EU Withdrawal — House of Lords, 2019-02-13
Topic: International Affairs
John Alderdice (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, as far as I am aware, they are both still in those places. They may be negotiating to go out of them, but they are still currently in them. If Brussels does not want any help, it may find itself creating problems rather than finding solutions. That is not in anybody’s interest In terms of the Good Friday agreement—I was part of the negotiation—neither the British Government nor the Irish Government bothered to fulfil the requirement of the British-Irish side for meetings of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, which did not meet for a decade. Is that not evidence that London was not paying proper attention to the relationship with Dublin What about Dublin? It is absolutely clear that the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, decided that, rather than act as a bridge between the United Kingdom and the European Union, he would line up with Europe and act as a bulwark for the European Union against the United Kingdom. It was not for the first time, and not for the first time has it been a disaster. Historically, every time Ireland has lined up with the rest of Europe against England, rather than Britain or the United Kingdom, it has always ended up being let down, from Roger Casement to Wolfe Tone. Every time they depended on people from outside to help in the relationship, it was historically disastrous. England’s difficulty was rarely Ireland’s opportunity; it was more often Ireland’s difficulty as well, and that is the danger that we are in at the moment The British and Irish Governments need to work much more closely together and engage with Brussels. Is there some practical way in which it could be done? I hear lots of people say that all these things are impossible; I came to the conclusion quite some time ago that had the people negotiating in Belfast, Dublin and Brussels been in Belfast 20 years ago, we would never have had a Good Friday agreement, because they would have said, "It’s all impossible. The IRA will never do this. The unionists will never do that". But we got there, right at the end of the time. How did we do that? First, we built relationships. We did not stand shouting abuse at one another. We started to talk. Then we set to the side high principle and started talking about the practicalities. When we asked unionists whether we could have cross-border bodies or, as republicans would have said, all-Ireland bodies, the unionists said, "No, you can’t have that". We said, "Hang on a second. We’ve actually been co-operating for 40 or 50 years on the question of fisheries in the Foyle because the fish pay no attention to the border and just go backwards and forwards. Could we do something now on other issues?" "Ah", the answer was, "if they’re practical issues, we can" When Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness wrote a joint letter in 2016 to the Prime Minister, they pointed out some of those practicalities. They said, "What are the issues?" In terms of the economy, which has been mentioned, there are basically two. One is agriculture and agri-food business; the other is energy, particularly electricity. What if the British and Irish Governments came together and said, "We’ve reached an agreement. Because it’s an island, it’s a natural quarantine. We’ve got to look after animal health and plant health. We’ll deal with agriculture and agri-food business on an island-wide basis. We’ve got good traceability and we’ll work together on those things. We’ve got an electricity grid which is for the island as a whole and, by the way, we’ll reach agreement that we are not going put any nuclear reactors on the island of Ireland. Could you let us deal with those things on an all-Ireland basis, because that’s the vast majority of the problem?" I think that quite a lot of unionists, as long as it was seen not as a constitutional but a practical issue, would say, "Okay, let’s talk about that; we can maybe do that". As Ian Paisley famously pointed out, the people are British but the cows are Irish. So we can do a little bit on the agricultural side People on both sides of the border already know where they should be paying their taxes to—they do not always do it but they know where they should be paying them to. If you are taking a load of petrol from Belfast to Dublin or, much more interestingly, a load of Guinness from Dublin to Belfast, you know perfectly well that taxation is different on the two sides of the border, whether or not you are in the EU. You still have to pay your taxes, and it is traceable If we deal with the practical realities, we can find ways of resolving these problems, perhaps quite quickly. But they need to take place in a context where people want to reach an agreement, not frustrate an agreement, for whatever reason and whatever background they come from It has been said clearly that time is short. The reassuring thing is this: two months before we reached the Belfast agreement, Sinn Féin had not even put forward a proposal for a Northern Ireland Assembly; less than two months later, we had a Good Friday agreement. It is doable if we are determined to reach an agreement and not frustrate the reaching of an agreement.