Irish Sea border: ‘Unionists must walk away from the Belfast Agreement if needs be’

An Irish Sea border will make exporting products from GB to NI so cumbersome and costly that many British manufacturers will simply decide to abandon Northern Ireland.

We will increasingly encounter the words ‘Not available in Northern Ireland’ when we browse British based retailers online.

As British commerce gradually departs from the Province, then local businesses will be forced to trade with other countries in the EU single market. As well as resulting in uncompetitive pricing and product choice limitation, there will inevitably be a growth in North-South trading and economic harmonisation with the Irish Republic.

This is only one of a number of ways in which an Irish Sea Border will compromise Northern Ireland’s remaining membership of the UK. We will remain part of the EU single market as the rest of the UK gradually moves away from restrictive EU directives.

An undemocratic consequence of this will be that we will be subject to new EU laws that neither our elected politicians or the British Government will have had any say in making.

In practice, Northern Ireland will have become into the first colony of the EU!

Taking this into consideration it is truly underwhelming how limp the opposition from Political Unionism has been so far. Certainly when compared to the vigour that Irish Nationalists have shown in resisting any attempt to introduce a hard land border.

The contrast in approaches is best represented by Edwin Poots’s departmental officials who had co-operated with the implementation of border infrastructure in local harbour ports [though the News Letter reported that he had ordered a stop to this in early September].

A Sinn Fein minister would never have allowed their department to cooperate in any way, with any attempt, to establish a hard land border, regardless of legal threats from the Secretary of State.

This difference is a key reason as to why the Government chose to betray the DUP rather than face down the opponents of a hard land border.

Regardless, time is running out if Unionist are to have any influence on the outcome of the negotiations!

The leaders of the three main Unionist parties must urgently issue a joint statement, stating that any form of Irish Sea border demonstrates a violation of the principle of consent, as enshrined in the both the Belfast/St Andrews Agreements.

As such, if implemented, all strands of Political Unionism will withdraw their support for those agreements and the political institutions they established.

It is imperative that both grassroots Unionists and local businesses, lobby MLAs continuously on this issue.

They must make it clear that if Unionist MLAs continue to meekly accept an Irish Sea Border, then the people will boldly reject them at the next election.

Kirk McDowell, Belfast BT5

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