One year from Brexit: Border sits under cloud of uncertainty

The farmer walked away from his tractor, the engine still running, and exited the field to chat, walking to the edge of one jurisdiction to point into another.

“That field is in the Republic,” he said, crossing the road on the outskirts of Jonesborough, Co Armagh, to point over the ditch at Co Louth and trying to explain the Border as best he could.

“Those sheep are in the South,” he added, pointing up the hill to another field.

The man would only identify himself as "Pat" but he had plenty to say about Brexit and how bad the UK's departure from the European Union a year from now might leave this rural area where he farms every day.

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“Sure how are they going to do it?” he asked, drawing out a zigzag line showing where the Border ran in front of him. It bisected two houses next to him and a derelict Protestant church down the hill. When that church was in use, the cleric used to preach from the Republic to his congregation in the North.

He recalls being stopped as a six-year-old in the 1950s by customs officials on a visit to an aunt across the Border. They confiscated a half-pound of butter he had been given to bring back to his mother.

Pat cannot imagine a return to those days if the UK decides to leave the EU and no special arrangements are made for Northern Ireland that would avoid the need for those officials returning.

“Push it away out,” he says, suggesting the Irish Sea is the best place for the Border.

Emergency guarantee

The EU and the United Kingdom agreed in Brussels last week that the final Brexit treaty had to include an emergency default position guaranteeing no hard border meandering through these fields. Twelve months since British prime minister Theresa May triggered the article 50 exit from the EU and 12 months from the formal Brexit, people along this 500km frontier are no clearer about what this might mean.

It is the absence of a clear solution for the Border 21 months after the UK voted to leave the political and economic union that makes life so difficult for people in this part of the island to plan.

“The biggest problem is the uncertainty,” said Liam McNally, a sheep trader who with his brother Micheál has been in business for 30 years, operating from a farmyard that straddles the Border 100 yards up the road.

“If it wasn’t so uncertain, you could do something but it is the total uncertainty of what’s going to happen, of what the rules will be.”

I don't see any policy documents from Whitehall as coming remotely close to sustaining agriculture here

More than 90 per cent of the sheep the Co Armagh-based brothers sell head south of the Border. The idea of no agreement on Brexit and no guarantee to avoid a hard border terrifies Liam McNally.

“It could wipe us out. Our business as it sits today would be finished overnight, so it would. The export of any live animal across the Border would stop overnight,” he said.

The McNallys are not alone. Shaun Irvine, a former chairman of the Northern Ireland Livestock Marts Association, estimates that 80-90 per cent of 150,000 lambs sold at his Ballymena Mart head south.

“We would be very concerned about anything that would affect that. We don’t have a lot of killing capacity here in the north of Ireland. We need southern factories to be buying them,” he said.

Uniquely exposed

The UK government’s analysis of the impact of no post-Brexit EU-UK free-trade agreement on Northern Ireland is severe: a 12 per cent economic hit, the third-worst regionally, a leaked report in February showed.

The Border region is an area uniquely exposed to Brexit. The impact on beef and sheep farmers would be far worse than on the wider Northern Irish economy. In the event of no deal, Northern Irish exports to and imports from the EU would collapse with new effective tariffs of up to 78 per cent under World Trade Organisation rules, while meat imports from cheaper countries under an open-door trade policy would reduce sales by more than a fifth. This was according to a report by the agri-business consultancy, The Andersons Centre, with Oxford Economics carried out for the Livestock and Meat Commission in August 2017.

James Lowe, a fourth-generation farmer, has three sons but has grave concerns about the prospects of passing on his 300-acre dairy and beef farm near Coalisland in Co Tyrone with Brexit looming.

Living almost 30km from the Border, Lowe can see the six counties of Northern Ireland from his farm. He fears for Northern Irish farmers, from the Mourne mountains to the south of him right to the Sperrins in the North, when they lose EU Common Agricultural Policy payments, which totalled €315 million in 2016.

“In that case alone I don’t see any policy documents coming from Whitehall as coming remotely close as sustaining agriculture here in the six counties,” he said.

Like many other farmers here, Lowe’s milk goes south to the Republic and his beef goes east to the UK. As chairman of the Northern Ireland Agricultural Producers’ Association, he says most farmer-members want to stay within the EU’s customs union to avoid tariffs and checks on products as they move. But if they are required, the checks should take place at the sea ports where veterinary and sanitary checks already take place.

“We are an island off the mainland. Stuff has to be exported anyhow. There are checks done regardless. That would be the best scenario as opposed to a hard border. We are not talking about constitutional change,” he said, referring to objections of the Democratic Unionist Party at the prospect of a border in the Irish Sea.

Common regulatory area

This week, for the first time since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, EU and UK official Brexit negotiators sat down in Brussels to discuss how to avoid what everyone does not want: a hard border.

Talks come a week after London conceded that there needed to be legal text on the default “backstop” in the final Brexit treaty: the so-called option C from the December deal with the EU that would ensure a “common regulatory area” on the island of Ireland if there was no option A, a deep EU-UK free trade deal that would make a hard border unnecessary, or option B, specific technology solutions for the Border to keep it invisible.

Option C would effectively keep Northern Ireland in the customs union (no tariffs) and internal market (rules making the EU, economically speaking, a single country) – two things the UK wants out of.

The EU negotiating “taskforce” is happy to listen to any proposal from the British but cannot see how they can maintain their “red lines” – leaving the customs union and single market – while avoiding a hard border.

“We cannot really see how they can be reconciled with no physical infrastructure and no barriers,” said a source familiar with the taskforce’s negotiating position.

Brussels wants a precise, detailed text around how option C will operate legally.

“That customs official needs to know what they have to do to provide the legal details of operating controls and checks but ensure north-south co-operation can continue,” said an EU source.

People are hoping for the best but there are very little indications with what is around the corner

The questions being asked in talks this week are: what are the controls that are needed so that Northern Ireland does not become a third country? How can controls be moved away from the Border?

On the eve of officials meeting in Brussels, Britain’s Brexit secretary David Davis, in an interview with BBC on Sunday, appeared to suggest that a mix of options A and B could maintain an open border. The “overwhelmingly likely option” of a free-trade and customs agreement would make finding a solution for the Border “much, much easier,” he said while border checks could be avoided with a “whole lot of technology”.

To some, Davis is throwing out stock lines the UK government has been repeating for months.

“You can see why the European phrase about ‘magical thinking’ comes back to the fore here. Because Davis is really showing that they definitely don’t have answers,” said Katy Hayward, an academic at Queen’s University Belfast who has carried out much research on Brexit and the Border.

Brussels seems to be definitive on the prospect of an “option B” technological solution. “We just don’t think that it will cut it,” said the EU source.

No infrastructure

In the absence of solid proposals on option A and a viable option B, EU negotiators will fall back on option C and insist that there is no infrastructure at the Border. The EU has tied Britain to this default “unless and until” there is another option under the latest version of the draft Brexit treaty.

The EU, including Ireland, is pushing for the lion’s share of the Border issues to be agreed by the June European Council meeting of EU leaders. But Taoiseach Leo Varadkar provided political cover for himself in Brussels last week by suggesting he would be happy to wait for “the right deal” in October, the deadline for the overall Brexit treaty, including the protocol on Ireland, to be agreed.

The EU, like many Northern Irish farmers, sees the best option as putting any physical infrastructure that comes with Brexit at Northern Ireland’s main ports – Belfast harbour, Warrenpoint port and Larne – along with the UK conceding as close as possible alignment with the EU customs union, whatever they wish to call it.

The ports operate “border inspection posts” to enforce EU veterinary and sanitary and phytosanitary standards to protect Ireland from animal infections such as foot-and-mouth disease. Ireland is essentially treated as a “single epidemiological unit” so adding customs checks, if required, would mean adding to existing infrastructure and thereby allowing the free flow of agriculture and food products within the island across the actual Border.

“All processes for handling cargo at the port are under constant review and we are actively developing contingency plans to cover all scenarios post-Brexit,” said Clare Guinness, chief executive of Warrenpoint port.

Northern Ireland’s second-largest port handled more than 300,000 tonnes of animal feed in 2017, about half of which was destined for customers in the Republic.

Seamus Leheny, policy manager for the Belfast-based Freight Transport Association, said Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has been exploring a voluntary self-declaration system where traders declare goods destined for Northern Ireland and for the Republic and if there are differences in tariffs, then there can be claim-backs or retrospective payments. He accepts that this would be a complex system but the most sensible approach, as he sees it, is to leave the checking of goods at entry at the sea ports.

“People are hoping for the best but there are very little indications or clues with what is around the corner,” he said. “There is a bit of apathy out there. People are waiting to see what happens.”

The EU negotiators are more definitive on what they want out of the coming months.

“Ireland is not to suffer,” said the Brussels source.