CityLab: How Brexit Got Snagged on the Irish Border

When Brexit happens, it will create the U.K.’s first-ever land border with the E.U., on the frontier between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. This shouldn’t pose passport problems, because the U.K. and Ireland have a longstanding passport-free Common Travel Area agreement. But because Britain is on course to leave the E.U.’s tariff-free single market, imports and exports must somehow be monitored across this 310-mile-long barrier. Controlling this flow by a so-called “hard” border—that is, one with checkpoints and customs controls—would be quite the job. Looking in one direction alone, Northern Irish exports to the Republic are worth £3.6 billion ($4.8 billion) a year, while there are a total of 275 land crossings between the two parts of the island, more than twice the number there are along the E.U.’s entire eastern frontier. A hard border here could thus be a nightmare for both countries. [...]

If that sounds a little too easy, it’s because it is. With no controls for smaller businesses, the Irish border would become a quasi-legal smuggling paradise for importers wanting to avoid paying duty on their goods. There would be nothing to stop, say, a non-European company flying their goods into Belfast, then using a constellation of smaller companies to get it across the border tariff-free. There’s no way the E.U. could accept this. It could end up being a weird backdoor version of the single market—which Britain says it wants to leave.

And E.U. resistance isn’t the only barrier to this plan becoming a reality. Allowing E.U. importers to get their goods into Britain tax-free over the Irish border would be giving their countries preferential treatment, which would break World Trade Organization rules and expose the U.K. to a tsunami of litigation. [...]

Since the referendum, the U.K. government has already risked jeopardizing the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brokered peace in the region by forming an electoral alliance with the hard-line loyalist Democratic Unionist Party. By attaching its electoral future to a sectarian party, the British national government has called into question its ability to maintain the “rigorous impartiality” stipulated by the agreement. If that weren’t bad enough, the U.K. is now hurtling toward re-solidifying the border—and potentially toppling a carefully balanced status quo—while contriving to insist that it’s doing nothing of the sort.  

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Jacobin Magazine: The End of the Old Brigade

For his supporters, Adams is the man who guided Sinn Féin to unprecedented political success; for disillusioned one-time allies, he is a slippery opportunist who abandoned fundamental principles in the name of expediency. His most vociferous critics in the Irish media will be glad to see the back of Adams, but their relief at his departure will be mixed with awareness that he did more than anyone to bring the IRA to a permanent ceasefire. He leaves Sinn Féin at a moment of uncertainty on both sides of the Irish border, with fundamental questions to answer about its political strategy in the years ahead. [...]

After his release in 1976, Adams was ready to challenge the old guard in the republican movement. His faction promised that there would be no more ceasefires without a clear British commitment to leave Ireland for good, earning themselves a reputation as hard-line militarists. The vision of a federal Ireland with an Ulster parliament espoused by Sinn Féin president Ruairí Ó Brádaigh was dismissed as a sop to unionism. Ó Brádaigh and his allies were ruthlessly marginalized by the younger northern Provos who rallied to Adams. In a dramatic role-reversal which reveals much about Adams’ political journey, Ó Brádaigh would later became one of his leading critics when he led Sinn Féin into the peace process of the 1990s. [...]

In the 1983 Westminster election Sinn Féin won over 40 per cent of the nationalist vote. It was a remarkable success that demonstrated the potential of an electoral strategy to Adams and his comrades in leadership. But it also proved to be the high water mark for the dual strategy of “the Armalite and the ballot box.” As time went on, the contradictions between the IRA’s guerrilla warfare and Sinn Féin’s political growth became ever more apparent. Support for the IRA campaign was confined to a minority of nationalists in republican strongholds like Derry, West Belfast and South Armagh. Beyond those circles, there was a ceiling that Sinn Féin could never break while the war continued. Controversial IRA actions, such as the bomb attack that killed eleven civilians at Enniskillen in 1987, would have a direct impact on Sinn Féin’s electoral prospects. [...]

But this should not really be surprising. For Gerry Adams and the movement he has built, social questions are ultimately a means to an end: useful insofar as they advance the prospects of Irish unification, disposable insofar as they don’t. And under his leadership, Sinn Féin has come closer to its primary objective than ever before. When Adams promised, at this year’s Ard Fheis, that his party would secure a referendum on Irish unity within five years, it wasn’t for show. Amid the fallout from Brexit, with unionism historically weak in the North and the conflict fading from the memory of the southern electorate, a referendum is increasingly plausible. What kind of Ireland it would produce is another story.

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