An all-Ireland agri -food zone is old news and a sign of desperation. But first….

Let’s start on a happier note. – Leo’s appearance at Belfast Gay Pride  in which he tactfully avoided grandstanding in his brief few words.

“I had a real honour today to walk with Lord Hayward, who, along with Conor McGinn, put the legislation through the Commons and Lords to bring about marriage equality here in a few months’ time. So we really want to thank them.

“What we see today in Belfast is Northern Ireland at its very best. Open, inclusive, diverse and for everyone.

I’m not so sure that’s it’s a done deal in the maelstrom that will be Westminster next month, but we’ll see.

Back to Brexit business…

 

Newton Emerson picked it up..  

It is just three weeks since calm voices pointed to a Plan B Brexit.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said in the event of no deal, Ireland was considering agrifood checks at ports around the whole island to avoid a hard border.

While this was “vastly inferior” to the UK-EU withdrawal agreement it was a realistic contingency, the Taoiseach said in a radio interview.

 The idea was welcomed by DUP chief whip Jeffrey Donaldson, although, as Varadkar had pointed out, “It would mean Britain accepting that Northern Ireland is being treated differently.

 An all-Ireland agrifood zone is the key recommendation of the UK’s Alternative Arrangements Commission, a group formed by senior Leave and Remain Tories and supported by the DUP.

 The commission proposed such a zone in a preliminary report at the start of July, with a final report published five days after the Taoiseach’s interview. Both reports were endorsed by both candidates for the Conservative leadership…. Everyone was clearly watching their language, with the phrase ‘sea border’ particularly notable by its absence. EU-compliant import checks on all the food travelling between Britain and Northern Ireland, even in the westbound-only direction, would be a substantial exercise and one the DUP has until now ruled out in the strongest possible terms.

An all-Ireland agrifood zone could as easily be called a permanent backstop as an alternative to the backstop, given how much north-south regulatory alignment it would require. Nobody said that either.

And the Sunday Times ran with it, uncredited.

Leo Varadkar will press Boris Johnson for an “all-Ireland” customs regime for food and agriculture, if the British prime minister accepts the taoiseach’s invitation to talks in Dublin later this month.

The DUP has urged Johnson to seek a time-limit to the backstop, somewhere between three and six years, as a quid pro quo for a pact on food — a deal the Irish government is so far refusing to make

At a private dinner with the prime minister in Belfast on Tuesday, Arlene Foster, Nigel Dodds and Sir Jeffrey Donaldson of the DUP forcefully proposed a fresh effort to secure a time limit to the backstop. In an interview with Miriam O’Callaghan on RTE Radio last week, Donaldson confirmed his party had raised the time limit with new prime minister.

The Lagan Valley MP said: “You could put a time limit on the backstop which would give enough time — including the implementation period, which can be up to three years — for the UK and EU to negotiate a future relationship, but the Irish government rejected any change to the backstop and weren’t willing to compromise in any way whatsoever.”

Donaldson and others in the DUP have indicated in the past they would be prepared to discuss an all-island regime for food, but the party is known to have concerns about Northern Ireland remaining in regulatory alignment with EU food standards if Britain does not.

The Sunday Times understands, however, that the DUP told Johnson the time limit on the backstop could extend beyond a three-year implementation, or transition, period for a further three years, into the future relationship phase.

The taoiseach is keen to explore restricting checks on meat and food products to ports such as Belfast, Dublin and Rosslare, rather than staging them at the border or at factory gates.

Large quantities of beef, lamb and milk cross the Irish border every day. The need for physical customs checks on that trade could overwhelm authorities in Northern Ireland and the Republic. Farmers in Northern Ireland sell roughly 400,000 lambs and 800m litres of milk to the Republic every year.

So have we the makings of a solution?  Alas not quite. I’d want to know a lot more.

Take that “ west bound “ direction Newton mentions.  Does that mean the daily cavalcade of fresh food refrigerated trucks would be subject to checks one side of the Irish Sea or another?  Would that mean for supplies and consumer prices and choice in Irish shops on both sides of the border?

And then there’s the politics if it. The DUP don’t seem to have cottoned on to the fact that the ERG  say they’ll reject a withdrawal agreement even without the backstop. Johnson’s idea seems to be a free trade deal without the backstop but with a long transition period. Good luck with that. Matching it in desperation is the return of the NI-only backstop – viable indeed if only you could omit the politics. The DUP would have to be toast in a new Parliament. Nicola Sturgeon would demand equal treatment. What price a hard border on the Tweed?

Prof Brian Lucey of TCD takes an altogether harsher line with Irish agriculture which politicians wouldn’t contemplate in public but just might yet have to sit out.

A trope of Brexiteers is that, in the brave old WTO world of pre-1992 Frey Bentos pies, Irish beef will not get a foothold in the UK and thus the economy will crash.

The reality, which bounces off a Brexiteer like a demand for specifics off the UK prime minister, is that live animal (€330 million) and meat (€2 billion) exports to the UK account for less than 2 per cent of total merchandise trade exports and less than 1 per cent of total exports, goods and services….Ireland, as an exporting nation, is about chemicals and computers, not cows. The dilemma for government is that while these sectors are negligible in overall export terms they are heavily overrepresented in employment terms: 5 per cent of total employment is in direct agriculture and fishing and probably another 5 per cent in food processing and related. Add to that the strength of the farming lobby and you have a political pain point.

A hard Brexit and a hard border are bearable, at a national level. What is needed is that rarest of political traits: courage and vision. We need leaders that will sell and support this as a chance for overly-exposed sectors and groups to finally decouple from the historically comfortable market of the UK and examine new business models. We need a political consensus in operation to tell the truth to Border communities, that a hardening of the Border is not by our choice. 

It’s all very well for him sitting in Trinity, not so ok if you’re sitting up the street in Leinster  House  – not to mention in farming on either side of the border.