"Tuesday 5th September 2017"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/05/northern-ireland-post-brexit-customs-deal-lord-peter-hain"Northern Ireland's future at risk without post-Brexit customs deal, says Lord Hain"Former secretary of state to tell House of Lords that government’s position on Irish border is "
delusional and contradictory"
"Peter Hain says the government’s way of trying to
"square the circle" of Northern Ireland is to
"pretend that the circle doesn’t exist"."Quote...The future of Northern Ireland after Brexit can only be secured if it remains in the customs union, a former secretary of state will tell the House of Lords on Tuesday.
The Labour peer Peter Hain, who as Northern Ireland secretary helped steer the peace process when the IRA was decommissioning its arms, will tell the Lords that
the government’s position on Northern Ireland is “delusional, contradictory and potentially very damaging”.
Lord Hain told the Guardian that the government’s negotiating strategy in Brussels
was incompetent.
He was
particularly scathing about its recently published position paper on Northern Ireland and Ireland, which suggests that an
“invisible” border could be maintained if the EU agrees to waive checks on small businesses providing goods and services, including dairy and meat products.
He said the government knew that
this was “pie in the sky” because EU law would require Ireland to have checks to prevent products such as hormone-injected beef or chlorinated chicken from the US from making its way into the EU.
“It seems that the government’s favoured way to … square this particular circle is to pretend that the circle didn’t exist,” he will say.
“It is in effect saying to the EU and Ireland in particular: ‘As part of the divorce settlement you can have the border. Do what you like with it. The Irish border will be your customs union frontier.’”
He also believes that the
government’s position is contradictory. On the one hand it wants to control the border to stop rogue immigrants, criminals and terrorists, but on the other they can come in via a back door through a porous Ireland.
He says
Brexit is jeopardising £200m worth of funding under the
EU peace programme, which finances cross-border initiatives especially in border communities.
“These thorny and intractable issues would not arise around the border … if we remained in the customs union …
In my view the only way of resolving the border conundrum is for Northern Ireland to be within the same customs union and single market as the Republic: either Northern Ireland alone or preferably the whole of the UK,” he will tell peers.
Etcetera....