What changes to Brexit agreement mean for Ireland

The age-old Irish question is now a question as much for Brussels as for Britain, writes Sean O’Grady

A ferry at Belfast port: details of goods checks are still to be agreed (PA)

Were it not for nearly 1,000 years of, shall we say, complicated and often unhappy Anglo-Irish relations, Brexit would be a bit simpler than it is turning out to be. That’s not to say that it would be easy, or a disaster or economically mixed, or any other unknowable event; it is simply to point out that the latest “bump in the road”, the British proposal to “override” part of the UK-EU withdrawal agreement relating to Northern Ireland, is unusually problematic because of history. Specifically it arises as a direct result of the partition of Ireland in 1922, and the centuries of war and the Troubles that came before and after. The fear is that the kind of customs and border posts commonly seen internationally (and even in Europe) would incite a return to Republican and Loyalist violence. That might, in turn, mean remilitarising the Northern Ireland-Ireland border; the political future of the province, and the possibility of a united Ireland, comes into play.  

Contrast the Northern Irish border issue with the position in the English, Belgian and French ports. There, the chances are that the end of the transition period on 1 January will see the sprouting of a vast infrastructure of border controls and customs checks to administer the tariffs and regulations on both sides. It is all very inconvenient, but no one wants to blow them up. That is the difference.  

The question does arise as to whether, after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and two decades of peace, anyone in Ireland wants to go back to the world of sectarian murder, army observation posts, barricaded police stations, helicopter controls and bombing campaigns in England. The answer to that is unknown, of course, but there is at least a risk that the continuing small groups of terrorists would go back to their dirty work, and, rather more dangerously, that the Provisional IRA and the various Ulster loyalist paramilitaries would regard the Good Friday Agreement as finished, and with it their commitment to exclusively peaceful means. The consequences of that would be gruesome. Putting a tag and a tax on a lorry-load of beef would be the least of our problems.