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Well, it's the UK's obligation to preserve the Good Friday Agreement. The legal technicalities of that are debatable, but let's assume for this discussion that

Well, it's the UK's obligation to preserve the Good Friday Agreement. The legal technicalities of that are debatable, but let's assume for this discussion that there exists a clear legal obligation to do so. Which specific obligation(s) under the GFA do you think would or would not be satisfied by which specific proposal(s) that have been made in relation to the NI/Ireland border?

barrkel 8y ago
We're not talking about law; we're talking about hearts and minds, identity, nationalism, the stuff that causes wars and keeps peace.
- Silhouette 8y ago
  The same question applies either way: Which specific obligation(s) under the GFA do you think would or would not be satisfied by which specific proposal(s) that have been made in relation to the NI/Ireland border? A lot of rather non-specific claims seem to get made in debates around Brexit, of the form "someone must do something to avoid violating the GFA", but without any supporting argument about why. The Agreement is publicly available and not a long document, so anyone can read it. I think it would further useful and interesting debate if more people did, because it doesn't actually say what quite a lot of people seem to think it does.
  - barrkel 8y ago
    The same question applies either way: It doesn't. You keep referring to a legal document, as if it's the legal document that matters. The legal document enshrines rights, but it was written in the context of both Ireland and UK being EU members - there was no reason to explicitly add things that came with the EU, or with the Common Travel Area, into the document, since they were part of the situation already. But in any case, to the specifics of the document. Declaration Of Support, clause 3: > We are committed to partnership, equality and mutual respect as the basis of relationships within Northern Ireland, between North and South, and between these islands. How can there be equality if Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland face a border when they go south, but Unionist British nationalists don't face a border when they go east? In the Agreement between Government of UK and Government of Ireland, Article 1, the two governments: > acknowledge that while a substantial section of the people in Northern Ireland share the legitimate wish of a majority of the people of the island of Ireland for a united Ireland, the present wish of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, freely exercised and legitimate, is to maintain the Union and accordingly, that Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom reflects and relies upon that wish; and that it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people Do you think putting a hard border between NI and the Republic constitutes a change in the status of Northern Ireland without a consent of the majority of its people, against the legitimate wishes of people in Northern Ireland and a majority on the island? Don't forget that the only people representing Northern Ireland in this debacle of UK government dysfunction is the one NI party that voted against the GFA.
    - growlist 8y ago
      > Do you think putting a hard border between NI and the Republic constitutes a change in the status of Northern Ireland without a consent of the majority of its people, against the legitimate wishes of people in Northern Ireland and a majority on the island? Indeed - if the Irish or the EU choose to erect a hard border it would indeed go against those wishes, and the UK should not allow them to do it.
    - Silhouette 8y ago
      You keep referring to a legal document, as if it's the legal document that matters. If we're making arguments about what the UK government can or can't do, it is the legal documents that matter. The rest is a matter of political judgement, obviously with significant implications, but it's not a binding constraint. How can there be equality if Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland face a border when they go south, but Unionist British nationalists don't face a border when they go east? I think you're stretching the intent of that clause. Clearly there isn't equality with NI being part of the UK but not part of Ireland either, and that's a much more fundamental difference in governance. Do you think putting a hard border between NI and the Republic constitutes a change in the status of Northern Ireland without a consent of the majority of its people, against the legitimate wishes of people in Northern Ireland and a majority on the island? Again, I think you're distorting the meaning with the selective quoting here. The change of status refers to the previous wording, which is about the right of the people of NI to determine whether to remain part of the UK or to become part of a united Ireland notwithstanding any overall majority on the island of Ireland for reunification.
Tomte 8y ago
Well, I guess the IRA had always had a legal obligation not to kill people. It hasn't stopped them. Maybe the view needs to be widened a bit.
- Silhouette 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but I don't understand what point you're trying to make here. The comment by blibble that you replied to was about a question of sovereignty, and both the summary of why the ERG don't like the proposed WA and the likely consequences of that seem reasonably accurate to me. You seem to have introduced first the GFA and then the IRA into the discussion, but without explaining why they were relevant to the original point. Can you clarify what argument you are trying to make here?
  - Tomte 8y ago
    I'll spell it out: He mentioned a not-further-defined mechanism for the EU to keep unlimited control over the UK. And I clarified that this mechanism wasn't an evil plan by the EU, but instead helping the UK to meet its international obligations.
    - Silhouette 8y ago
      He mentioned a not-further-defined mechanism for the EU to keep unlimited control over the UK. The actual claim was "it gives the EU effective control of the UK economy without any mechanism for the UK to leave that arrangement without the EU's permission", which is quite a different statement to what you just wrote. In the context of the proposed Withdrawal Agreement, the mechanism in question is the proposed backstop, which as it stands requires an open border to be maintained and has no exit conditions that the UK could exercise without EU consent one way or another. The only ways to keep a fully open border established so far involve remaining within the SM and CU. Without quibbling over minutiae, the practical effect of that is pretty much what blibble wrote.
  - celticninja 8y ago
    Are you from the UK? The point is that between the UK and Ireland there is a CTA, common travel agreement. This means frictionless border crossing between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. This was straightforward when both were EU members as the border didn't need to be policed for transfer of goods. If the UK leaves the EU then goods from the UK cannot just be moved into the Republic of Ireland if there is no join customs agreement. So now you have to introduce a hard border with the RoI which goes against the Good Friday Agreement. If you don't understand the relevance of the GFA then you should read up further on or and the Troubles that preceded it.
jenscow 8y ago
https://twitter.com/OFOCBrexit/status/1091333511548715009 https://twitter.com/OFOCBrexit/status/1091333511548715009 [video+subtitles]
simonh 8y ago
The agreement contains a commitment by the British and Irish governments to develop "close cooperation between their countries as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union". It's hard to see how we can do that as, er, not members of the European Union. I believe the Common Travel Area is also a key issue as it commits us to open travel through the border which on the face of it seems incompatible with leaving the customs union. The problem is the Brexit camp won't actually say exactly what they want, or exactly what their solutions to these problems are. They don't want to be in the customs union, by and large because it would restrict our ability to do trade deals outside the EU, but they won't say how specifically they would manage cross-border travel and checks which changes incompatible with the customs union might require. Until we find out what those deals outside the EU actually are, we can't say specifically what impact they might or might not have on the transport of goods and people. The Brexit camp want to cast this whole situation as the EU and Irish Republic forcing us to do this or that. They aren't. We freely and willingly went into all these commitments, many of which we were the driving force behind initiating and we're the ones threatening to tear them all up and force changes on them. The brexit camp are full of red lines for what they don't want, but have yet to present any credible plan clearly specifying what they actually do want, what it's consequences would be and how to implement it.
- Silhouette 8y ago
  The agreement contains a commitment by the British and Irish governments to develop "close cooperation between their countries as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union". It's hard to see how we can do that as, er, not members of the European Union. This is the standard NI-border-tail-wagging-dog argument that you can't have Brexit at all because of wording in the GFA, but it's fundamentally flawed in two different ways. Firstly, your quote of the GFA is selective. Read the words just before the ones you mentioned, which fundamentally change the meaning. Secondly, both the UK and Ireland are signatories to the EU treaties, including the TFEU that provides for withdrawal of a member state under Article 50. As a matter of international law, to the extent that any earlier treaty between those parties is contradicted by a later treaty to which they are also signatories, the later one takes precedence. (This is why I noted before that the legal technicalities are debatable.) I agree with the spirit of the rest of your comment, in that advocates of Brexit need to get their story straight so there are concrete discussions to be had, so I won't comment further on those points here.
benj111 8y ago
I'm not a lawyer, so not 100% but Article 1 part iii: "and that it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people;" A majority of NI didn't vote for Brexit, and a hard border would change the status of NI?
- Silhouette 8y ago
  This is a selective quote and commonly misunderstood. Taken in context, the status in question is whether NI remains a part of the UK or becomes a part of a united Ireland. The point of that provision was that across the entire island of Ireland there was a majority for a reunited Ireland, but within NI specifically there was not, so this was an explicit agreement that reuniting North and South would not happen without the consent of the people of Northern Ireland alone.
  - benj111 8y ago
    You asked for a part of the agreement. I ventured a somewhat uninformed opinion. If you know more than me, then isn't it incumbent on you to venture an opinion on why we're in the situation of trying to avoid a hard border?
    - Silhouette 8y ago
      If you know more than me, then isn't it incumbent on you to venture an opinion on why we're in the situation of trying to avoid a hard border? If you're asking for my personal, subjective opinion, then I think it's a combination of two factors. Firstly, there are the local issues. Taken in isolation, avoiding changes that would unnecessarily restrict crossings at the NI/Ireland border is obviously a good thing, particularly for the people and businesses near that border. Meanwhile, closing the border has little upside for anyone at this level. That means maintaining the open border is a solid vote-winner, like having more funding for the NHS or more teachers in schools. Any resulting costs will be elsewhere, in this case at a national/international level where potentially the open border could conflict with other possibly desirable outcomes. But of course there are complicated legal issues involved because of the history, and on top of that there is an implied threat of violence that can be invoked. It is very easy to paint a picture where changing the Irish border causes Very Bad Things to happen, and thus not changing the Irish border becomes an attractive proxy for blocking those other outcomes if in your view they are not so desirable but it's harder to make a direct case against them. In short, there are important local considerations, but at national/international level it's also a convenient vessel for blocking other changes that some parties don't want. It's probably a rather cynical point of view, but the proxy debate going on here does remind me of the people in the UK who suddenly became constitutional scholars and fierce advocates of this concept they'd never heard of a week earlier called parliamentary sovereignty, right around the time that a referendum widely advertised as giving the people a final say returned a result they didn't support but it turned out that constitutionally the referendum couldn't be binding after all and the current balance of opinion in Parliament might go the other way. It's a very large scale version of getting bogged down in legal technicalities, unfortunately at the expense of more reasoned debate on the underlying issues of substance.

barrkel 8y ago

We're not talking about law; we're talking about hearts and minds, identity, nationalism, the stuff that causes wars and keeps peace.

Silhouette 8y ago
The same question applies either way: Which specific obligation(s) under the GFA do you think would or would not be satisfied by which specific proposal(s) that have been made in relation to the NI/Ireland border? A lot of rather non-specific claims seem to get made in debates around Brexit, of the form "someone must do something to avoid violating the GFA", but without any supporting argument about why. The Agreement is publicly available and not a long document, so anyone can read it. I think it would further useful and interesting debate if more people did, because it doesn't actually say what quite a lot of people seem to think it does.
- barrkel 8y ago
  The same question applies either way: It doesn't. You keep referring to a legal document, as if it's the legal document that matters. The legal document enshrines rights, but it was written in the context of both Ireland and UK being EU members - there was no reason to explicitly add things that came with the EU, or with the Common Travel Area, into the document, since they were part of the situation already. But in any case, to the specifics of the document. Declaration Of Support, clause 3: > We are committed to partnership, equality and mutual respect as the basis of relationships within Northern Ireland, between North and South, and between these islands. How can there be equality if Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland face a border when they go south, but Unionist British nationalists don't face a border when they go east? In the Agreement between Government of UK and Government of Ireland, Article 1, the two governments: > acknowledge that while a substantial section of the people in Northern Ireland share the legitimate wish of a majority of the people of the island of Ireland for a united Ireland, the present wish of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, freely exercised and legitimate, is to maintain the Union and accordingly, that Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom reflects and relies upon that wish; and that it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people Do you think putting a hard border between NI and the Republic constitutes a change in the status of Northern Ireland without a consent of the majority of its people, against the legitimate wishes of people in Northern Ireland and a majority on the island? Don't forget that the only people representing Northern Ireland in this debacle of UK government dysfunction is the one NI party that voted against the GFA.
  - growlist 8y ago
    > Do you think putting a hard border between NI and the Republic constitutes a change in the status of Northern Ireland without a consent of the majority of its people, against the legitimate wishes of people in Northern Ireland and a majority on the island? Indeed - if the Irish or the EU choose to erect a hard border it would indeed go against those wishes, and the UK should not allow them to do it.
  - Silhouette 8y ago
    You keep referring to a legal document, as if it's the legal document that matters. If we're making arguments about what the UK government can or can't do, it is the legal documents that matter. The rest is a matter of political judgement, obviously with significant implications, but it's not a binding constraint. How can there be equality if Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland face a border when they go south, but Unionist British nationalists don't face a border when they go east? I think you're stretching the intent of that clause. Clearly there isn't equality with NI being part of the UK but not part of Ireland either, and that's a much more fundamental difference in governance. Do you think putting a hard border between NI and the Republic constitutes a change in the status of Northern Ireland without a consent of the majority of its people, against the legitimate wishes of people in Northern Ireland and a majority on the island? Again, I think you're distorting the meaning with the selective quoting here. The change of status refers to the previous wording, which is about the right of the people of NI to determine whether to remain part of the UK or to become part of a united Ireland notwithstanding any overall majority on the island of Ireland for reunification.

Tomte 8y ago

Well, I guess the IRA had always had a legal obligation not to kill people. It hasn't stopped them. Maybe the view needs to be widened a bit.

Silhouette 8y ago
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what point you're trying to make here. The comment by blibble that you replied to was about a question of sovereignty, and both the summary of why the ERG don't like the proposed WA and the likely consequences of that seem reasonably accurate to me. You seem to have introduced first the GFA and then the IRA into the discussion, but without explaining why they were relevant to the original point. Can you clarify what argument you are trying to make here?
- Tomte 8y ago
  I'll spell it out: He mentioned a not-further-defined mechanism for the EU to keep unlimited control over the UK. And I clarified that this mechanism wasn't an evil plan by the EU, but instead helping the UK to meet its international obligations.
  - Silhouette 8y ago
    He mentioned a not-further-defined mechanism for the EU to keep unlimited control over the UK. The actual claim was "it gives the EU effective control of the UK economy without any mechanism for the UK to leave that arrangement without the EU's permission", which is quite a different statement to what you just wrote. In the context of the proposed Withdrawal Agreement, the mechanism in question is the proposed backstop, which as it stands requires an open border to be maintained and has no exit conditions that the UK could exercise without EU consent one way or another. The only ways to keep a fully open border established so far involve remaining within the SM and CU. Without quibbling over minutiae, the practical effect of that is pretty much what blibble wrote.
- celticninja 8y ago
  Are you from the UK? The point is that between the UK and Ireland there is a CTA, common travel agreement. This means frictionless border crossing between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. This was straightforward when both were EU members as the border didn't need to be policed for transfer of goods. If the UK leaves the EU then goods from the UK cannot just be moved into the Republic of Ireland if there is no join customs agreement. So now you have to introduce a hard border with the RoI which goes against the Good Friday Agreement. If you don't understand the relevance of the GFA then you should read up further on or and the Troubles that preceded it.

jenscow 8y ago

https://twitter.com/OFOCBrexit/status/1091333511548715009 https://twitter.com/OFOCBrexit/status/1091333511548715009 [video+subtitles]

simonh 8y ago

The agreement contains a commitment by the British and Irish governments to develop "close cooperation between their countries as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union". It's hard to see how we can do that as, er, not members of the European Union. I believe the Common Travel Area is also a key issue as it commits us to open travel through the border which on the face of it seems incompatible with leaving the customs union. The problem is the Brexit camp won't actually say exactly what they want, or exactly what their solutions to these problems are. They don't want to be in the customs union, by and large because it would restrict our ability to do trade deals outside the EU, but they won't say how specifically they would manage cross-border travel and checks which changes incompatible with the customs union might require. Until we find out what those deals outside the EU actually are, we can't say specifically what impact they might or might not have on the transport of goods and people. The Brexit camp want to cast this whole situation as the EU and Irish Republic forcing us to do this or that. They aren't. We freely and willingly went into all these commitments, many of which we were the driving force behind initiating and we're the ones threatening to tear them all up and force changes on them. The brexit camp are full of red lines for what they don't want, but have yet to present any credible plan clearly specifying what they actually do want, what it's consequences would be and how to implement it.

Silhouette 8y ago
The agreement contains a commitment by the British and Irish governments to develop "close cooperation between their countries as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union". It's hard to see how we can do that as, er, not members of the European Union. This is the standard NI-border-tail-wagging-dog argument that you can't have Brexit at all because of wording in the GFA, but it's fundamentally flawed in two different ways. Firstly, your quote of the GFA is selective. Read the words just before the ones you mentioned, which fundamentally change the meaning. Secondly, both the UK and Ireland are signatories to the EU treaties, including the TFEU that provides for withdrawal of a member state under Article 50. As a matter of international law, to the extent that any earlier treaty between those parties is contradicted by a later treaty to which they are also signatories, the later one takes precedence. (This is why I noted before that the legal technicalities are debatable.) I agree with the spirit of the rest of your comment, in that advocates of Brexit need to get their story straight so there are concrete discussions to be had, so I won't comment further on those points here.

benj111 8y ago

I'm not a lawyer, so not 100% but Article 1 part iii: "and that it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people;" A majority of NI didn't vote for Brexit, and a hard border would change the status of NI?

Silhouette 8y ago
This is a selective quote and commonly misunderstood. Taken in context, the status in question is whether NI remains a part of the UK or becomes a part of a united Ireland. The point of that provision was that across the entire island of Ireland there was a majority for a reunited Ireland, but within NI specifically there was not, so this was an explicit agreement that reuniting North and South would not happen without the consent of the people of Northern Ireland alone.
- benj111 8y ago
  You asked for a part of the agreement. I ventured a somewhat uninformed opinion. If you know more than me, then isn't it incumbent on you to venture an opinion on why we're in the situation of trying to avoid a hard border?
  - Silhouette 8y ago
    If you know more than me, then isn't it incumbent on you to venture an opinion on why we're in the situation of trying to avoid a hard border? If you're asking for my personal, subjective opinion, then I think it's a combination of two factors. Firstly, there are the local issues. Taken in isolation, avoiding changes that would unnecessarily restrict crossings at the NI/Ireland border is obviously a good thing, particularly for the people and businesses near that border. Meanwhile, closing the border has little upside for anyone at this level. That means maintaining the open border is a solid vote-winner, like having more funding for the NHS or more teachers in schools. Any resulting costs will be elsewhere, in this case at a national/international level where potentially the open border could conflict with other possibly desirable outcomes. But of course there are complicated legal issues involved because of the history, and on top of that there is an implied threat of violence that can be invoked. It is very easy to paint a picture where changing the Irish border causes Very Bad Things to happen, and thus not changing the Irish border becomes an attractive proxy for blocking those other outcomes if in your view they are not so desirable but it's harder to make a direct case against them. In short, there are important local considerations, but at national/international level it's also a convenient vessel for blocking other changes that some parties don't want. It's probably a rather cynical point of view, but the proxy debate going on here does remind me of the people in the UK who suddenly became constitutional scholars and fierce advocates of this concept they'd never heard of a week earlier called parliamentary sovereignty, right around the time that a referendum widely advertised as giving the people a final say returned a result they didn't support but it turned out that constitutionally the referendum couldn't be binding after all and the current balance of opinion in Parliament might go the other way. It's a very large scale version of getting bogged down in legal technicalities, unfortunately at the expense of more reasoned debate on the underlying issues of substance.