Dublin is vibrant?
:dubious:
Looks and feels like a mid level English city. Even the accents, considering the rather posh airs of some Dubliners and the mass of Irish in England.
It’s nice, that I’ll give it.
Fight my ignorance please. What happens if there’s Hard Brexit but no border controls are set up in Ireland?
Would the EU find the R. of Ireland to be out of compliance? Would English smugglers start bringing EU goods (or people) in illegally, via Ireland? (If so, would that be considered a Plus or a Minus by the Brits?)
They’re talking like people are going to wake up on November 1st and bam there’s a huge wall and checkpoints. I have yet to hear any official talk about direct costs to build, compensation for landowners whose cows now need to get a passport to come in for milking or anything, just comments that that it’ll come into place by default. They’re not even threatening to make Ireland pay for it, it’s just going to somehow happen.
It seems like pure magical thinking.
Except for perhaps WW2, pretty sure is was not a particularly hard border. I remember going from Belfast to Dublin mid 1990’s and yes there were checks, but it was almost like showing your ticket to an usher, guy breezes through. It was no where like the Governmentally mandated anal probes that exist post 9-11.
My guess is that the primary issue would be people and goods crossing into Northern Ireland from Ireland and not the other way around. I believe having sovereignty over their own borders was a big issue with the leavers.
Compare it with the rest of Ireland, rather than with the rest of the world.
Along with my schoolmates spending a couple of months there, I went from Ireland to Belfast in 1983 and it was a long wait at the border, check all passports (please please please let nobody have forgotten theirs god is great ok nobody has), several stops along the way and Belfast felt absolutely militarized. We found it scary, and this was during the time when other Basque were leaving the Basque country for fear of ETA; we were used to relatively-high levels of police presence. We were left in a park and didn’t dare leave it; there were soldiers everywhere.
British Isles is a problem term .
While it was originally invented in Roman times it then dropped out of use for 1500 years .
It was revived in Tudor times as a political term to justify their control of the territory .
It is a term not used by the Irish Government in document , they will use a variation of "these Isles"s
It’s not magical thinking at all. Border controls are the default condition for borders; it requires considerable effort and ingenuity, and high degree of international co-operation, to avoid them, and in fact the borders between EU member states are pretty much the only example of international borders which are wholly open.
Among the points of Brexit is so that the UK can have its own trade policy - set its own tariffs, negotiate its own trade deals. But there’s no point in setting tariffs if you’re not going to bother collecting them, so there will need to be arrangements to collect tariffs on good crossing into the UK. Trade deals will be hard or impossible to negotiate if other countries have no incentive to negotiate them, and you abandon the primary incentive if your policy is not to levy tariffs, or to pretend to levy them but not to collect them. Why would another country make a trade deal to get a reduction or elimination in tariffs that aren’t payable anyway?
And this cuts both ways; the EU is also concerned about the integrity of its tariff regime, but also about the integrity of its single market. Goods in Dublin can be brought to Athens without any kind of tarifss, checks, controls, documentation, compliance - anything. This requires confidence that goods in Dublin are fully compliant with EU market requirements. The UK will no longer be committed to applying or enforcing EU market standards, and if there is no control on goods moving from the UK to Ireland then non-compliant goods can enter the single market.
And that’s even without considering the UK’s ambition to be become a global trading nation, and the need to respect WTO rules if they are to have any hope of doing that, and the implications of WTO rules for a policy of not bothering to enforce customs and market regulations on goods imported from, or through, just one country.
A border, basically, is the point where one fiscal and regulatory regime gives way to another. That means when goods cross the border, they become subject to new rules and new taxes, and that’s not really consistent with the idea of not enforcing the rules or collecting the taxes. The mechanisms which are used to enforce the rules and collect the taxes are the things that make a border hard. Neither side wants, or admits to wanting, those mechanisms to apply at the Irish border, but unless both are willing to make the choices needed to avoid them, then their application is inevitable. It won’t happen overnight; it will take a little time to devise, prepare for and implement the mechanisms, so they will be rolled out on a gradual basis. But they will unquestionably be rolled out. There is literally no point to Brexit, and no point to the Single Market and the Customs Union, if this is not done.
Cough. The single market was completed in 1993. The border you passed through in the mid-90s was the open border - not the hard border that is the default outcome of Brexit.
If British goods are being allowed entry into the Republic, without paying taxes or being subject to quality controls, then that means the EU would have a policy that taxes aren’t paid at the EU Border.
And under WTO rules, that would mean that the EU has established tariff free entry and would have to give the same terms to every other member of the WTO, because the WTO rule is that every member gets the same treatment from another member that it gives to its “most favoured nation.” Britain would be the “most favour d nation” and the EU would have to give that same MFN treatment to all other WTO members.
So if the EU doesn’t charge border taxes on Brifish goods coming into Ireland, it can’t charge border taxes on goods from any other WTO member, bringing goods of into any EU country.
Hence, the Irish backstop, to establish a customs zone indefinitely between the EU and Britain.
Hence, outrage from Brexiteers, who say the EU isn’t “playing fair” and not letting Britain go.
But how can the EU give up its right to charge tariffs on goods from all the WTO states, to satisfy Britain?
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The PM of the UK wants Britain to leave the EU without any arrangements for a customs union with the Republic. He has rejected the Withdrawal Agreement, which would have prevented a hard border. It appears to be the policy of the British government to leave even if that creates a hard border.
If the residents of Northern Ireland aren’t British because Ireland isn’t part of the island of Great Britain, then you would agree that the residents of Hawaii are not Americans because Hawaii is not part of North America, correct?
I went on a road trip from Edinburgh to Donegal in 1990 and didn’t even take my passport (I don’t have either British or Irish citizenship) - as far as I recall we just drove and nobody stopped is. That’s crossing the border in the middle of nowhere, mind you, not in the city.
There’s only a physical border if somebody builds a physical border. Who’s currently on the UK and Ireland back to build one, if they both take one look at the problem, go ‘fuck it - causes too many problems’ and then just don’t? (Serious question - perhaps the answer is ‘the EU’)
Were you towing a trailer of meat at the time? Or perhaps a tanker of liquid milk? 
Broadly, there are three kinds of controls applied at international borders:
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Migration controls, which affect people crossing the border. Have you got the passports, visas, etc that are required? Are you on a watch-list? Etc.
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Fiscal controls, which have to do with taxes. Are tariffs due? Pay them, or make the required arrangements to have them paid. Excise duties? Value-added tax? Etc.
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Regulatory controls, which mostly have to do with goods. Are these goods which is is lawful to bring into the country? To sell? Do they conform to applicable market regulations regarding, e.g., safety? Does trading in these goods require any particular licence or approval, and have you got it? Etc.
For quite a long time now, Ireland and the UK have been in a Common Travel Area, established by agreement between the two governments, under which there is little or no migration control at the Irish/UK border. If you can lawfully enter Ireland, you can travel from there to the UK without restrictions or formalities, and vice versa. This predates both countries’ membership of the EU, and will survive Brexit. The hard border that people fear will result from Brexit is not a migration border.
It’s a fiscal and regulatory border. Individuals crossing the border will not be affected per se (unless perhaps by congestion and delay resulting from the issues I am about to mention.) It’s goods crossing the border, trading across the border, and also individuals crossing the border for economic purposes (e.g. to provide services to a customer across the border) which will be adversely impacted. But this will be a very substantial impact, with signficantly adverse social, economic and political consequences.
Because not constructing a border causes huge problems for both of them. For the UK, it fundamentally derails the whole Brexit project, for reasons already outlined. The British can’t “take back control of our borders” (a Leave campaign slogan) by abandoning control of their borders. They can’t operate their own tariff policy without actually collecting tariffs. They can’t have their own market regulations for goods if they don’t apply their market regulations for goods, and anyone is free to import and sell anything they like. And similar issues affect the EU (and Ireland as a member state of the EU).
Border controls don’t exist for fun. They exist because they are needed to implement laws and policies. You can, of course, devise laws and policies which don’t require border controls for their implementation - that was basically the design brief for the Customs Union (tariff policy) and the Single Market (regulatory policy). What you can’t do is adopt laws and policies which require border controls to be effectively implemented and then decide not to bother with the border controls, not to bother with any attempted alternative implementation method that doesn’t involve border controls, and assume that things will just work out. Any pretence, for political or electoral advantage, that you will do this is not credible.
Gosh, yes, Dublin is vibrant - four universities with about 47,000 students, about a dozen permanent theatres and more theatre companies, thriving indigenous live music scene, bumper-to-bumper taxis on George’s St at 2 am, direct flights to about 20 European capital cities - pick any other list of crude indicators of cultural vibrancy that you like, and see if you can find an English provincial city that can tick all the same boxes.
Glasgow. Manchester. Liverpool. Newcastle. Bristol.
I like Dublin. Spent a lot of my uni holidays there. But to call it a European Capital in all but the most technical way is really pushing it.
Agreed. The CTA existed for a long time before the EC membership started and indeed seamlessly was subsumed into it…despite the UK and Ireland both not being part of the Schengen zone. Still, its perfectly possible to drive from Belfast to Dublin without ever needing practically needed a passport, though technically you might need it and a visa (as I did, though I always made sure I went to the appropriate authorities before entering and exiting).
Thats a problem now. The political realities in the UK are that free movement of persons is a dead letter, no political party supports it. Outside of EU membership that was fine.
A Republic in the EU and the UK outside the EU makes a different situation. One in which the CTA cannot function as is. Because it means that someone can enter the Republic and simply drive to Belfast and enter the UK.
Glasgow is not an English provincial city. Do not make this mistake in the wrong company. I’ll say no more than that.
UK position is that they will maintain the CTA and, for once, I think they mean this and will implement it.
The problem this creates is that it presents an opportunity for, e.g. a Polish citizen to enter the UK without any control or even knowledge on the part of the UK authorities. But in practical reality this is not a huge problem because Polish citizen will be able to enter the UK very easily anyway - there will be visa-free entry for EU citizens.
What Brexit UK wants is not to stop, or even apply much control on, EU citizens entering the UK, but on EU citizens settling in the UK - becoming resident there, taking up jobs, etc. But they don’t intend to do this through border controls; rather, they will use in-country controls. EU citizens will be able to enter the country with minimal cost, delay or formality and in practice without their entry even being recorded, but in order to rent a flat, put their kids in school, register with a GP practice, take a job, etc they will have to demonstrate that they have an appropriate citizenship/migration status giving them a right of abode in the UK. Migration law enforcement will be largely outsourced to schools, doctors, employers etc, who themselves will exposed to penalties if they do not co-operate in implementing the rules.
Is this practicable? Will it work effectively? Will it be politically acceptable to UK citizens who will now have to produce papers proving their status in order to do everyday things? Is this what they fought the War for? Are the words “Windrush scandal” galloping towards this conversation at breakneck speed? All good questions, but they are not made more pressing or acute by the continuation of the CTA. What the UK intends to do in this regard is not incompatible with the continuation of the CTA, and if what they intend to do proves impracticable it won’t be made practicable by terminating the CTA.
So, of the three kinds of controls on the UK/Irish border that might be threatened by Brexit - migration, fiscal, regulatory - I think migration controls are the least likely to eventuate, and if they do it will not be for some time. As matters stand the other two are certain to eventuate, and quite quickly.
Heh We were in a little white van. Coulda been anything in the back (not huge tons of anything, I’ll grant). What there actually was, was three mattresses and a half-dozen students who didn’t believe in road safety laws
I do see that not properly implementing the customs border causes big problems for both the Eire/EU side and the UK. Except that if they do properly implement the customs border that also causes huge problems (more problems for NI than for the Republic, I guess). From the British side, it looks like implementing the border is actually worse in terms of problem caused. Boris seems to be sticking his fingers in his ears and saying la la la I have a secret plan that we won’t need any of that stuff - so it doesn’t look like he’s doing any work to employ border staff and build checkpoints. Is someone in the Irish government doing that?
The rules can officially spring into place, sure, but I don’t see how they’re going to be able to do more than draw a chalk line and get people to pinky promise not to cross it over 99%+ of the border on November 1st. Unless, of course, there’s a huge secret stockpile of physical barriers, thousands of people contracted to put them up in a single night, border guards already starting the hiring process…
They could manage a few token checkpoints on the major routes. They could declare rules. Ability to enforce rules is what I’m talking about. How do you enforce a hard border without a physical barrier or checks? They take time, and money, and organisation to put in place.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t be massively damaging to legal trade, I’m just saying that turning a line on a map into a meaningful border is not something that just happens. A border you can drive right across without any checks isn’t a hard border, except on paper.
The border with Northern Ireland isn’t Ireland’s only problem. Most of its trade with the rest of the EU is by truck, and those trucks will have to cross the EU border twice. A hard border between the UK and Ireland is also effectively a hard border between Ireland and France. Neither country is landlocked, obviously, but the existing direct ferry links don’t have the capacity or the speed to handle everything.
There are checks, controls, documentation and compliance (sic, I’d really like to know what do you think people aren’t complying with): most of it is supposed to be done at point of origin and point of arrival, but documentation can be checked at any point during travel. When I’ve worked for companies whose products need to travel with MSDS, one of the points of discussion is what language to print those in (source and destination, both plus English, all languages along the route, all plus English), with the end decision often varying by route; other items such as bills of lading are often multilingual as well, to facilitate checks.