Brexit: UK-Irish Relations

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, it is good that the House is debating this important but often overlooked and marginalised issue of the consequences for the whole island of Ireland of last year’s referendum vote and the Article 50 negotiations now under way. It is good, too, that we are doing so on the basis of yet another careful, judicious and evidence-based report from your Lordships’ EU Select Committee, and of the excellent introduction to that report by my noble friend Lord Jay of Ewelme. The report shows something of the extraordinary fecklessness demonstrated by the supporters of leaving the EU when they have not very often addressed the possible risks and dimensions of winning that vote. Now we are facing those risks and neither they, the supporters of leaving, nor the Government seem yet to have any very convincing answers to these questions.

It is as well to begin with one salient fact: when they voted in the referendum last June, the people of Northern Ireland voted by a substantial majority that their future would be best assured by remaining in the EU. That fact cannot be gainsaid or belittled, nor should it be. What we are discussing now is, in the judgment of that majority, a damage limitation exercise, and those who so incessantly call for the referendum outcome to be respected here should respect that fact too. The party in the north that now supports the Government needs to recognise that it was in a minority in that vote.

I would like to touch on two issues that come up less often than those of the border for goods and services and the free movement of people—indeed, they have not come up at all—the future of the network of the EU justice and home affairs legislation, and the situation that might arise with regard to EU membership should the people of Northern Ireland decide at some point in the future by a majority, as provided for in the Belfast agreement, to join the state of Ireland. First, there really should be no doubt about the critical role that the EU’s justice and home affairs legislation has played in recent years in depoliticising law enforcement across the whole island of Ireland. That was the conclusion to which the then Home Secretary—now the Prime Minister—came at the time of our opt-in/opt-out negotiations in 2013-14 on justice and home affairs. We need some clarity from the Government about how they plan to sustain that joint co-operation after we have left. If we left without a deal, we would simply go in this instance over a cliff edge—no WTO, no plan B, just plain thin air. I would like to hear from the Minister about that because there is not a word about it in the paper produced by the Government, and not one of the speakers in today’s debate has yet referred to it.

Secondly, there are the implications should the people of Northern Ireland ever vote freely and fairly for unification. Some seem to believe that this was some kind of clever plot by the Irish Government when they made reference to that in the EU guidelines. It is not, actually; if you look at it carefully, it is simply to recall the precedent set when the people of East Germany voted to join the Federal Republic of Germany without giving any rise to the need for new accession negotiations, as would be the case if Scotland voted for independence, on which it is quite clear that there would need to be accession negotiations. The inclusion of that in the guidelines merely repeats the precedent that was created in the case of East Germany.

The free movement of people is going to take a lot of effort by the Government and the EU, which broadly subscribe to avoiding the imposition of new controls between the two parts of Ireland. Frankly, it is not going to be enough to simply recite “common travel area” endlessly as if that were some kind of magic potion. The hard fact is that the common travel area has never so far, throughout its existence, operated when part of the island continued to apply the EU treaty provisions on freedom of movement while the other did not. We need to know now not just that the common travel area is to be sustained but how that is to be done in the new circumstances. Perhaps the Minister could say something on that because, again, the desire to do that is in the Government’s paper but there is nothing on how to do it.

Trade in goods and services is another area where the desire to avoid the reimposition of border controls will not in itself be enough. How is it actually to be done, by whom and where? Why have the Government simply discarded, even before Brexit negotiations began, the two simplest means of avoiding any border control—namely, staying in either the single market or the customs union? Why did they decide that without thinking about the problems that it would cause in Ireland? Now they are going around trying to patch them all up.

On those two points—free movement, and trade in goods and services—the Government’s recent paper is full of admirable aspirations, which I share, but short, if not bereft, of detail on how to get from here to there. Not surprisingly, the passages on trade have caused plenty of sucking of teeth by the EU side, which is most at risk if the Government’s magic ideas turn out to be impracticable. There has been less criticism of the passages on freedom of movement. That is understandable because it is we who are at risk—or at any rate the Government, who wish to impose strict controls on immigration to this country—if the approach in the paper is applied.

I hope that your Lordships’ EU Select Committee will subject the ideas in the most recent paper to some careful scrutiny and that the Government will be forthcoming on the practicalities of how their ideas are to be given effect, in case they are to be agreed in Brussels.

That leaves us with one final point. The improvement in Anglo-Irish relations in recent years has been outstanding and brings huge credit to all the parties concerned—the British Government, the Irish Government and the parties in Northern Ireland. They deserve that credit. We must not put it at risk in the difficult negotiations that lie ahead. We will be far more likely to succeed in that if we stop treating the problems being caused to both parts of the island as if they were collateral damage, which are simply bad luck because we took a decision to leave the European Union and they just have to lump it—to grin and bear it. If that is the attitude that we take, nothing but trouble lies ahead.