Brexit's Irish Question

[Denzil_DC]

People, money, Ireland. These are the three big questions on which the immediate future of the Brexit project hinges. When European Union leaders meet in October, they will decide whether “sufficient progress” has been made in talks with the British to allow for the opening of substantive negotiations to determine the United Kingdom’s relationship with the EU after it leaves in March 2019. As the EU’s lead negotiator Michel Barnier put it last May:

I…made very clear that the [Irish] border issue will be one of my three priorities for the first phase of the negotiation. Together with citizens’ rights and the financial settlement. We first must make sufficient progress on these points, before we start discussing the future of our relationship with the UK.

By the border issue he means the question of whether a hard customs and immigration border is to be imposed between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

And so the Irish Question rises yet again, looming on the road to Brexit like the Sphinx on the road to Thebes. It threatens to devour those who cannot solve its great riddle: How do you impose an EU frontier across a small island without utterly unsettling the complex compromises that have ended a thirty-year conflict? The “people” part of the preliminary Brexit negotiations concerns the mutual recognition of the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and vice versa. The “money” part concerns Britain’s outstanding obligations to the EU budget and the calculation of the final divorce bill. Both are awkward and politically divisive issues, but it should be perfectly possible to reach a settlement.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/brexits-irish-question/

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[TubbersUK]

1. I just read that 30,000 locals cross that border each day

Jobs, commerce, family, leisure.

Boris of course has been his usual glib self on the issue.

[Pope George Ringo II]

2. The CTA is really quite incompatible with a hard border

Of course, since the British government won't talk about "People, money, Ireland," they'll never get to talk about all this nonsense they keep issuing papers on. The eventual Brexit is going to be even worse than it needed to be.

[LeftishBrit]

3. This is indeed really worrying

[KatyMan]

4. We used to live in Slane

and would regularly drive to Newry for shopping; the only difference when you crossed the border was that the roads were better. The shops even took punts or pounds, 1 for 1 (this was in 99-2000) It would (will?) be tragic if north were cut off again from the south.