Monday, 5 March 2018

Bonkers Brexit update: Theresa May's absence of a cogent alternative makes a hard border in Northern Ireland increasingly inevitable


Theresa May’s much awaited Brexit speech on Friday, failed yet again, to propose any workable alternatives to a hard border in Northern Ireland.

Disgraced/deluded Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, proffered some advice to Theresa May ahead of her speech. In a leaked letter, he urged her to be relaxed about the whole hard border thing. So what if the Good Friday Agreement unravels? – small price to pay for being able to decide the shape of British, err, bananas.

This is completely at odds with the fact that Theresa May signed off on phase one of Brexit in December, contingent on the fact that there would be no hard border in Northern Ireland and, in November, Boris Johnson himself said, There can be no return to a hard border. That would be unthinkable, and it would be economic and political madness".

Why the change of heart? We don’t know, because the media hasn’t deemed it necessary to press the Foreign Secretary on his complete U-turn. This buffoon even compared Northern Ireland to London’s congestion charge this week and still the media afford him the veneer of credibility. Lies have long since been Johnson’s strategy of choice. Remember the £350 million a week he promised for the NHS?

The vacuum created by the absence of any cogent workable alternatives to economic and moral bankruptcy post Brexit, is being filled by anodyne soundbites, deception and lies. David Davis lied about the existence of the Brexit risk analysis and on Wednesday, Jacob Rees Mogg lied when he said Jeremy Corbyn voted against the GFA on Channel 4 news.

The people on the Island of Ireland, my family and friends, deserve better. They want to know what Brexit will mean for their livelihoods and their future. These are just some of the practical questions that Theresa May has yet to answer:

If Northern Ireland leaves the single market, a hard border is inevitable. What will become of the cross boarder collaboration enabling farmers on both sides to compete with their counterparts elsewhere in the world?

 25% of the region’s raw milk goes south of the border to be processed and 40% of Northern Irish lambs are processed in the republic. A hard Brexit would impede that flow, not just because of tariffs and customs checks, the burden of paperwork around traceability and standards would be prohibitive.

What will become of the joint initiatives on shared waterways? Access to medicine? And the current all-island approach to preventing the spread of animal diseases, such as, foot and mouth?

What will become of patients from the Republic who receive radiotherapy in the north and the children who travel from Belfast to Dublin for heart surgery in the only all-Island newly opened world class facility? How will emergency services continue to collaborate post Brexit?

What about subsidies? Northern Ireland already has the highest levels of unemployment and poverty in the UK and can ill afford to lose €3.5bn in EU subsidies up to 2020. Unless the magic money tree in Panama is raided, the British exchequer would struggle to fill that gap.

By getting into bed with the DUP and riding rough shod over the rigorous impartiality required by the Good Friday Agreement, the Tories are gambling with peace in the province. The majority of people in Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. Despite the Tories having no mandate to impose a hard border and promising there wouldn't be one, their continued inability to propose concrete alternative plans and failing to address the above questions, makes the hard border inevitable.

In the words of a Dublin friend: "Jaysus, Mary & Holy St Joseph - We're feckin doomed!"



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