Theresa May’s much awaited Brexit
speech on Friday, failed yet again, to propose any workable alternatives to a
hard border in Northern Ireland.
Disgraced/deluded Foreign Secretary,
Boris Johnson, proffered some advice to Theresa May ahead of her speech. In a
leaked letter, he urged her to be relaxed about the whole hard border thing. So
what if the Good Friday Agreement unravels? – small price to pay for being able
to decide the shape of British, err, bananas.
This is completely at odds with the
fact that Theresa May signed off on phase one of Brexit in December, contingent
on the fact that there would be no hard border in Northern Ireland and, in
November, Boris Johnson himself said, “There
can be no return to a hard border. That would be unthinkable,
and it would be economic and political madness".
Why the change of heart? We don’t know, because the
media hasn’t deemed it necessary to press the Foreign Secretary on his complete
U-turn. This buffoon even compared Northern Ireland to London’s congestion
charge this week and still the media afford him the veneer of credibility. Lies
have long since been Johnson’s strategy of choice. Remember the £350 million a
week he promised for the NHS?
The vacuum created by the absence of any cogent workable
alternatives to economic and moral bankruptcy post Brexit, is being filled by anodyne soundbites, deception and lies. David
Davis lied about the existence of the Brexit risk analysis and on Wednesday,
Jacob Rees Mogg lied when he said Jeremy Corbyn voted against the GFA on
Channel 4 news.
The people on the Island of Ireland,
my family and friends, deserve better. They want to know what Brexit will mean
for their livelihoods and their future. These are just some of the practical
questions that Theresa May has yet to answer:
If Northern Ireland leaves the single
market, a hard border is inevitable. What will become of the cross boarder
collaboration enabling farmers on both sides
to compete with their counterparts elsewhere in the world?
25% of the region’s raw milk goes south
of the border to be processed and 40% of
Northern Irish lambs are processed in the republic. A hard Brexit would impede that flow, not just because of tariffs and
customs checks, the burden of paperwork around traceability and standards would
be prohibitive.
What will become of the joint initiatives on shared waterways? Access to medicine? And
the current all-island approach to preventing the spread of animal diseases,
such as, foot and mouth?
What will become of patients from the
Republic who receive radiotherapy in the north and the children who travel from
Belfast to Dublin for heart surgery in the only all-Island newly opened world
class facility? How will emergency services continue to
collaborate post Brexit?
What about subsidies?
Northern Ireland already has the highest levels of unemployment and poverty in
the UK and can ill afford to lose €3.5bn in EU subsidies up to 2020. Unless the magic money tree
in Panama
is raided, the British exchequer would struggle to fill that gap.
By
getting into bed with the DUP and riding rough shod over the rigorous impartiality
required by the Good Friday Agreement, the Tories are gambling with peace in
the province. The majority of people in Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. Despite the Tories having no mandate to impose a hard border and promising there wouldn't be one, their continued inability to propose concrete alternative plans and failing to address the above questions, makes the hard border inevitable.
In the words of a Dublin friend: "Jaysus, Mary & Holy St Joseph - We're feckin doomed!"
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