European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-05-02
Topic: International Affairs
Andrew Robathan (Conservative, Centre-right): Thank you. The vexed history of Northern Ireland and the island of Ireland is known very well by most of the noble Lords in this House. We have heard some very good speeches from the former Lord Chief Justice, the former Primate of All Ireland and former Secretaries of State. The whole history of Northern Ireland is scarred by bad faith, a lack of good will, which we heard about from the noble Lord, Lord Carswell, and by intransigence. No side in any debate in Ireland—and no Government indeed—has a monopoly on that intransigence We heard from the distinguished historian, the noble Lord, Lord Bew, a short time ago. I was going to mention him anyway. I am not sure if one is allowed to put in a plug for a book, but I will. I read his book Churchill and Ireland only last month. I commend it to everybody in this House. First, it is very readable. Secondly, it shows that, over a period of 50 years, intransigence and a lack of good will led to division, death and conflict. Today, again, we have intransigence in Northern Ireland, where there is no Assembly and where the two sides cannot come to an agreement. I have to say that I blame that on Sinn Féin Let us look briefly at the current situation with the border. We heard a little from the noble Lord, Lord Carswell, about bicycling down to Dublin. I spent the best part of a year of my life in Northern Ireland, often in uniform but subsequently working in the Northern Ireland Office for the previous Government. Just over three years ago, I went down to south Armagh with some people. Noble Lords may think that everything is normal in south Armagh, but I was in one car with armed police, I recall that there were four other cars around to check that there were no ambushes and there was a helicopter overhead. This is still bandit country I mention that because the big issue at the time was the smuggling of diesel and then the washing of the red dye out of diesel, which by the way causes the most appalling environmental damage. People smuggle diesel because red diesel is very cheap, especially in the Republic, and it is brought up to the north, washed and sold at a cheap rate in Armagh. Smuggling of fuel continues to go on—the diesel has slightly changed—and there is smuggling of cattle. I read that 10,000 cattle in the last three years were stolen in the Republic, smuggled across the border and sold in the north. Members of this House may know Slab Murphy, who was notorious in Northern Ireland. He was closely involved with the IRA. He was basically a racketeer who made a great deal of money. I am glad to say that he finally went to jail a couple of years ago To cross the border, there are already different currencies. There are variable duties in the south and north. There are customs officers who actually work on the border. They do not sit in posts, but they work checking things. There are random checks. I was on one or two with the police. There are no fixed posts and, as the noble Lord, Lord Hay, has just said, nobody wants fixed posts. We do not need them. But there are already, as mentioned in subsection (2)(b) of the amendment, security checks and random checks The head of Irish Customs, Niall Cody, said on 25 May last year that it is "practically 100% certain" that there will be no new customs facilities along the border. He added: "We are not planning customs posts" He said that in the Dáil I am indebted to the son of my predecessor in the House of Commons—my noble friend Lord Lawson—who wrote an article recently and drew my attention to the following in an address by Michael Ambühl, who was Switzerland’s chief negotiator in its trade agreement with the EU. He said: "We have a smoothly operating frictionless border with the EU, though we are not a member of the customs union. That is even though 2.2m people and 23,000 lorries cross the borders between us and the EU every day" So what is the problem? Perhaps some of the chickens pay a little bit of duty, I do not know. The problem is the lack of good faith and, yet again, intransigence. I am told, as we have already heard, that Monsieur Barnier is encouraging the Taoiseach in this enterprise. I worked with the Government of Enda Kenny, which was very much on the side of and emollient towards the UK. They wanted to work with the UK. I would say that Mr Varadkar is cutting off his nose to spite his face Nobody wants a hard border, yet the Government and the Labour Party have a manifesto pledge to leave the customs union. Why do we not get on with it, to the mutual benefit of everybody? Others may attribute motives, but Barnier has said in the past that he wants to educate the British people, which means teach us a lesson. I see bad faith in Barnier and I see intransigence. Surely it is not beyond the wit of man, with good faith and good will—unless you do not want a settlement, which I fear is the case with the noble Lords who proposed the amendment—to come up with a decent frictionless border Noble Lords who are tempted to support the amendment should consider, as has been alluded to, that we should not use Ireland and its history as a stick with which to beat Brexit or as a pawn. Let us instead give Ireland, north and south, and its good people—nationalist, unionist, whatever they may be—what they really want: co-operation, friendship, prosperity and the ability to trade and cross the border happily.