European Affairs — House of Commons, 2018-03-14
Topic: Mixed Topics
Karin Marguerite Smyth (Labour, Centre-left): Saturday is St Patrick’s day. Although we do not know where St Patrick was actually from, we know that he was not Irish. Captured as a slave by the pirates who roamed the Irish sea at the time, he was not entirely welcome when he returned as a free man, although he might find himself quite popular at Twickenham on Saturday The Bristol Post recently published an article about the Bristol merchants who, under Henry II, went to Dublin in 1171 to defend Dublin castle against the insurgency in Ireland. As a reward from Henry, they were able to establish trading posts. There is still some debate about whether the merchants still have citizenship in Dublin, or whether the arrangement has been overridden by the 1937 Irish constitution. That is something that I still intend to discuss with the Irish Government Because time is short, I will skip through the centuries that lie between then and now, during which people have flowed across these islands, mostly in times of conflict and often in times of great poverty and desperation, looking for work and trying to settle in various areas. A hundred years ago, we were the same country. My grandparents were born under the auspices of this Parliament in Mayo and Cavan, joining John Redmond’s followers in the British Army during the first world war Upstairs in the House this week, there has been an exhibition of pictures by Bernard Canavan depicting the flow of migrant labour after the second world war. Last week, in one of the Committee Rooms, there was the most amazing discussion and presentation by the former Taoiseach John Bruton and the historian Dermot Meleady about John Redmond and the battles that were waged in the House. That was at the invitation of the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson) and my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn), and it was a truly magnificent evening This weekend London will have three days of celebration for St Patrick’s day, which is a far cry from my experience as a child growing up in London. We had very small parades, which were hidden away on a Sunday morning, viewed with great suspicion, and heavily policed. There was no welcome parade on the streets of London. My first experience of crossing the Irish border was in 1985, when I was only 21. It was a shocking, horrendous experience, which I will not go into now, but over the intervening 30 years I have witnessed a phenomenal transformation of that experience I urge the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union and the Prime Minister to visit parts of the border now, to understand exactly what is at stake. The Good Friday Belfast agreement was not just about Northern Ireland, and it was not just about Ireland. It was not about a border. It is about the freedom of movement of people across these islands and the deep roots that we have. It is also incredibly important to the Irish community who are settled here, and have seen the experience of being Irish in this country transformed over the last 30 years. The normalisation of relations was hard fought for, and we need to preserve it. For the first time, we have an international treaty between our countries based on mutual respect and shared interest after those centuries of conflict. It is an exemplar across the world The verdict of the House of Lords on the border was that there was "a distinction between identifying solutions that are theoretically possible and applying them to a 300-mile border with hundreds of formal and informal crossings, and the existence of which is politically divisive. Any physical infrastructure at the border would be politically contentious and, in the view of the PSNI, a security risk." Paragraph 47 of the December agreement talked about a "mapping exercise". I have asked before in this place and in writing to the Prime Minister for that mapping exercise to be published We need to end the façade that there can be any kind of different customs and alignment regimes across these islands, or any unilateral change to the current provisions. From St Patrick and the Bristol merchants’ wanderings to the billions of pounds traded and movements made across these islands now, the great people of these islands expect to be able to move and trade freely, and any dilution of that will not be acceptable to any of us.