Theresa May couldn’t sway DUP because they’re nutters[mad or eccentric]

Posted By: April 03, 2019

IRISH CONGRESSIONAL BRIEFING
Distributed to Congress by Irish National Caucus
“ This week’s commentary by Brian Feeney on the Brexit madness.”
 —Fr. Sean McManus



Brian Feeney. Irish News. Belfast. Wednesday, April 3, 2019

ANGELA Merkel arrives in Dublin tomorrow. It’s not a social call. Officially she’s there ‘to support’ Leo Varadkar and the Irish government in these critical times of Brexit.

The real reason is that she wants to know what Varadkar and the Irish government are going to do about the border.

Yesterday Varadkar was trying to give satisfactory answers to the same question to Macron in Paris.

Obviously it’s crunch time. Macron and Merkel are the big two in the EU but Merkel is the boss.

It’s 2014 since Merkel was in Ireland so her visit tomorrow is significant.

The EU, and these two in particular, have lost confidence that the UK will produce an orderly exit by April 12.

Never mind those indicative votes. There are only three legal options: no deal, no Brexit or May’s deal.

If not May’s deal there’s no deal, which means there’s no backstop. That means there will be an EU border in Ireland. They want to know what it will look like.

The official Irish position is still that there will be no Border, but for the past month Merkel has been using every opportunity at EU meetings to ask Varadkar what he’s going to do.

So far, answer came there none. She wants one tomorrow. She wants to know what Ireland is going to do, as she repeats, “to preserve the integrity of the single market”.

So far the best information we have is that there will be checks of some kind on incoming goods “away from the border”.

Fair enough, but what about animals and vegetables – phytosanitary checks?

Some of you may remember the havoc caused by the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak when six million sheep, cattle and pigs were slaughtered on the other island.

What struck every observer was the way the Irish government sealed the border to keep the disease at bay.

For the EU, the danger of any communicable disease getting into the single market is unthinkable.

Without a backstop and checks in the Irish Sea, Britain’s border in Ireland will be the EU frontier.

What happens when the first consignment of Brazilian beef lands in the UK? What about the infamous US chlorinated chicken and hormone-stuffed beef? There will have to be phytosanitary checks at the Border.

The British know all this and three weeks ago published their plans for trade in the event of no deal.

All EU goods will enter The North freely. However, the EU will apply full tariffs to everything going out from the north to the south, which will, within a month, wipe out The North’s agriculture.

Meanwhile punitive tariffs will be placed on EU goods entering the UK otherwise than across the British border here. Within a month Irish agriculture would be flattened.

Most experts instantly condemned the British plans as ignorant, stupid and illegal because they breach World Trade Organisation rules which stipulate every country has to be treated the same; you couldn’t treat Ireland differently from other EU states.

It wouldn’t take long for the French and Germans to retaliate. The UK says they can act on a temporary basis, but how long is temporary and how do they get out of it?

‘Urgent discussions’ is the UK answer. On what basis? Who decides? Who arbitrates?

Meanwhile the Border in Ireland will be a paradise for smugglers and tax avoiders.

The British proposals were so ridiculous and ill thought out and obviously unlawful in international practice that they can’t be serious.

There can only be two motives. First, to scare the Irish government and the EU into ditching the backstop, but that won’t happen because of the importance of the integrity of the single market.

The real motive was to put pressure on the DUP to cave in and accept May’s deal because anyone can see The North’s business and agriculture would be destroyed.

Whatever the reason the cunning plan failed. The authors didn’t realize they are dealing with nutters, fanatics, people who would happily adopt a scorched earth policy, who would die in the last ditch, yelling, “Nevarr.”

The proof? They laughed at the UK proposals and voted down May’s deal, the best of both worlds offered by the EU.