Good Friday Agreement: Impact of Brexit

Lord Bew Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for securing this debate. I am well aware of his great experience of Northern Ireland and the time that he has given to it.

As a remain voter, I do not find it difficult to accept that the decision to leave the European Union has had destabilising effects in Northern Ireland. There is really no question about that; none the less, I am not sure that they have been carefully defined in this debate, nor has there been any attempt to sketch a way forward, given that this has happened. However, it is not just Brexit; alongside it is a perfect storm of the Irish language, the renewable heating initiative scandal and other issues relating to laws on abortion and gay marriage. All those things have come together in a perfect negative storm. It is not just Brexit but Brexit is the biggest issue and possibly the one that makes it harder to ensure the return of Stormont.

I accept that there needs to be clear evidence that there will be no hard border. I think it is in almost any conjuncture extremely unlikely—almost inconceivable—that there will be a hard border, but we need to have that in place. It needs to be visible for people before we are likely to get Stormont back.

I acknowledge the scale of the difficulty, but we have a way of talking about this that is not totally precise, and there is an ethical balance which is awry. For example, twice in this House today the fact that the DUP did not support the Good Friday agreement has been referred to. Sinn Féin also did not support it on the day. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, was there on that day, and he knows it. The noble Lords, Lord Murphy and Lord Trimble, know it. It did not support it. The agreement came into being in effect as the result of a vote, a decision and an alliance between the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP. Sinn Féin brilliantly claimed later that it owned it, but it did not support it on the day, and, without the vote of the SDLP, we would not have had it. We do not owe the Good Friday agreement to Sinn Féin’s vote.

But in this House it is only the DUP that was not there on the day. This indicates a certain sliding of the moral scales as we talk about this. It is a small indication, but an important one. As a matter of substance, just read Sir Jeffrey Donaldson this week. There is no doubt that the DUP has come to terms with the Good Friday agreement in substance—that it had effectively come to terms with it was part of the agreement on supply and consent with the Government. So there is a way of talking about this which skews the balance in a way that is not accurate.

If I may say so, there is no proper way of discussing the impact on the psychology of Northern nationalists, which I accept has been harmful, particularly on the Catholic middle class—perhaps more so than on any other section of Catholic society. The Good Friday agreement allowed people to consider themselves citizens of Europe—possibly evolving towards Irish unity, possibly not—and continuing to enjoy the National Health Service and their pension from London as before. It allowed a very happy set of slightly conflicting assumptions in people’s minds—but people like to live with slightly conflicting happy assumptions in their minds—and it has rather woken that up, because it is a certain type of assertion of the United Kingdom as a separate state, which is a problem. On balance, historically, I support the secret, very tricky—you could say dangerous—negotiations in March 1993 between the Major Government and the IRA. Let me point out to noble Lords the message from the British Government on 23 March, two days after the Warrington bomb which killed children, to the IRA leadership and Martin McGuinness:

“The final solution is union. It is going to happen anyway. The historical train—Europe—determines that. We are committed to Europe. Unionists will have to change … The island will be as one”.


Nobody disputes that this message was actually sent. One can talk about whether it was wise or not—I can understand why it was.

None the less, the truth of the matter is that we are now not committed to Europe. The message is extinct. It is dead. It is an ex-message. That is the reality of where we are now, and life has changed for a lot of nationalists in Northern Ireland who would like to believe that something like that message represents the truth of things. We have to accept that. That is why we have to be very careful to put in counterbalances. For example, I think the British Government should support completely the Irish Government’s recent suggestion that people in Northern Ireland should be able to vote in the Irish presidential election. We need to look at ways of bringing the scales back towards a compromise.

The fundamental choice referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, is still there, however. If a majority of Northern Ireland votes to join the Irish Republic, it can so do. That part of the Good Friday agreement is still absolutely in place, and it is accepted now by the European Union that the so-called East German solution is available: if Northern Ireland votes to join the Irish Republic, it will automatically join the European Union. Fundamentally, the glide path that nationalists like to live with for constitutional change of that sort on a democratic basis is still in place and in no way changed by Brexit. It is very important to note that.

The noble Lord, Lord Trimble, rightly made the point that there is not enough discussion in London about the dangers to the Irish economy of a no-deal Brexit. But the clatter in Dublin now is massive. All the think tanks, all the serious economists, all the newspaper headlines, the central bank headlines and ex-ambassadors all say how dangerous a no-deal Brexit would be to the Irish economy. This therefore means that there really is an exceptional impetus on us all to compromise at this point. Regarding the outlines of that compromise, the poorly negotiated transitional agreement of December 8 none the less contains language in paragraphs 49 and 50, and even just in paragraph 49—the European press point out that Michel Barnier always looks slightly ill when paragraph 50 is mentioned, because he does not like it and is trying to wriggle out of it—laying its emphasis on the consent principles. When you are talking about future regulatory change in Northern Ireland, it must be done in a way that protects the Good Friday agreement. You cannot protect it by riding roughshod over the principle of consent as it affects the unionist community.

It seems to me perfectly possible to draw up—as is probably necessary as a fig leaf for the Irish Government—some kind of legal provision, which would, as long as it keeps to the real principles of paragraphs 49 and 50, embody those principles, and be something that we could all live with, as long as we stay on 49 and 50, and not on the later, more fanciful, proposals of March from the European Union. That is a critical thing to bear in mind. The Good Friday agreement was not an agreement—I even used to hear Irishmen talking about it being “signed”, showing that they do not understand what happened—between nationalists and a few human rights lawyers. It was an agreement between nationalists and unionists. It is as simple as that, and the agreement can still be made the basis for a reasonable historic compromise.

Finally on this point, the White Paper, which I know many people dislike, clearly moves substantially towards resolving this question, because of the degree of regulatory and customs alignment it proposes with the European Union. I understand if any noble Lords hate it—I have good friends who intensely dislike it—but it is not possible to say that the Government are not driven by a policy that the Prime Minister says day in and day out that she is pushing in large measure because she thinks it helps to solve the Irish question. It is clear that it effectively removes a number of the possible regulatory, customs-based and other issues that might arise in the short term. It is as simple as that. It may not happen, but there is no question that it is her intent, and there is no question that that is what it would do if we had a deal based on Chequers.