Northern Ireland business chief has fears over GB-NI customs checks

Dr Wesley Johnston, a director of Colourpoint Books and Blackstaff Press, has said he is worried about checks on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland under proposals set out by the UK government last week.

The government confirmed last week that there will be a border in the Irish Sea.

A position paper on how it envisages trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain after Brexit said that there will only be limited additional processes to handle goods arriving in Northern Ireland, using “all flexibilities,” and none the other way.

But the document is just an interpretation of the Irish Protocol, first agreed by Boris Johnson and Leo Varadkar last October, and might meet resistance from the EU.

Dr Johnston said that while he is pleased to read there should be no checks on goods moving from Northern Ireland to Great Britain, he expressed concern about the implications of customs checks on goods moving the other direction.

“Confirmation that there will be no checks on goods entering GB from NI is half the battle,” he told the News Letter. “We sell books to distributors in GB, especially Amazon, who then sell throughout the UK. It seems that we will be able to send these books without too much trouble.

“The worrying aspect is the need for checks on goods going the other way. For example, if a customer in Enniskillen buys a book on Amazon, the book will go from our warehouse to an Amazon warehouse in GB, then back to Enniskillen. Will that require checks and hold things up?

“We also get books printed by GB printers and these manufactured goods may now require paperwork to enter NI.

“Additionally, many of these books will then move on to be sold in the Rrepublic of Ireland, so will they incur tariffs and cause delays?

“We may have to shift our production base to EU printers to compensate for this, but will this then create issues importing the books to NI?”

Dr Johnston added: “There are many unknowns. It is a worrying time for business. The apparent lack of transparency from the government to date does not encourage us that there will not be further problems.”

Meanwhile, the Ulster Farmers’ Union has said it “welcomes the UK government’s release of its approach to the NI Protocol as part of its ongoing Brexit negotiations with the EU.”

A spokesperson for the UFU added: “Since the beginning of the Brexit process, the UFU’s key objective was to secure continued access for Northern Ireland to both the mainland UK and EU markets so that trade would be as free and frictionless as possible east/west and north/south.

“We hope that the two negotiating parties will reach a conclusion quickly that will allow this to happen.”