So what happens with Northern Ireland in a no-deal Brexit? If a hard border is resurrected, would there be a risk of a return to The Troubles?
Yes, in short. A hard border with customs checks, vehicle inspections etc, or even just with licence plate cameras would provide both a catalyst and a set of targets for the crazies to take action. It can’t be stressed enough how much of a pacifying effect the absence of border infrastructure has had in NI.
But there are other potential flashpoints too. Under the Good Friday Agreement, there is a devolved power-sharing Assembly in NI which has power to deal with various policy areas such as agriculture, infrastructure, justice, health etc. The sharing of power between nationalist and unionist parties has always been fraught with tension, especially as the largest parties representing these groups are Sinn Fein and the DUP, respectively. (Sinn Fein being of course the political wing of the IRA, and the DUP being the hardest of the hard-line unionists with their own ties to paramilitary orgs).
In Jan 2017 these tensions reached breaking point, as the two main parties fell to loggerheads after a political scandal. The Assembly was suspended, and hasn’t resumed in the 2.5 years since. (One of the reasons the situation is difficult to resolve is that Westminster would be expected to act as an honest broker/facilitator of negotiations and while this would always be a bit difficult for nationalists to swallow, the fact the Westminster Tory government is only in power because of a deal with DUP MPs makes any claim to disinterested arbitration laughably hollow).
Anyhow, NI has been struggling on without a devolved legislature and just about getting by. In the event of No Deal however, there would have to be a great deal of legislation passed affecting e.g. infrastructure and agriculture and there simply wouldn’t be time to hammer out a deal that would get the Assembly up and running again. So what would have to happen is that Westminster would have to impose direct rule: a massively retrograde step and, insofar as steps can be inflammatory, an incredibly inflammatory one.
This point was recently made in a paper by the Institute of Government (an independent think tank which analyses policy and politics); when this point has been put to the new Foreign Secretary and to the new PM’s spokesperson, both have failed to deny it.
In the Troubles, the basic assumptions were that the people of NI could be Irish, or they could be British, but they couldn’t be both and forcing them to pick either one was both the only option and a terrible injustice. The open border and the Assembly presented a new option, which was essentially that you could in fact be both; you could trade and travel freely with Ireland, and while you were still technically ruled by the UK actually a lot of the decisions were being made locally. So everyone could just…chill out a bit and get on with their daily lives without being confronted with harsh dichotomies.
No Deal Brexit risks bringing back not just symbols of the old binary approach, but the on-the-ground realities. It seems quite plausible that some associated factors will return too.
Here’s what the IoG has to say about No Deal Brexit and NI:
Thanks for that informative post! So if nothing happens, and the deadline passes, does the hard border return?
Yup. With a vengeance.
So, NI declares independence (while retaining allegiance to the Crown for old times’ sake), immediately joins the EU and adopts the Euro, and keeps an open border and chill with Eire, rather than hold hands with the UK like Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff?
NI won’t do that - NI can’t be assumed to have a unified view on anything. Scotland, however, might take another run at independence, particularly given that they went heavily for Remain and like their links with Europe.
Thanks. I wonder what the mechanism would be? What officials will start to physically build border infrastructure – walls and such? ISTM that the motivation from local contractors and builders will be to boycott such efforts.
Independence isn’t on the cards. NI is not a viable sovereign state, and more importantly, no-one in NI wants independence as such. The options are re-unification with Ireland, or continued union with GB.
It is certainly possible that the shock of No Deal Brexit and the resulting impositions and general clusterfuckery tilts the balance of opinion in NI towards re-unification with Ireland. Continued membership of the EU is a pretty big incentive and there will certainly be a great deal of disillusionment with the UK government. However, it is making a very definite choice and there would be a substantial majority who were unhappy with the decision if and when it were made - which certainly wouldn’t happen immediately as it would have to happen through some sort of referendum/election/deliberative assembly.
But broadly, No Deal does imperil NI’s place in the UK.
No, joining the EU cannot be done instantly. It’s a long and complex process.
The only way it could be done reasonably quickly would be for NI to give up its own government and become part of the Republic of Ireland. And there is absolutely no way they will ever do that.
“No way” seems to ignore that some of the people of Northern Ireland have been pushing quite hard to do exactly that since the partition.
It’s unlikely, but it’s more likely than it’s been since 1609. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. And that fact, assuming it’s correct, is going to be a strong impetus to those who have been working towards it by fair means and / or by foul.
The point is that it’s “some of the people”. Other people are fanatically opposed to it, to the point of violence.
In March 2019 the Irish Times commissioned an opinion poll on reunification.
If there was referendum on unity with the Republic now, would you vote yes for unity, or no against?
Yes 32%
No 45%
Don’t know 23%
In the short term, it’ll be chaos - there will be few to no border controls of any materiality in place. Most people will keep doing what they’re doing now until someone tells them not to, which means that once the government get around to implementing something it’ll be the ordinary but clueless punters who get caught and fined/arrested, while the criminal elements will already have set up their much more organised illegal border crossing mechanisms.
In the long-term - God only knows. Squads of trained Riverdancers tapping along the border, for all I can guess.
Would NI never consider independence on their own, *without *union with Eire? Perhaps a Celtic Common Market of sorts with them and an independent Scotland, and trade agreements with the remaining rump UK?
All the polls showing what they, or anyone, would do are based on assumptions that would no longer apply after a hard Brexit. They may not be definitive.
The thing about NI is that it represents the overlap in the Venn diagram or “Ireland” and “the UK”. It contains elements of both, and you could place it into either circle but it’s not really a category on its own.
While I am not from NI I’m pretty sure there’s very little interest in going it alone even if they had the economy for it (which they don’t). Most people there want to be part of one country or the other, not a new one of their own. Hell, they can’t even keep a functioning devolved government.
So the question is, would NDB, a hard border, Westminster rule, trading chaos and the prospect of jumping into the loving embrace of the EU be enough to swing say 4% of votes from No to Yes while getting Don’t Knows to break 3:2 for Yes? Or some variation on that?
Not a certainty, but very far from absolutely no way, I’d think.
Also, it’d be really interesting to see the trend in Don’t Knows, because given this is NI 1/4 being unsure about the big political question of their lives seems high.
Unless I’m misunderstanding something, declaring independence would just replace one hard border with two: the Republic of Ireland and the UK. Sure, they could negotiate some sort of trade agreements with Dublin and London, but those take time to work out, and in the meantime, NI would have WTO borders, with all the risks of instability and violence that entails.
While an independent Northern Ireland, Scotland or even Wales might well take years to join the EU, I had been working on the assumption that they could (if they were willing to make the effort) join the EEA / EFTA quite quickly, which would be ‘good enough’ for most pro-EU people. Anyone familiar with the detail? This could be Scotland’s destiny in particular.
Completely unrelated - while a no-deal Brexit would have some bad consequences for Ireland north and south, there would be some relatively favourable mitigations. Specifically, at a personal level, any Irish person (and only Irish people) would have full citizen’s rights throughout the EU and the UK. That’s quite a useful right for someone who was interested in working for a multinational company with EU and UK operations. (I suppose in theory Irish citizens could be deprived of their rights in the UK, but it seems unlikely, and the northern Irish couldn’t be treated like this while NI remains in the UK).
For demographic reasons (higher birth-rate, lower propensity to emigrate) the Nationalist community in NI (i.e. those who tend to favour unification with the Republic has been slowly but steadily growing, relative to the Unionist community. So, even if a no-deal Brexit doesn’t result in an immediate majority for unification, it may appear to bring that event closer - to accelerate the existing trend.
A poll conducted in NI in December 2018 asked respondents how they would vote on unification with the Republic, if the UK left the EU without a deal. The result was:
Would probably or certainly vote to remain in UK: 42%
Would probably or certainly vote to leave UK and join inited Ireland: 55%
Don’t know/not sure: 3%
Corresponding figures if UK leaves EU with the Withdrawal Agreement as negotiated: 48%, 48%, 3%. If UK remains in EU: 60%, 29%, 11%.
Now, polls which ask people to say not what they would do immediately, but what they would do in the future after hypothetical events tend to be not completely reliable predictors of what they actually do, if and when those events occur. But, still, this does lend support to the view that a no-deal Brexit could materially increase support for a united Ireland, possibly to a decisive degree. And even if it wasn’t an immediately decisive majority, if no-deal Brexit is painful for NI - and all models suggest that it will be very, very painful; much more so than for UK as a whole, which will be painful enough - then the boost to support for a united Ireland could be an enduring one. Demographic changes might do the rest in a surprisingly short time.
I think there’s two factors at work here.
First, many people’s assent to the continued union of GB and NI is conditional on, or sustained by, the high degree of integration with the rest of Ireland which shared EU membership makes possible. Therefore, reducing that degree of integration tends to weaken support for the union, and so imperil it.
Secondly, the whole Brexit project and the way it has taken over UK politics and driven it in a more and more extreme direction demonstrates that the UK political establishment has no regard for the wishes or interests of Northern Ireland. NI voted against Brexit, but is having Brexit forced on it anyway. All forms of Brexit are signficantly harmful to NI, but the UK has chosen to hew first of all to hard Brexit, and now apparently to no-deal Brexit, which injure NI much more than Brexit needs to. A favourable carve-out for NI, which is popular in NI and acceptable to the EU, is being rejected by English Brexiters because it offends their amour propre. Sincere unionists in NI are likely to must be angry, depressed and discouraged by this cavalier treatment, which they must see as a betrayal by those in Great Britain who claim to be unionists themselves.
The other point to bear in mind is that there have throughout been small dissident groups attempting terrorist acts against police officers and the like (another case just the other day). It doesn’t need much in the way of official activity along the border line for such people to find new targets, and (eventually, maybe gradually) the cycle of repression/retaliation to start up all over again. It doesn’t have to involve, or reflect the serious commitment of, many people for it to be a serious threat to peace.