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Peadar Carpenter, the Irish ambassador to Luxembourg, said that regulatory alignment between Northern Ireland and Ireland would avoid a hard border.Picture credit: Embassy of Ireland (Luxembourg) 

No deal could be announced on Monday 4 December, when the British prime minister Theresa May met Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president. In the first part of the interview, Carpenter gave his assessment on the overall talks and praised EU unity.

He went on to talk about the Irish position on avoiding a hard border, how Ireland would probably be most affected by Brexit, and what “regulatory alignment” means.

The UK government intends to leave the EU single market and the customs union. This would mean a border with customs checks would have to be installed on the island of Ireland, between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and between Ireland and the UK. This would have significant ramifications on trade for Ireland, as most of its goods pass through the UK before entering other EU member states. In Northern Ireland, many small and medium enterprises trade exclusively with Ireland, and customs checks and/or diverging regulatory standards (in health and safety, or environmental standards) would increase prices and introduce cumbersome procedures.

While the UK had set out two possibilities in its Ireland paper, the negotiations seemed to stall on the “regulatory alignment” wording that was included in the draft agreement. The DUP, a party in Northern Ireland which props up the Tory minority in the House of Commons, had issued a statement that it could not support this, on the basis that it would separate Northern Ireland economically and politically from the rest of the United Kingdom.

The EU’s position is that Northern Ireland should stay in the customs union.

Protecting the Good Friday Agreement

Speaking to Delano on 5 December, Carpenter outlined the priorities for the Irish government on these negotiations:

“The Good Friday agreement, the Common Travel Area, the border, the peace funding the Europe has put into it, our land bridge, all of these are hugely important to us. We don’t see any way around not resolving them before we move on to talks about trade and other things.”

“Ireland will be more affected by Brexit than the UK”

Carpenter said that Ireland would be most affected by Brexit. The Irish economy was very interconnected with the British, and furthermore, the border issue was crucial.

“For Ireland, Brexit is going to present many challenges. We are in effect, in European terms, the island behind the Island--so we’re further removed from Europe. For us, it’s not only the border on the island: most of our trade and goods goes through the UK to Europe. It’s our land bridge as we would call it. There are many issues that we would have to resolve, but phase 1 was just about the Irish specific, so if we could do that, then we would have made a start. There are 5,000 northern SMEs doing business with the south, worth 15% of Northern Ireland trade. Through that, relationships have developed, links have been created and deepened. These things make for a natural and normal society and we don’t want that affected in any way.”

Regulatory alignment

“No regulatory divergence”, which was set in the initial text, would mean that Northern Ireland would stay in the customs union, Carpenter explained. Afterwards, it was changed to “regulatory alignment”, but that was still not accepted by the DUP (which supports the national government in London).

Carpenter said that there was not much difference between the two wordings: “You’re talking about language, you’re talking about text. By their nature, people will go away and keep working at these and try to find a form of words. I think it will probably give you the same end result.”

The Irish ambassador elaborated further on how this would be beneficial to both sides, telling Delano on Tuesday:

“We share already a lot on the island of Ireland: the electricity market, agriculture there may be things slightly different from Great Britain. Arising from the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process, we have almost 150 different areas where we cooperate. One example on the island of Ireland is that we have one specialist centre for autistic children--only one on the island, in county Armargh on the northern side of the border. We have 4 centres of excellence for cancer care: East, West, North, South. We have mixing of schools, we have so many things in common, our waterways, our lochs, we share so much. We are an island, we’re not that big. So, it shouldn’t be beyond people to try and find some way that we can share and work together, and the gains that we got from the peace process and from the customs union and the single market should not be underestimated.”