Insight
A terrible border is reborn? Ireland and a no-deal Brexit by Daniel Keohane 25 September 2020
If the UK fails to reach a trade deal with the EU, and does not implement the special arrangements for Northern Ireland agreed in the Withdrawal Agreement, Ireland faces the prospect of a hard land border being reborn. After the 1916 Irish rising, the poet WB Yeats wrote that “a terrible beauty is born”. Subsequent events led to Irish independence from the UK and the partition of the island. The customs border, established in 1922, was removed after 1992 with the creation of the EU single market. That EU context – of removing borders between members for the movement of people, goods, services, and capital – helped encourage the process that led to the 1998 peace agreement, known as the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement. After 1998, security installations were removed and the land border on the island of Ireland became invisible, with cross-border co-operation and the all-island economy functioning mainly based on shared EU rules. However, if the UK government fails to reach a trade deal with the EU, and also refuses to abide by the special arrangements for Northern Ireland agreed in the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement, Ireland faces the prospect of a terrible border being reborn. The two sorts of ‘no-deal Brexit’ If the UK and EU do not reach an agreement on their future relationship by the end of this year, there are two scenarios. The first would see the UK leave the ‘transition’ period, which concludes at the end of 2020, with no agreement on the future EU-UK relationship, but uphold its pre-existing commitments made under the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement. This is sometimes referred to as a ‘WTO-only Brexit’, since the UK would then trade with the EU only on World Trade Organisation rules. Without a trade deal, the subsequent combination of fully-fledged customs and regulatory checks at EU-UK borders, along with the application of tariffs and quotas on many goods, could cause significant disruption. The second scenario is a combination of a ‘WTO-only Brexit’ with a failure to implement the 2019 UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement, especially regarding Northern Ireland. This would be a ‘double no-deal Brexit’. CER INSIGHT: A terrible border is reborn? Ireland and a no-deal Brexit 25 SEPTEMBER 2020
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