Good Friday Agreement: Impact of Brexit — House of Lords, 2018-10-11
Topic: Immigration
John Davies (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I begin by taking up the contributions that have just been made by my noble friend Lord Adonis and the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, which touched on a very important point. There is freedom of movement within the island of Ireland—the common travel area, as we have always called it. You have the right to walk, drive or take a train anywhere on the island and never show any papers or go through any controls at all. It is of course vital that we keep that regime and it would cause a revolution—of which I should probably be a part, by the way—if anyone suggested removing those rights However, how can we possibly retain those rights when the Government are determined that the country will leave the European Union and no longer be a part of the freedom of movement provisions of the treaty? In such circumstances, anyone could take an aircraft from Bulgaria, say, to Dublin—they would have an absolute legal right to be admitted into the Irish Republic—and then simply take a bus or walk across the border into Northern Ireland and they would de facto be in the UK. Since I do not think there are going to be any border controls either between Northern Ireland and England, they could then come over to London. How is it possible that, after two and a half years of talking about this issue, we have still not had an answer to this from the Government? I ask the Minister today, if he does nothing else, to give us the answer to that very key question. It is disgraceful that it has never been answered by the Government up to the present time I was going to talk about something slightly different, relating of course to the Belfast agreement. I remind the House that, for two or three years after the agreement was concluded, I was shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. I was determined to make what contribution I could to normalisation in those circumstances, in support of the principles of the Belfast agreement. I therefore made a point of meeting people on both sides who had been involved in the violence, which had been terrible. I made a point as well of going to places where no British politician had been for 40 years. Incidentally, I was the first British politician to meet the Loyalist Commission I was also the first British politician to go to Crossmaglen for 40 years, not being helicoptered into the sangar and out again but going in a perfectly normal way. I did a walkabout, went into pubs and shops, had a long discussion in the post office and so forth. I was treated with the greatest degree of friendliness. I have to say that that visit was controversial at the time; the Unionist Party—I see that the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, has left the Chamber—was not in favour of my doing it and the chief constable said he would not give me a police escort. I was deeply grateful; that was the last thing I wanted in those circumstances I also knew I was not running any risk. By that stage, I understood enough about Ireland, Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA to know perfectly well that, if the IRA wanted to kill me, they could do so without any difficulty any day they more or less chose. However, if Martin McGuinness said to me, which he did when I told him I wanted to go to Crossmaglen, "You’d be very welcome in Crossmaglen, Quentin", I knew that I was entirely safe and that no one there would dare to harm a hair on my head. I cannot say that I always feel like that elsewhere. That visit went off very well I also spent quite a lot of time, again because of introductions by Martin McGuinness, in west Belfast. I remember many hours of conversations, usually at the Patrick Sarsfield club—I do not suppose any British politician had been there before either, for that matter— talking about things that interested me about Ireland. One subject I raised was how Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA were persuaded to agree to the Belfast agreement, to agree to peace and, above all—the most difficult thing for them—to agree to give up their arms. I learned what had actually happened Martin McGuinness had said—I dare say that Gerry Adams and other members of the Army Council would have said the same thing, but I only heard about what Martin McGuinness had been doing and saying from his people—"Well, okay, we have not got 100%. We have not got a united Ireland, but we have got the best deal we could have negotiated for the last 60 years and, in my judgment, the best deal we can negotiate for the next 20 years. Actually, we have an enormous amount of what we require—probably 80%", because, as a result of the Belfast agreement, all the obstacles were coming down. The roads that had been blocked up were being reopened, there would be no procedures or difficulties placed in the way of moving around the island of Ireland. There was no greater difficulty driving between Dublin and Belfast than in driving between Limerick and Cork "What is more", Martin McGuinness continued, "all-Irish institutions are being set up, and that is the way forward, and both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland are now part of the European Union"—a situation that could not possibly have been envisaged when the Troubles started in 1969 and 1972, and obviously not in 1919 to 1922, during the violence referred to a moment ago. That changed an awful lot of things, because it meant that the British were equal partners with a constant necessary working relationship with the Irish in the European Union. As time went by, internal frontiers within the European Union became psychologically less important and physically less visible. Things were going in a direction in which it was all right for the Irish nationalist and republican movements to go along with the Belfast agreement entirely consistently with the objectives that they had always had Now we see the dangers of the present situation, because the British have said that we are leaving the European Union and all that is going for a burton. It is no longer clear that there will not be checks—I have already raised the question of borders of various kinds. A border is any line in the ground which, when you pass it, can have some legal or financial consequences. The issue is what happens to freedom of movement within the island of Ireland, as I just mentioned, and what happens to the movement of goods. Notoriously, there have been no solutions to that at all We are in danger of creating yet another case of a British broken promise, and Anglo-Irish history is full of British broken promises, which we have lived to regret over time, so I hope that the Government are not thinking of making and leaving in the history books yet one more British broken promise.