The Irish Question. Why the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is a challenge

After the decision by the relevant UK Cabinet committee to endorse what is in effect an increased financial offer to the European Union, the prospects of the next EU Council meeting in December agreeing that sufficient progress has been made to allow talks to begin about an implementation or transition period, and the ultimate future relationship, have risen sharply. A potential complication, however, has arisen over the question of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, indicating that he might veto the move to the next stage in talks if Theresa May does not provide him with a written assurance that there will be no ‘hard’ border with physical infrastructure.
To a degree, Mr Varadkar is manifestly bluffing in that if there were to be no deal between the UK and the EU come March 2019, with the UK simply leaving the European Union with no financial settlement and reverting to World Trade Organisation rules, then the hardest of hard borders between the UK and the Republic would be a certainty. Yet, on a different level, though, the concern of the Dublin Government and its aspiration to extract whatever concessions it can is understandable. Once the bigger round of negotiations start as to what the broader relationship between the UK and the EU might be, the domestic interests of Ireland will diminish in importance as far as the EU-27 are concerned. Hence, the logical time for Mr Varadkar to at least threaten to throw his toys out of the pram is now while he has a modest degree of leverage.
Why is the border issue so challenging?
In one sense, this seems a strange issue to be so challenging. The EU has, after all, a number of land borders with non-EU nations. Norway shares a long border with Sweden and a far smaller one with Finland. Switzerland has a number of borders with EU nations. The same is true in eastern Europe where several countries have boundaries with parts of the former Yugoslavia that are not currently in the European Union. Various ad hoc solutions have been adopted to cope with these situations. Why is the operation of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland different?
The answer is a combination of geography, history and economics. All boundaries on any map are to a degree artificial. The Irish border is, even allowing for this, exceptional. The historic province of Ulster within the island of Ireland consists not of six counties but of nine. The inclusion of Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan in Northern Ireland at the time of partition in 1921-1922 would have produced an entity with a modest Catholic majority, which was hardly what those who wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom were trying to achieve. The actual form of division adopted thus involved not only dividing Ireland but splitting Ulster in order to achieve a six county unit with a clear Protestant majority (although this has eroded somewhat in the intervening 90 plus years).
The resulting border is something close to a cartographic dog’s breakfast. It does not follow many natural boundaries such as mountains or rivers. There were farms which found themselves with fields in two different countries. The complexities were recognised from the outset and a Boundaries Commission was established in order to deal with the numerous anomalies that had been caused, but its work was interrupted by the Irish Civil War and then its recommendations were never implemented. The border has hence always been unusually porous and a red carpet to smuggling, whether this be arms for a sizeable period of time or cigarettes which it still is (taxes on them being lower in the Republic). This would be a nightmare of a border to attempt to establish serious control over if that is needed.
Added to this, the creation of a frictionless border has come to be seen as an essential element of the Irish peace process. Furthermore, in the two decades since the second IRA ceasefire was called in 1997, the economic relationship between the North and South has been transformed and for a substantial amount of business and trade the border is invisible. All of which explains why how the boundary operates on a day-to-day basis is incredibly important to this and any Irish Government.
Politics is compounding the border issue
Mutual political instability and uncertainty is compounding the border question. Dublin asserts that the most straightforward means of maintaining the status quo would be for the UK to remain in the customs union or for Northern Ireland alone to retain membership of it.
The first of these is a total non-starter as far the Conservative Party is concerned as it would mean sacrificing the capacity to reach independent trade deals with non-EU nations, and the second is as toxic to the DUP as it would involve a new border dilemma, namely between Northern Ireland and mainland Great Britain. Even if Theresa May were willing to compromise on this, the fact that the DUP is required to sustain her minority administration makes any movement here impossible.
Matters are further complicated by the absence of a devolved power-sharing Executive at Stormont, which collapsed back in January initially over whether First Minister Arlene Foster should stand down pending the outcome of a public inquiry into her role as the then Enterprise Minister in the Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme fiasco, but which has moved on to a deadlock over whether the Irish language should have a status equivalent to that of English.
If all this was not enough, the Irish Government has spent the last week teetering on the brink of collapse as two rival opposition parties, Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein, sought to force out Frances Fitzgerald, the Deputy Prime Minister, for her decisions as Minister of Justice in a scandal involving the attempt by senior figures inside the Irish Police to discredit an anti-corruption whistle-blower in their own ranks. Although an early election appears to have been averted, Mr Varadkar has every incentive to shore up his position by playing to the crowd on the border issue.
So what is likely to happen?
The chances are that Mrs May will offer some written assurances rejecting a hard border but not perhaps the completely open-ended promise which Dublin would ideally want to see published. This is because, assuming that the neither the UK nor Northern Ireland are within the customs union (overwhelmingly likely), even with the most sophisticated technology, trade across the border is likely to become more cumbersome. A deal which meant no tariffs between the UK and the Republic would reduce this burden, but there is bound to be more bureaucracy than at present because one of the major areas of business that moves across the border relates to farming and the EU has a set of stringent food and agricultural standards that it will want to see enforced effectively. There are a variety of ways of achieving this without checks at the border, but some sort of additional inspection regime will be tough to avoid. The closer that a final EU-UK arrangement is to ‘Canland’ rather than ‘Switzada’ then the more extensive these arrangements around non-tariff barriers are likely to be.
The real ‘Irish Question’ surrounding this matter is, therefore, our old friend in these talks, money. Who is going to pay what proportion of the unknown but potentially considerable sum of cash that will be needed to ensure that the practical functioning of the border between north and south is as ‘frictionless as possible and that the sums lost in tax revenue courtesy of smuggling across this very atypical national boundary is as little as feasible? The instinct of those in Dublin is that as it is the UK which has created this difficulty through its decision to leave the EU, London should pick up the bill. This is why Dublin would like a written assurance that is specific on physical infrastructure matters. Mrs May will be keen to avoid making any commitment now that renders extra expense inevitable.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA