by A few years ago, I noticed while going on Twitter (as it was then) that there was an international border between the UK and Ireland on the island of Ireland. To my surprise, Irish nationalists came in to deny this objective legal reality. I couldn’t help but be reminded of George Orwell’s comment that, for nationalists, “a well-known fact may be so intolerable that it is usually set aside…
Or indeed both of those things. Such double thinking can be seen in the way the Irish government has handled the current migration series with Britain. In fact, it is not at all clear that the asylum and immigration problem in Ireland has been greatly reinforced, let alone created, by our policy in Rwanda. But it suits the Irish establishment to claim that the fault lies with the British, and one can certainly empathize, if not sympathize, with their desire to be on the outside of the Sinn Féin monster – even if they expect us to catch up with him in Belfast.
The problem this poses for the Irish is that, having decided to blame us, they have to try to control the movement of asylum seekers south across the border, and their long standing position maintain that that limit has no control. Unsurprisingly, this is difficult to achieve and they can only do so when they insist that the necessary controls are non-intrusive and do not need to be at the border.
This all probably sounds very familiar. It is certainly terrible for the Irish, as it is the same as Britain’s position on customs and trade in late 2019 and again in the abandoned Northern Ireland Protocol Bill. We argued that the customs border could be at the land border, managed directly behind border checks and appropriate law enforcement. We were told that this was simply impossible, a “unicorn”, and that there would be a risk of violence. In 2019, Parliament forced us to retreat. In 2023, the British Government endorsed and signed the Windsor Framework instead. That’s why we have the current mess.
In response to this latest crisis, the British Government, from the Prime Minister down, chose to enjoy the tables turned and lecture the Irish about the value of maintaining an open border. Irish self-righteousness makes this entirely understandable, but it still misses the point. It’s a feel-good tactic and not an actual strategy.
For one thing, we are not immune to the same problems. It could be forgotten, from the Prime Minister’s comments, that the British Government will soon require an ETA, travel authorization, for non-resident third country nationals traveling from Ireland to Northern Ireland. We probably intend to police this in some way – and indeed who could doubt that, if the flow of illegal migrants were for some reason in the other direction, we would look at that requirement remove as close to the border as we are. could?
Otherwise, how can it be in our interest to argue for an open border now, when the demands of Ireland and the EU on this have done so much damage to our interests? We need, or should want, a meaningful land border. We should not be arguing that it would become less significant than it is now, and that nationals of third countries would be able to cross it at will.
So, even if it goes against the grain, the right course of action is to let the Irish do what they want, realizing that this is entirely possible without fences and border posts. In an ideal world, we would then go on to argue that the same could be done for goods and customs arrangements as well, but unfortunately the Government, under the current leadership at least, have sold that pass to the Windsor Framework.
Still, the precedent is set; and just because we can’t do the latter doesn’t mean we’re not interested in the former.
Like it or not, the United Kingdom and Ireland are deeply intertwined as countries and people for a whole range of historical and political reasons. The Common Travel Area, the fact that anyone born in Northern Ireland can choose Irish citizenship, the joint voting rights, all of this is highly unusual between two independent countries. But it is precisely this deep interconnectedness that means we need to be clear about the basics.
One of those essential elements is clarity about the boundary. We currently have a people border in one place, a customs border in another, with both the British and Irish governments denying that one or the other actually exists at all. This Schrödinger limit is not going to work. The current arrangements may aim to avoid friction but will in fact create endless anomalies, instability and conflict. They cannot survive.
In the end, the legal boundary can only be in one place and not two, and everyone has to agree on the place. The only stable long-term scenarios are that it will be at the current land border or in the Irish Sea. If we don’t want him to be the second, we have to show that he can work when he is at the next.
