Opinion

Newton Emerson: Brexiteers making life difficult for the DUP

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Newton Emerson
Newton Emerson Newton Emerson

So farewell then to the customs partnership, Britain’s official policy for frictionless borders post-Brexit, which has been killed off in cabinet nine months after Prime Minister Theresa May adopted it. Defeat was by a single vote, supplied by new home secretary Sajid Javid.

The full customs partnership was always a ridiculous idea - it would have required every EU member to help the UK run a separate tariff regime.

However, last month Dublin signalled a UK-Ireland partnership could be possible. The DUP has been too busy picking fights with the Irish government to seize that opportunity but it appeared to grasp its predicament as the customs partnership died.

Peter Foster, the Daily Telegraph’s Europe correspondent, reported three sources saying the DUP was making clear to Number 10 it will back continued customs union membership - which Brexiteers see as making Brexit pointless - “if that is the price to avoid an Irish Sea border.”

With hard Leavers now in the ascendant that no longer looks like a price May, let alone the DUP, can extract.

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The spectre of violence from leaving the customs union has been raised by Chris Patten, who authored the report that established the PSNI. Speaking in a House of Lords debate, he said: “I think I am right in saying that the first two fatalities during the Troubles, or certainly among the first fatalities, were two customs officers.”

The attack this apparently refers to occurred at the end of 1971 and may not have been intentional, as the IRA was firing on a British army patrol.

Four customs officers and two lorry drivers died the following year in a bomb at Newry’s customs post but this was also unintentional, as the three IRA bombers died as well.

After these outrages - in which nearly all the fatalities were Catholic - there were no further murders of customs officers, and while it is true customs infrastructure was significantly scaled back on EU accession in 1973, facilities remained for a further 20 years. It seems important amid the present hysteria to report this accurately.

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The SDLP has portrayed the West Tyrone by-election as a missed opportunity to send an anti-Brexit MP to Westminster. But that was never going to happen. The real missed opportunity was for Sinn Féin to claim the result as an endorsement of a Stormont deal. As February’s deal fell through, a well-timed trip to the polls has been squandered.

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Arlene Foster has been ridiculed for saying Michel Barnier, the European Commission’s chief Brexit negotiator, is “not an honest broker” in those negotiations.

Obviously, Barnier is not neutral: the clue is in his title. However, he does repeatedly claim his top priority is protecting the Good Friday Agreement “in all its parts” for the good of all the people of Northern Ireland.

Given that Brexit barely impinges on the agreement, the best that can be said for this stance is that it is open to interpretation.

By contrast, Foster was simply mistaken when she accused Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of “a huge breach of protocol” by not informing local representatives he was visiting Armagh and Down.

Varadkar informed the Northern Ireland Office in the absence of a Stormont executive, which is the correct protocol, as the NIO confirmed.

Behind Foster’s annoyance may lie the question of whether she is still first minister. Technically, she could just about claim to be so - but only if she wanted to be ridiculed all over again.

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North Down UDA boss Dee Stitt has turned to the last desperate argument in paramilitary politics - class clichés. They are class-based twice over in this instance. In a plea for more ‘transitional’ funding, Stitt said: “If you were living in a working-class area, you were going to be involved in a paramilitary organisation.”

He then claimed that of the 100 boys in his school’s fourth or fifth year, which would have been in the mid-1980s, only 15 to 20 were not involved with paramilitarism.

Definitions of ‘involved’ can vary, as can schools and years within schools. But 80 per cent plus, in Bangor, during a relatively calm stretch of the Troubles?

Perhaps they had heard unionist warnings of a “Cultra war”.

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Around 100 health staff from Northern Ireland have attended a safety and quality conference in Amsterdam at a cost of roughly £140,000. Belfast Health Trust alone sent 61 delegates. Politicians and trade unionists have questioned the necessity and cost of the trip, with the NI Conservatives suggesting the whole thing could have been teleconferenced into a Belfast hotel. A story along these lines writes itself but now that Belfast is very much in the conference business, how loudly should we proclaim it as a waste of money?

This dilemma is never more pronounced than in telemedicine, where Northern Ireland has enjoyed some success promoting itself at the European level. So our health staff - including, before Stormont collapsed, health ministers - regularly travel to conferences instead of using the internet, to explain how doctors can use the internet instead of travelling to their patients.

newton@irishnews.com