Mike Nesbitt: I warned about danger of Irish Sea border – and what Brexit would mean for identity

Your correspondent, Bobby Baxter of Coleraine, is entirely wrong in his assessment of my reasons for encouraging a Remain vote in the 2016 referendum on continued membership of the European Union.

(January 25 – ‘Yes the DUP voted to Leave but some other unionists didn’t read the anti EU mood of the silent majority’)

My motivation in urging Remain was to protect the most important Union of all, that of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Mr Baxter erroneously states as fact that I and a number of business leaders were obsessed with the land border, claiming “All they talked about was we need to keep the Irish border open, otherwise the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) will be broken and it could lead to trouble, if we were to have customs posts set up between Northern Ireland and the Republic.”

It is a matter of record that I warned of the potential for a border in the Irish Sea, with a return to the bad old days of suspicion over the movement of goods and people from Britain’s ports and airports into Northern Ireland.

I also warned of the consequences of a Brexit vote on people’s sense of identity. Many in Northern Ireland subscribe to the mixed identity expressed by the great poet John Hewitt, who said he was an Ulsterman, but also Irish, British and European.

Hewitt went on to warn that to deny any part of that mix would diminish who he was. Brexit has denied many their sense of being European.

The result is that the constitutional question that was put to bed by the 1998 Belfast / Good Friday Agreement, is now back on the political agenda. That was the very outcome I wished to avoid.

Mr Baxter also claims the Ireland / Northern Ireland Protocol “was concocted up (sic) by Boris Johnson and Leo Varadkar during their meeting at Thornton Manor held on October 10 2019”.

In fact, the origins of the Protocol were in remarks by Mr Johnson eight days earlier, on the 2nd of October – comments greeted as a “serious and sensible” way forward by the DUP leader.

The challenge is not to rewrite history as Mr Baxter appears keen to do, but to build a fair, peaceful and prosperous society in Northern Ireland, where every citizen wakes up with an equal opportunity to flourish. I believe that can best be achieved within the United Kingdom, but whether we will be better off outside the EU remains an open question.

Mike Nesbitt, MLA for Strangford since 2011, UUP leader 2012 - 2017

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