Brexit: UK-Irish Relations

Lord Trimble Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trimble (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord on introducing this debate. I join him in sending good wishes to the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, for his recovery. As the noble Lord said, the report was published last December and much of it has been overtaken by events, particularly the publication of the UK paper on Ireland. I was very glad to hear an interview on the radio last week with John Bruton, the former Taoiseach, in which he acknowledged that that paper had gone a very long way in recognising the problems they have, so I shall not try to deal with the whole scope of the report introduced by the noble Lord.

I shall focus first on the proposals in the report for a special status for Northern Ireland, which are set out on page 58 and the following pages. The report contains two boxes describing the Belfast agreement, or the Good Friday agreement, as it is commonly known. They are Box 4 on page 39 and Box 5 on page 48. Both boxes focus on strands 2 and 3 of the agreement, but the important constitutional provisions of the agreement are in strand 1, which is not mentioned in the report. That is particularly unfortunate as some of the proposals in the report can and will be seen by unionists as undermining the guarantees in strand 1 of the agreement.

I shall elaborate on that a little. Paragraph 241 refers to,

“the circumstances on the island of Ireland as a whole”,

but constitutionally, that island is not a whole, and its divided existence is guaranteed by strand 1 of the Good Friday agreement. As the noble Lord said, the paragraph goes on to suggest that there should be some form of bilateral agreement between the British and Irish Governments, but there already is such an arrangement in the Good Friday agreement, to which the Northern Ireland parties have access, so what is the point of another if it is not to exclude the Northern Ireland parties from it? That would be a very dangerous way to proceed.

There is more precision in paragraph 262, which sets out a number of bullet points. The sixth bullet point reads:

“Acceptance of the Northern Ireland Executive’s right to exercise devolved powers … about the free movement of EU workers within its jurisdiction”.


That is a very interesting concept, a,

“right to exercise devolved powers”,

on a particular issue, because devolved powers are necessarily, by definition, of a subordinate nature. When you talk about a right to exercise those powers, you are trying to move the nature of the power away from being devolved in a different direction. That, again, is rather dangerous. The intention of this novel right is clear. It if were implemented, there would be three immigration polities within the British Isles; the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Great Britain would have different provisions. Northern Ireland would, in this way, be excluded from this aspect of United Kingdom policy. That, again, is something that we would be very concerned about. Your Lordships may feel it is just a matter of impression, but there is a serious issue there.

Paragraph 239 is also interesting. It mentions a debate in the Northern Ireland Assembly on a motion supporting the concept of “special status” for Northern Ireland. The paragraph starts by expressing concern about unionist “sensitivities” but ends by saying:

“The motion was defeated by a single vote, following opposition from the Unionist parties”.


We know what that means: it was just a single vote, which means it is virtually agreed and we can press on. That is what some people would want to do, arguing that it is only one vote and that they will change their position. Compare that with the rules for agreement within the inter-party talks, subsequently written into the legislation and observed in practice by the parties of Northern Ireland and by both Governments over the last 20 years. Those rules for decision-making are quite simple. They are there in a similar but slightly different form in the Act, but as originally set out in the agreement, they involved a majority of unionists, a majority of nationalists, and the agreement of both Governments on strands 2 and 3 and of the British Government alone on strand 1.

Those are the decision-making procedures and to have them just set aside, as it were, as is implicit in the way the report is framed, will simply not be acceptable—not just to unionists but to the other parties in Northern Ireland that have benefited from the procedures that are in the Good Friday agreement and have been implemented in the Executive. I agree with the comments that have been made about the need for the Executive to be reinstated, but we say this again and again and I am afraid it always falls on deaf ears, because Sinn Fein is determined not to do it until it has milked this situation for as much as it possibly can. It is prepared to dig in, so that we might possibly break the record set by Belgium for operating without a Government—but that is by the way. Those are the points I wanted to make about special status. The Government’s report is not going down that well, and we should endorse that.

I will just continue with a number of comparatively brief observations. Point 5 in paragraph 262 calls for the creation of a “customs and trade arrangement” in the event of the United Kingdom leaving the EU. Does the Minister agree that “customs and trade arrangement” is, like the single market, an expression of the EU, and that if you are participating in them you have not left the EU? Is it not also the case that if special trading arrangements are offered to one party, under the WTO rules, those arrangements must be available to all trading partners, so that option is not viable?

Does the Minister not also agree that we simply cannot settle these issues until we know, in a fair amount of detail, the trade arrangements that there will be for UK-EU trade? On that matter, do we in principle still support free trade? On Saturday, David Davis was quoted in the newspapers as saying:

“Britain is unlikely to secure anything but a hard customs border with the European Union”.


Is that the Government’s position? In any event, what is the point of saying that so early in the proceedings? If the EU insists on tariffs, will we still stick to the undertaking given that there would be no structures to enforce such tariffs on our side of the border? That would be one useful contribution.

I also urge the Minister that we should stop talking and briefing about money. The payment of money from the UK to the EU is one of the strongest cards we have, and it should be held in reserve and not regularly splashed all over the papers, with people seeming to invent the sums. Again, do our interlocutors understand that in a negotiation of this nature, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed?

Finally, I have a personal observation about something that worked very well for me in the negotiations we had. If you are not prepared to walk away, you have no leverage, but you must be prepared for the insults that will follow.