With a population of around 1.8 million – on a par with somewhere like Kent – it’s perhaps not surprising why Northern Ireland has been largely side-lined by the general Brexit press coverage. Fears of a new Scotland referendum aside, the debate is largely dominated by England-centric issues, deemed of more immediate interest to the bulk of UK voters.

This marginalisation is unfortunate. As the only UK region to share a land border with another EU Member State, Northern Ireland has a unique voice in terms of the more drastic, visible and potentially negative impacts that Brexit may bring to it.

This series looks at why that is, starting with the obvious elephant in the room.

Opening Pandora’s Box Part 1 – The impact on the Good Friday Agreement

Northern Ireland has been hit harder than most by the fall-back from the global recession and the challenges of globalisation. However, on balance over the past two decades, it has enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity that seemed unthinkable at the height of the troubles.

The key to this, in purely political terms, is the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Granted, the EU had no direct role in the signature of the agreement; however, it is undeniable that its success is critical on the fact that both parts of Ireland exist as part of a common political and economic framework: by virtue of both the UK and Republic being EU Member States.

The following looks at the obvious ways in which Brexit will threaten this.

A) The identity issue.

One of the landmark achievements of the GFA was to expressly recognise the right of the people of “Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British”. Under the common union of the EU, Northern Irish people have the right to move freely between North and South as EU citizens and to hold Irish and UK passports if they want to. And thanks to the Single Market, businesses across the island can trade freely with each other in a common, borderless market – helping to forge the unique trading relationship that exists in Ireland today.

For many people, it is no longer so important whether you consider yourself Irish, or British, Northern Irish – being in the EU means there is little practical difference to what passport you hold anyways. Equally, this dilution of nationality also made it easier for the Republic to drop its overt claim to the six counties in its own constitution, paving the way to getting the majority of the Unionists on board at the time. And so against all odds, the apparently irresolvable issue of the North’s identity moved from being a primary political issue that had seen decades of unwanted violence on the island, to being a secondary constitutional and democratic one that was acceptable to a considerable majority of people in Ireland.

This achievement would obviously be problematic if the UK left the EU, in view of the restrictions on movement that are mandatorily applied to third country nationals outside it. For example, as anyone born in Northern Ireland currently has the automatic right to an Irish passport, does this mean that many aspects of Brexit – not least the freedom of movement – would only apply selectively to non-Irish passport holders in the North? Has anyone promoting Brexit even considered what sort of legal framework could allow this? And might this be the first time many Unionists take the plunge with an Irish passport, just to get visa-free travel throughout the EU?

Aware of the potential minefields here, an Irish Parliament (Oireachtas) Joint Committee report on Brexit has already called for Northern Ireland to be recognized “(in an EU context) as having ‘a special position constitutionally’ in the UK, in view of the Good Friday Agreement”. From a purely legal perspective, they certainly have a point.

B) The importance of mutual cooperation.

In a time when a bemused Queen can be presented with a pint of the black stuff at the Guinness factory in Dublin, and former IRA commander Martin McGuiness can toast her back at Buckingham Palace, then we are clearly living in a time when the relationship between the countries is unrecognisable from what it used to be.

Ireland is now UK’s biggest European ally, a privileged trading partner, and the only EU Member State to share a land border with a UK region. As such, you can understand why the Oreichtas report has recommended for the Republic to be “involved from the outset in all negotiations on the UK relationship with the EU, as UK’s membership of the EU is an issue of vital national interest to Ireland”.

The reason for this is from sitting within the same tent, the UK and the Republic now share many common interests not least over Northern Ireland. This includes the areas of Police and Justice Co-operation that the UK has actually opted into, border issues, and controlling terrorism under the European Arrest Warrant scheme, as well as non-EU considerations such as the common policies, forums and various North-South Councils that remain crucial to the continuing success of the GFA. As Taioseach Enda Kenny put it, “common membership of the EU project is part of the glue holding that transition process together”. It is clear that the UK leaving the EU is going to have some sort of effect on this.

Some Unionists politicians may be keen to show their electorate that they won’t stand silently while the Republic passes an interest in such matters. This may be sadly predictable, but do they really want to jeopardise the relationship with the UK’s closest European ally, and the province’s biggest trading partner, for the sake of some political grandstanding?

c) Funding.



The overwhelmingly positive recognition of the Good Friday Agreement across the board has also helped trigger various financial contributions from the EU that have helped secure its success. Estimated at around €2.4 million from 2007-2013 alone. This includes:

various initiatives to improve community relations, cross-border cooperation, environmental problems and to increase private investment in the region under the Northern Ireland Task Force; and

various PEACE programmes financed chiefly by the European Regional Development Fund, designed to support peace and reconciliation by supporting the regeneration of urban, rural and border areas, and tackling the separation of communities along ethnic lines. Peace IV (2014-2020) has just been approved, which will see a further €282 million earmarked to be added to the €333 million that was invested from 2007-2013.

Can a post-Brexit UK, with its own economy widely predicted to suffer some sort of negative fall out, replace this crucial funding lifeline? Despite the populist and promissory rhetoric of Brexiters, this is highly unlikely, given the current trend for cutting centralised funding on anything that moves in the UK, something people in Northern Ireland are very aware of following the various narrowly-avoided crises in getting an acceptable budget agreed with the 2015 “Fresh Start” Stormont Agreement. Fortunately, maths is an exact science, so questioning Brexiters, a movement united in its opposition to government subsidies, on just where this money might come from, should be interesting.

D) The ECHR

References to the rights of Northern Ireland citizens to the protection of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) also feature very heavily in the GFA, which even goes to far as to state that this right could not be taken away by unilateral action by the UK.

This consideration hasn’t deterred Conservative politicians that dominate the Brexit debate from trying to ensure that the UK public associate the ECHR with the EU itself. Even key Remainers have tried this, presumably in the hope of not being seen as not too overtly-EU themselves before their core voters, unless they are making an argument that the EU might just affect their back-pockets. This includes the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who wants the UK to leave the ECHR, to David Cameron himself, who has settled for trying to replace the UK’s Human Rights Act of 1998 which implements it.

Not only is this very worrying, it is also very misleading – and arguably deliberately so. The ECHR actually belongs to the Council of Europe, a completely separate and independent entity from the EU. In Northern Ireland’s case, it also poses a particular problem for the GFA, which again, might need to be rewritten if the UK revokes the ECHR in the post-Brexit momentum.

As the GFA effectively gives Northern Ireland its own constitution, this may be a trifle politically sensitive. Equally, if they don’t, the thought of the UK allowing Northern Ireland to have a different Human Rights framework from the rest of the UK, given the supremacy of the UK courts over them, is equally awkward.

E) The constitutional conundrum

The last public referendum in Northern Ireland, in May 1998, saw 71% of voters endorsing the Good Friday Agreement and all that it sought to achieve – with the DUP, at the time, the only serious party to openly oppose it. In the South, this figure was an even more impressive 95%, albeit with a proportionally lower turnout.

Consider also that, unusually for any UK constitutional issue in Northern Ireland, there is a similar broad consensus for Northern Ireland people and it’s politicians, who are all too aware from their ministerial duties and elsewhere just how important the EU has been and will continue to be for Northern Ireland. Unsurprisingly, the nationalist vote is likely to be unanimous (for those sensible enough to actually vote). The broad church of the Alliance is likely to account for the middle ground vote. Unionism is itself somewhat split with the Ulster Unionist Party supporting a remain vote, leaving the DUP as a lone voice again – this time as the only main party ostensibly advocating for Brexit.

Even then, the DUP has taken a more nuanced approach than the “take our country back” line given by less creditable members its lower rank and file, by simultaneously recommending its voters to decide for themselves in the EU referendum and stray from the official party line if they wish to. This helps Foster, bound somewhat to pay lip service to the hard-core loyalist and British-at-all-costs element of her support, to stave off accusations that the DUP’s stance has recklessly prioritised the ideological aspirations of a minority of the NI population against the greater interest of the rest of its citizens. This certainly wouldn’t go down well with the business and agricultural community on whom the DUP has traditionally enjoyed strong support – many of whom have their own compelling reasons for going against the party line.

With broad public and political support likely to guarantee a similar majority vote in this referendum, this poses some awkward questions for the Brexit campaign. Can a post-Brexit government force Northern Ireland into dismantling a constitutional arrangement that a strong majority of its population have twice comprehensively voted for? Will nationalist parties press for a border poll as they claim? And if it fails as is most likely, will a special status be given to Northern Ireland to appease nationalists instead, now cut off not only from Ireland, but the entire EU itself? If not – what implications would this have for the peace process? And if yes, what will Scotland make of this, sure to follow any developments here with interest?

When dealing with such complex and politically traumatic questions, sometimes there are no real satisfactory answers. How refreshing it would be for a Brexit politician to openly admit that.