sep 26, 2019) with the question:
Why is the Irish border where it is?
Everything you need to know on how the Irish border was created.
In 1922 Sir Austen Chamberlain described the Irish border as “a compromise, and like all compromises is illogical and indefensible.” A century on many Irish people would argue the border remains just that when pressed for their thoughts on the snaking line that cleaves Ireland into two parts.
Countless others would disagree and could tick off the names of relatives wounded or killed in its defense.
For most the line scratched out by bureaucrats in the early 20th century probably doesn’t bother them much; it’s there and that is that.
The idea of an Ireland disjointed and administered out of two capitals was first mooted seriously in the 19th century when Home Rule was advocated by Prime Minister William Gladstone.
Then, as now, rule from Dublin was fiercely resisted by most Protestants in Ulster. “Home Rule means Roman Rule,” cried loyalists amid fears that a legislature in Catholic Dublin would mean discrimination against Protestants.
Where once Presbyterians in Ulster opposed the union with Great Britain now they were its staunchest defenders; not only did they fear Home Rule would ultimately mean independence but they worried that a Dublin Government would be dominated by farmers with little care for the north’s more industrial economy. Ulster, they argued, with its growing manufacturing base and trading links with the world had more in common economically with Britain than the south.
While Charles Stewart Parnell refused to “give up a single Irishman” in his quest for a Home Rule Parliament, many of his opponents concluded that the division of the island was the only way to satisfy two so exclusive and yet fiercely held demands.
The Home Rule debate had sowed the seeds of partition and it would not be long before they blossomed.
In 1912 the Liberal Party was in power again and attempted one last role of the dice to settle the Irish Question once and for all.
But the Third Home Rule Bill roused passions that made the opposition to the first two seem mild and dignified.
Irish Party legislators John Dillon and Joseph Devlin intransigently argued that the whole 32 counties of Ireland be placed under the authority of a Dublin Parliament: "No concessions for Ulster, Ulster will have to follow," the pair insisted.
The result was the Ulster Covenant, signed first on September 28, 1912, by Sir Edward Carson with a silver pen and a flourish at Belfast City Hall. In total 471,414 men and women vowed to use “all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. And in the event of such a Parliament being forced upon us, we further solemnly and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognise its authority.”
Bluffing they were not and in January 1913 Carson moved a motion in the British Parliament that would have exempted all nine Ulster counties from any Home Rule Parliament.
Irish Party leader John Redmond reluctantly responded by suggesting that each county is given a plebiscite allowing it to opt in or out of Home Rule, all excluded counties would remain governed directly by Westminster.
While Carson had the support of the opposition Conservative party leader Andrew Bonar Law, the governing Liberal Party was inclined to Redmond’s position and suggested that Antrim, Down, Derry and Armagh would be exempted from Home Rule, whilst Cavan, Monaghan, Donegal, Tyrone and Fermanagh would be ruled by Dublin.
Pressing his luck, Redmond suggested the nationalist majority towns Newry and Derry – in the unionist majority counties of Down and Derry – also be given to Dublin; his suggestion was rejected.
Yet still, hardline unionists felt threatened and concluded the only way they could guarantee Home Rule would not be “imposed” was through an armed militia. The formation of the Ulster Volunteers in 1912 lit a similar fuse of militarism in the nationalist community and the result was the Irish Volunteers, who pledged themselves to defending the right of any Home Rule Parliament to govern the country.
Ireland seemed to be marching resolutely towards an orange on green civil war and as the events of one fateful day on March 20, 1914, made clear, the almighty British Empire would be powerless to prevent it.
The Curragh Incident, as it came to be called, was the most serious mutiny in Britain’s recent history; with the Home Rule Bill soon to finish its final meandering journey through Parliament, General Sir Arthur Paget informed his officers that action against the Ulster Volunteers might soon be necessary. Any men from the province would be allowed to take a tactical vacation, anyone else not willing to take up arms would be dismissed.
Some 60 officers out of 70 made clear in no uncertain terms that they would rather resign than take up arms against the Ulstermen and that was that. Britain’s authority over the island, having frayed thin for so many years, looked all of a sudden completely impotent. If it could not even use British Army to enforce British law. Did government in Ireland even exist?
Ultimately, military force against the UVF was averted when in June that year Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armagh, Derry, Down and Antrim were given exemptions from the act.
Unionists on the wrong side of the border reluctantly accepted the terms of the act to avoid civil war and with the tacit admission that “the existence of the Empire was at stake.”
Where once Carson had vociferously argued for the exclusion of Ulster in its entirety, the existence of large Catholic majorities in Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal meant the inclusion of such counties threatened the long-term vitality of a northern state, with the risk that one day the whole of Ulster would vote to join the southern state. Reluctantly unionists concluded three limbs had to be amputated to save the body.
Thomas Moles, an MP for Titanic's home city of Belfast, morosely pondered, “In a sinking ship, with the lifeboats sufficient for only two-thirds of the ship’s company, were all to condemn themselves to death because all could not be saved?”
The outbreak of the First World War that August saw the Act given Royal Assent but shelved for the duration of the conflict. At a time when the government’s focus had to be squarely on winning the ‘Great War for Civilization,’ there was little time for constitutional innovation.
Fate intervened in the meantime and when Germany surrendered to Britain, Westminster found another conflict had broken out, this time in the United Kingdom’s western appendage. The Irish War of Independence raged for two full years until the two sides agreed on an uneasy truce.
Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith were dispatched to London to thrash out a peace treaty that would lead to Collins’ death and the partition of the island.
The Anglo-Irish Treaty was narrowly ratified by Dáil Éireann, but the provision that Ireland be partitioned was an absolute deal-breaker for many legislators, even if the blow of division was couched in the promise that a Boundary Commission would review exactly where the border should lie.
Collins argued that partition was only temporary and pleaded, “We all known Ulster cannot survive without southern Ireland.”
However, not all legislators thought partition necessarily a bad thing; Cork Deputy John Walsh controversially argued that Sinn Féin’s revolution “was only a partial one… I came to the conclusion that if we included the… West British cutthroats… They would again influence our national policy. The Irish language and all that pertained to it would go by the board… and everything we have fought for through 800 years would be smashed to atoms and swallowed up in the British Empire.”
The outbreak of Civil War following the independence of the Free State in 1922 meant the Commission would not meet until 1924.
Fresh from dividing Upper Silesia following the Treaty of Versaille, a small group of British civil servants cast their eyes west to Ireland. Their boss, Richard Feetham, was a Welsh-born South African and had already produced one report for the British Government on constitutional reform in India.
Joining him was Eoin MacNeill, then the Free State’s Minister for Education, and Joseph Fisher, a liberal unionist representing the Northern Ireland. Now safely ensconced in power, Belfast unionists were determined to give “not one inch” to the Free State and refused to appoint someone to a body designed to reduce their territory; irritated, the British Government appointed the maverick Fisher to speak for Ulster.
The Commission soon ran into problems when it became clear that the trio had very different ideas about the purpose of their work; McNeill wanted to see large transfers of nationalist Ulster to the Free State, Feetham hoped to tinker conservatively with the border and Fisher suggested that Belfast should annex Donegal on account of the county’s persistent poverty.
“We ought to bear our share of the burden of congestion and misery, and Ulster can never be complete without Donegal. Donegal belongs to Derry, and Derry to Donegal… and a hostile ‘Afghanistan’ on our northwest frontier would be placed in safe keeping,” he argued.
While this idea had some support among the Commission’s witnesses, ultimately it was a political nonstarter and Fisher was forced to content himself with a two-mile extension of the border into north east Donegal.
The outcome that would have most satisfied Dublin, namely the transfer of Catholic areas in Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armagh, Derry and Down was rejected that on the grounds that it “would gratify 258,617 persons and be contrary to the wishes of 205,528 others.” The rate of dissatisfaction was far too high for the Commission to recommend such drastic surgery.
Thus, the tinkering began. East Donegal was for Ulster, but a proposal to give heavily Catholic Strabane in Tyrone was rejected – its hinterland was Protestant. A small sliver of Tyrone was to be gifted to Dublin but that part of the county still under British authority would still retain its Catholic majority.
Fermanagh was treated with similar delicacy. “We may have to go pretty deep in places,” Fisher concluded and 70 square miles were mapped into the southern state; crucially for nervous Protestant farmers, key floodgates would remain in Northern Ireland.
The Commission eyed up north Monaghan where a few heavily Protestant parishes hugged the border but declined to transfer anything; reasoning that the adjacent parishes in Armagh were Catholic. But further to the county’s south, a ten square mile block was scalloped into the north.
Only in Armagh was anything approaching radical change proposed; 14,678 citizens were to be given to Dublin, of whom 13,859 were Catholic.
The fate of Newry was hotly contested; nationalists contended that as three-quarters of its populations were Catholics it would shatter the credibility of the Commission were its transferral not proposed. Feetham however inclined to the view that the town was a commercial satellite of Belfast and ruled it would remain in the north.
Overall 282 square miles were to be given to the Free State and 78 to the north; 31,000 people – of whom close to 28,000 of whom were Catholic – would find themselves under Dublin rule and some 8,000 citizens would be given to Belfast – of whom nearly 3,000 were Catholic. The territory of Northern Ireland would drop by 3.7% and the population by 1.8%.
Fisher was at pains to assure Carson that Northern Ireland would, “remain a solid and close-knit unit… somewhat trimmed on the edge… No center of even secondary importance goes over, and with Derry, Strabane, Enniskillen, Newtownbutler, Keady and Newry in safe keeping your handiwork will survive. If anybody had suggested twelve months ago that we could have kept so much I would have laughed at him.”
When the proposals were leaked to the media in November they provoked outrage in the south. The humiliation of losing parts of Donegal and Monaghan in return for minimal gain elsewhere was too much for Dublin and MacNeill tendered his resignation from the Commission.
There was speculation that the Government could lose a motion of no confidence in the Dáil and that Éamon de Valera could be swept to office in a republican backlash.
A meeting between the two remaining commissioners and the Prime Ministers of Britain, Northern Ireland and the Free State was arranged. Joined by Winston Churchill, who was then serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the commissioners were told in no uncertain terms that their report was best “burnt or buried”.
Despite their protests that certain anomalies needed to be fixed the rare unanimity between the three governments meant the report was a nonstarter; the six counties would remain united.
An invisible border?
This Vox video explains How Brexit could create a crisis at the Irish border.
Northern Ireland is part of the UK, but because of a special power-sharing agreement, it has an open border with Republic of Ireland. This was designed as a compromise that ended 30 years of conflict and violence in Northern Ireland between Nationalist and Unionist paramilitaries.
Today, Brexit means that the UK needs to close its borders and the issue of the Irish border is one of the hardest things to negotiate with the EU. Closing this border could undermine the compromise that kept the peace for 20 years.
To truly understand the international conflicts and trends shaping our world you need a big-picture view. Video journalist Sam Ellis uses maps to tell these stories and chart their effects on foreign policy.
A 2017 European Parliament Briefing Paper by Jonathan Tonge, University of Liverpool, UK for the Policy Department : Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs - European Parliament - says:
The Impact and Consequences of Brexit for Northern Ireland
KEY FINDINGS
- Northern Ireland is the part of the UK most distinctly affected by Brexit. The introduction of a ‘hard border’ with the Republic of Ireland is a particular concern, with customs controls probable and immigration checks possible. Free movement across the island of Ireland remains a desired feature of a strong bilateral relationship which strengthened amid common EU membership and the Northern Ireland peace process.
- Northern Ireland has no autonomy over Brexit. As such, Northern Ireland’s 2016 referendum vote to remain within the EU is, in constitutional terms, of no significance.
- The UK Supreme Court has stated categorically that the consent of the Northern Ireland Assembly is not required for the UK government to withdraw from the EU.
- The UK’s relationship with the EU (and its termination) is an excepted power, retained by the UK government. No powers have been devolved to the Northern Ireland Assembly in this respect. The 1998 Northern Ireland Act gives the Assembly the right to pass laws but only in devolved policy areas and does not affect the power of the UK Parliament to make laws for Northern Ireland.
- The Northern Ireland Assembly will be able to determine what EU legislation should be retained where it affects Northern Ireland in policy areas over which the Assembly holds devolved powers.
- Brexit will require deletion of references to the EU within the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland’s peace deal. The all-island aspects of the Agreement most embed the EU and provide institutional mechanisms for the continued financing of the peace process by the EU. Given the status of the Good Friday Agreement as an international treaty and its endorsement in referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a reworking could be challenged but there seems no legal room for such a challenge.
- The UK and Irish governments appear to desire some form of special status – without using that term - for Northern Ireland, given the potential adverse economic effects in both jurisdictions and the political sensitivities accruing to any hardening of the border dividing the island.
- The political sensitivities of Brexit are considerable. Most nationalists voted to remain within the EU. They see themselves as Irish citizens, i.e. members of the EU, and wish to retain that status. A minimum demand is special status for Northern Ireland. A majority (but a far from overwhelming one) of unionists voted to leave. Whilst the risks to the current relative peace are minimal, the extent of continuing inter-communal polarity provides a strong case for special treatment for Northern Ireland.
- A bilateral bespoke deal between the UK and Irish governments to maintain the Customs Union between the two states – which would continue to render invisible Northern Ireland’s frontier with the Irish Republic - would require EU approval. The UK government has listed tariff-free trade across borders, via a special agreement with the EU, as a priority. Failure to conclude such a deal will impact significantly upon Northern Ireland as a site of tariff checks.
- The UK government has listed the maintenance of a Common Travel Area (CTA) between the UK and Ireland as one of its negotiating priorities. Its abolition would have significant potential impact upon travel across the border.
Ian Knox cartoon 14/6/17:
Many onlookers expect the DUP/Tory deal will be used to whitewash the list of DUP financial scandals!
Stop 'megaphone diplomacy' from Dublin over Brexit
Gerry Moriarty Tue, Aug 1, 2017
Lagan Valley MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has returned to the DUP-Irish Government Brexit spat by complaining about “megaphone diplomacy from Dublin”.
On the prospects of a hard border Sir Jeffrey said on Tuesday: “If the Irish Government is going to say they’re not going to co-operate in designing a solution then of course . . . the UK will get on with designing a solution.”
The DUP politician was responding to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s comments last week that the Government was “not going to design a border for the Brexiteers”.
Mr Varadkar also complained that the failure of the DUP and Sinn Féin primarily to strike a deal to restore the Northern Executive and Assembly meant that when it came to “Northern Ireland I have nobody to ring” about how to deal with Brexit.
DUP and other unionist politicians also took exception to one report that rather than a hard border on the island of Ireland the Government wanted a border in the middle of the Irish Sea. This was denied by the Government.
Ahead of an expected visit to Northern Ireland by Mr Varadkar later this week the temperature was increased when Fine Gael senator Neale Richmond in a statement issued through his party’s press office accused the DUP of “political impotence” and “whinging” over Brexit.
“The DUP’s whinging doesn’t hide their political impotence. They would be far better off seeking to influence their Government partners in Westminster and working to get the Executive back up and running to give Northern Ireland a strong voice,” said Mr Richmond.
On Monday evening Sir Jeffrey declined to respond to Mr Richmond, saying he was a “low level” politician but that he would respond if “Fine Gael put up somebody with credibility”.
On Tuesday morning however Sir Jeffrey changed his mind and again weighed into the cross-Border row. “What won’t solve the problem is megaphone diplomacy from Dublin,” he said.
In August 2017 a photo of this spoof customs post set up by anti-Brexit campaigners on the Irish border with Northern Ireland was posted on the Business Insider website:
Adam Becket and Adam Bienkov Aug. 8, 2017
The question of what happens to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland after Brexit is so difficult to solve that it could ultimately derail Brexit.
Even more than the rights of EU citizens and the size of the UK's Brexit divorce bill, the Northern Irish border is so contentious, and so politically dangerous to tackle, that there may, in the end, be no viable solution.
If Theresa May's Brexit vision is destined to fail, then this could be the one issue that triggers it.
So why does the Irish border matter so much?
The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is currently more or less invisible. There are no border controls meaning goods and people move freely to and from the neighbouring countries.
However, Brexit creates complications. When the UK officially leaves the EU in March 2019, Northern Ireland will be removed from the 28-nation bloc alongside England, Wales and Scotland. The Republic of Ireland, on the other hand, will remain an EU member state.
Why does this matter? Well, if May sticks to her current plans to leave the customs union, then there will need to be some form of new border controls between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, in order to avoid smuggling between the UK and EU.
The European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has previously warned that "frictionless trade" is "not possible" following Brexit.
This is deeply important to the UK economy. A House of Lords report published in December said that €60 billion is traded between the UK and Ireland each year, and an estimated 30,000 people cross the Irish border every day. A hard border would put this at risk.
However, the political impact on the Northern Ireland peace process could be much greater.
Surely this won't actually threaten peace in Northern Ireland?
It might. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 relied heavily on membership of the European Union, with free movement between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland a key part of that.
Brexit will upset this delicate balance of power in the region and risk, as John Major has warned, the return of the "hard men" to Northern Ireland.
"People regard the peace process, that was very hard-earned [as certain]," he warned earlier this year.
"People shouldn't regard it as a given. It is uncertain, it is under stress, it is fragile."
As Irish columnist Fintan O'Toole wrote, Brexit means that "English nationalists have planted a bomb under the settlement that brought peace to Northern Ireland."
So what are the options for the border after Brexit?
So nobody wants a hard border, but we may have to have one, and even if we don't, we will need to create some new form of not-hard, but not-soft border that hasn't actually been invented yet?
Basically, yes.
This doesn't sound good.
It really doesn't. In fact, unless the UK and Ireland can resolve this question, then Brexit negotiations could come to a grinding halt before they've even got going.
Only a softer Brexit can avoid chaos! By the 17th August 2017 the New Statesman was headlining an article by Conor
McGinn, Labour MP for St Helens North and a supporter of the Open
Britain group, raising the issue in terms of the British Government
abdicating its responsibilities!The Government’s Brexit position paper yesterday on Northern Ireland that included its border proposals has only multiplied the number of questions that need urgent answers.
The questions people in Northern Ireland, particularly those in border communities, have asked me over the past year are in many ways similar to those I'm asked in my constituency in St Helens; what impact will Brexit have on them, their families, their jobs and businesses and their freedom of movement. But one issue looms larger than any other - the border.
These new proposals have now opened up a fresh set of questions on the border that are being asked not just by people in Northern Ireland but across Britain, Ireland and the EU too. The most obvious is that if you do not have checks on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland or between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, where do you carry out checks on immigration, goods and services?
The Government talks about an invisible border and using technology to make it work, proposing to have barrier-free access to the EU while negotiating free trade agreements. In that context, these ill-conceived proposals are more a reflection of a fantasy politics where the solution, not the border, is invisible.
Based on its proposals yesterday, the Government is effectively handing back the decisions over a porous border of 310 miles and over 200 crossings to the European Union and abdicating responsibility for a mess of its own creation.
The Government paper stresses its commitment to maintaining an open border. But their relentless progress towards a hard Brexit raises a number of practical obstacles.
The first is immigration. A majority of my constituents in St Helens North and the UK as a whole voted to leave the EU in the referendum last year. I understand the fact that for many of them their main motivation was to achieve better control of immigration.
The Prime Minister herself has been very clear that her Government’s policy remains to cut annual net migration to the "tens of thousands" - a metric I believe to be artificial and flawed. But the Government’s policy on maintaining the Common Travel Area will create a gaping hole in Britain’s immigration policy.
Yesterday's proposals suggest that when we leave the EU, people wanting to come to Britain from EU countries will have to do no more than to book a flight to Dublin, take the bus to Belfast, and then cross the Irish Sea to enter Great Britain - with no checks at any point.
Far from taking back control of its borders as it claimed, the Government will be giving it away. Far from making our borders more secure, the loss of our place in the Single Market will open up a new route to illegal immigration and people traffickers. This is not what my constituents, or anyone else, voted for in the referendum.
At present, around 35,000 people cross the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic every day to work, study, visit relatives and do business. Over 200 crossing points handle 177,000 lorries, 208,000 vans and 1.85m cars per month.
Any immigration checks on the border whatsoever would be a practical nightmare. They would also be a collective psychological nightmare for people living in proximity to the border on both sides, erecting barriers between people - families and friends - in the North and South and potentially reopening divisions of the past.
This is the appalling Catch 22 the Government has placed itself in. Their position paper contains no evidence that they have a clue how to solve the problems they have created.
On customs, there is currently no barrier whatsoever to exporting and importing goods across the border. Huge numbers of firms rely on this frictionless cross-border trade. However, the Government’s plan raises the prospect that new controls will come into place, introducing additional cost and bureaucracy for companies and hitting the economy.
While they are trying to reassure small firms in particular that this will not be the case, it is inconceivable that Britain could leave the EU’s Customs Union and not impose customs checks.
Besides, Ireland is a member of the EU. Any deal cannot simply be arranged bilaterally between London and Dublin. It will need to apply to all the other EU nations.
The Government is casting around for a workable solution to the problems Brexit presents for Northern Ireland. But the easiest and most obvious answer is staring them in the face.
If Britain stayed within the Customs Union or the Single Market, the Common Travel Area would be mucheasier to maintain, and customs checks of any kind would not be required. To truly rule out a return to the borders of the past, the Government needs to swallow its pride and drop its commitment to a hard, destructive Brexit.
Theresa May made a huge strategic error in caving in to the Tory right-wing by ruling out a customs union or membership of the Single Market. She could have worked with EU partners who also have concerns about freedom of movement and want reform to get a good deal on good terms for Britain.
She has squandered goodwill in Europe and united the other 27 EU nations around a harder position against the UK. The lack of a viable answer to the pressing questions over the Irish border is just the start of what I fear will be a very painful road ahead.
Conor McGinn is Labour MP for St Helens North and a supporter of the Open Britain group.
By December 2017 this "abdication of responsibility" had resulted in Brexit negotiations with the EU reaching a point of political crisis.
Theresa May’s Brexit strategy is in disarray after the Irish Prime Minister dramatically accused her of reneging on an agreement that would have ended the deadlock in the talks.
On a day of drama, the Prime Minister pulled the plug on a deal on the Irish border after it was rejected by the Democratic Unionist Party which props her up in power – triggering claims she is being “held to ransom”.
The embarrassment left Ms May scrambling to arrange crisis talks with the DUP before she heads back to Brussels later this week, with the clock ticking on the negotiations.
EU leaders have demanded she guarantee there will no hard land border in Ireland before a summit next week, if the talks are to move on to discussing future trade and a transitional deal.
The unravelling of the deal also left many Conservatives questioning Ms May’s handling of the talks, amid disbelief that the DUP had not been squared off in advance.
The talks broke down after Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, ruled out any move “which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom”.
“We have been very clear. Northern Ireland must leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the United Kingdom,” she said, speaking at Stormont.
The party – despite being the Tories’ partner in government – appeared to be blindsided by the UK’s apparent concession of “regulatory alignment” on both sides of the border, to avoid checks.
Within 20 minutes, Ms May interrupted her talks with Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU Commission President, to telephone Ms Foster. When she went back to the lunch, the deal was off.
Later, Leo Varadkar, the Irish Prime Minister, went on the attack, accusing Ms May of reneging on a firm agreement to solve the border controversy and kick-start the talks.
“The responsibility of any prime minister is to ensure that they can follow through on agreements that they make and we are surprised and disappointed that they haven’t been able to,” he told a Dublin press conference.
The UK government and EU leaders had agreed a text earlier in the day that “gave us the assurance we needed” – only for Ms May to ask for “more time”, he said.
At Westminster, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats seized on the role of the DUP. Jeremy Corbyn said: “The real reason for today’s failure is the grubby deal the Government did with the DUP after the election. Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader, said: “The DUP must not be allowed to dictate the UK’s Brexit negotiations. This again shows the Conservatives are in office but not in power.” And Ben Bradshaw, the former Labour minister, tweeted: “Britain is being held to ransom by a party that’s propping up the Tory Government and represents minority opinion in Northern Ireland.”
In Brussels, Ms May put a brave face on the disappointment, saying the two sides would “reconvene before the end of the week” for further negotiations.
On many of the issues there is a common understanding. And it is clear, crucially, that we want to move forward together,” she said
“But on a couple of issues some differences do remain which require further negotiation and consultation and those will continue.”
Later, Donald Tusk made clear how close the EU believed it had been to a deal, tweeting: “I was ready to present draft EU27 guidelines tomorrow for #Brexit talks on transition and future.”
The European Council President argued an agreement at next week’s EU summit was “still possible”, but warned: “It is now getting very tight.”
In Dublin, Mr Varadkar said he was happy to give Ms May more time, saying: “I do trust her and I believe she is negotiating in good faith.” But he rejected claims that “regulatory alignment” for Northern Ireland was a weakening of Dublin’s earlier demand for “no regulatory divergence”, insisting they meant the same thing.
If so, that adds weight to the argument that such a deal would see Northern Ireland effectively remain inside both the EU single market and customs union.
A draft of the agreement, obtained by the Irish public broadcaster RTE, read: “In the absence of agreed solutions the UK will ensure that there continues to be no divergence from those rules of the internal market and the customs union which, now or in the future, support North South cooperation and the protection of the Good Friday Agreement.”
Nicola Sturgeon was fast out of the blocks, insisting that – if Northern Ireland was to be allowed to “effectively stay in the single market” – then so should Scotland. The First Minister’s call was quickly echoed by Carwyn Jones, her counterpart in Wales, and London mayor Sadiq Khan, who both demanded bespoke Brexit deals.
Intensive talks will now take place between the Government and the DUP over the next few days and the Cabinet is expected to discuss the continued deadlock on Tuesday. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove may seek answers on suggestions that the Prime Minister is willing to accept “regulatory alignment” for the whole of the UK, if necessary. Pursuing that course would almost certainly trigger resignations by Brexiteers, who are determined that Britain has complete freedom to pursue trade deals with different regulations.
The Prime Minister’s spokesman refused to discuss that claim, saying: “This is an ongoing negotiation. I’m not going to comment on that.
Anti-Brexit campaigners also hit out at the DUP’s role in the affair.
“It seems clear that Arlene Foster and the DUP are calling the shots and now are running the Government. Labour and Conservative remain minded MPs outnumber this sad little rump by more than ten to one. It is time for these people to stand up and make themselves heard,” said Eloise Todd, chief executive of Best For Britain. “While DUP MPs might have cost Theresa May more than Pogba, it is the British public who are paying the price for their intransigence. “What galls me most is hearing the DUP saying that they want the same rules as the rest of the UK – if they believed, that they would have acted on same sex marriage and abortion but yet, they won’t. Maybe more public cash will now be sent across the Irish Sea to keep the DUP happy.”
The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement
20 years on . . .
The Good Friday agreement is 20 – and Britain can’t afford to forget it
Martin Kettle writes in the Opinion piece (Thu 5 Apr 2018):
The historic deal has brought Britain and Ireland closer than ever. To neglect the peace process now is a grave mistake
The Good Friday agreement, which was signed 20 years ago next week, did not solve all the problems in Northern Ireland. Much of it was based on an agreement to disagree – including even about what to call the deal itself. But it was a historic and massively beneficial trade-off for the people of the north. It brought peace. It brought fairness. Above all, it brought a new kind of ordinary life.
And with the coming of ordinary life, there slowly grew up once more in Britain a kind of neglect of Ireland. Eventually, after a few false starts, Northern Ireland began to govern itself. After a while, British politicians did not need to get involved so much. Understandably, Gordon Brown spent less time thinking about Ireland than Tony Blair and John Major had done; David Cameron and Theresa May spent even less. Political leaders in Britain did not want to get sucked in. Even in the Irish Republic, there was a certain distance and a long slow sigh of relief.
In one sense, the return of neglect represents a continuity. English, later British, indifference to Ireland has deep roots. Many would use much stronger language, especially about the era when English Protestantism was at its most militantly anti-Catholic. My generation of English people wasn’t the first to be brought up in ignorance about Ireland. But that habit of ignorance was an institutionalised one. English schools have never taught their pupils much about the history, literature or culture of Scotland or Wales, never mind Ireland, and they don’t do so now.
In another way, though, the lack of interest in Ireland makes benign sense. There is far more cooperation and mutual respect than there was before. Much of this has to do with being in the European Union for so long. But it is also because the world is much more connected and liberal than it was. British and Irish people inhabit shared cultures without thinking or fretting about it. Most of us should be fine with that.
Brexit clearly threatens this. The harder the border between north and south, the more reckless the UK’s decision to leave the EU will be judged. But even a hard border would be unlikely to herald the return of the bomber and the gunman, or the redeployment of thousands of troops, or the reimposition of a discriminatory sectarian state in the north. The collective failure in Northern Ireland can’t be blamed just on Brexit.
It is a fact that the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement is not getting anything like the attention it merits in Britain. This neglect should cause great concern. This was, after all, a historic deal for both islands. It reflected extraordinarily well on all those who crafted it. It established, you might almost say, a new sort of truth about the importance of compromise in politics. Yet the silence across much of the UK media on the subject is deafening – and dishonourable.
Update
Brexit’s Irish border problem, explained
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