Oral evidence - Brexit: UK-Irish relations follow-up

Dr Graham Gudgin and Professor John Garry.

Q1 The Chairman: Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am sorry to keep you a few minutes behind our intention. We are delighted that you are here. It is no disrespect to you and your accumulated wisdom to say that we are on a hairy timetable, partly because of business down in the House. We would like to conclude this session within the hour from now, so I hope we can reflect that in our prolixity in asking questions and your succinctness in responding to them.

Graham Gudgin, you have had a distinguished and varied career—chief economic adviser at Policy Exchange, previously special adviser to the First Minister, and a strong economic and academic background. Professor John Garry, of Queen’s University, has a distinguished record looking at the political analysis of these situations. Politics and economics on that island tend to overlap and coalesce. As you know, our Committee has already demonstrated its continuing interest in the problems of the island of Ireland, slightly ahead of time in terms of the subsequent debate. That has reinforced our interest and we are continuing to do so.

If we may, unless you have anything burning to say to us, we will kick straight off with questions. I will, if I may, ask Professor Garry the first question, but expecting Graham, who I know has written supplementary evidence, to contribute. John, would you like to give an assessment to the committee of the evolving views and opinions of people in Northern Ireland on Brexit and the implications for Northern Ireland since the 23 June referendum, bearing in mind, quite apart from the United Kingdom situation, that there have been autonomous and separate events on the island?

Professor John Garry: Thank you for the invitation to be here and for the question. My first point is that at the time of the referendum in Northern Ireland there was a distinct split in public opinion and how that impacted the vote. Voting in the referendum was very much along the typical ethnonational lines in Northern Ireland. People who are Catholic, believe in a united Ireland and are nationalist overwhelmingly voted to remain. There was a much stronger propensity for people from a Protestant background who believe in maintenance of the union with the United Kingdom to vote to leave.

Certainly in one sense you could say that, in terms of public opinion, the referendum in Northern Ireland was like any other issue in Northern Ireland: it broke down along the typical lines. However, there is an important caveat to add. The interpretation of voting that is prevalent for understanding what happened in Britain also appears to work in Northern Ireland. That is, there is a distinction between people from a less-educated, low-income background with socially conservative views—the so-called “left behind”—who tended to vote leave in Northern Ireland in the same way they tended to vote to leave in Britain, whereas more highly educated, middle-class people with social liberal views tended to vote to remain. However, that distinction only really worked in the Protestant community. So within the Protestant community it was people who are less educated with socially conservative views, anti-immigrant and so on, versus middle-class liberals. It did not matter what kind of Catholic you were: you voted to stay.

Since the referendum, there has been a bit of slippage, if I can use that word, in a pro-remain direction. Ninety per cent of people who voted to remain at the referendum said, “Yes, I will vote remain again”, when they were asked a year later. Less than three-quarters of people who voted to leave at the time of the referendum said they would vote to leave when they were asked a year later. There is a lot of stability, as there is in Britain, but a bit of slippage towards remain.

The Chairman: May I probe the slippage for a moment? Do you have any concerns as to the motivation for it within what you have described as rather set views in the different communities in Northern Ireland? Is this an economic driver, a worry about disruption at borders, or a general disenchantment with the prospect of leaving? Is there any light and shade that you can give us?

Professor John Garry: Northern Ireland is notorious for having divided views on things, but there is one issue on which there is not a divide, which is people’s reluctance, in both communities and on both leave and remain, to have any hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Less than a quarter of all respondents to my survey said that there should be a hard border between north and south. Even though there are loads of issues on which there is a lot of disparity, I suspect that the salience of a possibly impending hard border was in all likelihood a significance swayer of those towards a remain position from a leave position.

The Chairman: Thank you. Dr Gudgin, would you like to give us your thoughts on this issue? I know that you have helpfully sent supplementary evidence to the Committee.

Dr Graham Gudgin: I agree with what Professor Garry just said. Immediately after the referendum there was a feeling that Brexit had been something of a game changer. There was an upswelling of support for a united Ireland. It was thought at the time that even some unionists would prefer to stay in the EU rather than stay in the UK. That view was put around and it was certainly one I heard from colleagues, especially from some young professionals in Northern Ireland, where I still live part of the time.

We have had some reasonably authoritative evidence since then. First there was the Life and Times survey, which is equivalent to the British Social Attitudes survey. It was taken in autumn 2016, so a few months after the referendum. It appeared to show that there had been very little movement on support for a united Ireland. It broke down to about 79% preferring to stay in the UK and 21% supporting a united Ireland. Support for a united Ireland was really an eventual support. There was very little support for an immediate move to a united Ireland.

Another thing worth emphasising is the previous general election, which really was something of a surprising triumph for the DUP, the pro-Brexit party, which gained 36% of the vote—a 10 percentage point rise in its share—whereas the pro-remain Ulster Unionist Party saw its vote decline by a third. Indeed, all the pro-remain non-nationalist parties saw their votes decline. Looking at the vote carefully, it still probably amounts to, as Professor Garry said, not much changing from the referendum. It is probably still a 56:44 divide. What one can say is that some unionist voters were alarmed by the thought that Brexit had somehow increased support for a united Ireland, so they may have coalesced around the DUP rather than the UUP.

The Chairman: Thank you for those insights. It perhaps gives me the opportunity to say that, as far as I am concerned, this is a live evidence session, in the sense that if you need to return to any of these points on reflection or in the light of developments subsequent to this meeting, please feel that you can. We have not lost and we will maintain our interest in this continuing issue, possibly even when others are focusing on other matters.

Q2 Baroness Falkner of Margravine: We have had very interesting papers from both of you, but I would like to take you to the joint report from December and the commitment in it for full alignment with the rules of the internal market and the customs union, and for north-south co-operation. Could we hear from you whether that step in itself leads us inevitably to a soft Brexit—or not, as the case might be? What wiggle room do you think there is for the UK Government, having now committed to that, as negotiations go forward?

Dr Graham Gudgin: My view is that it does not commit the UK to a soft Brexit. The words in the paper are extremely confusing, as we all know. I have consulted lawyers in Cambridge—I am currently based at Cambridge University—and those to whom I have spoken tend to have the opinion that what the famous paragraph 49 means is regulatory alignment right across the UK. Other people to whom I talk do not say that at all. For instance, Lord Trimble, who was a constitutional lawyer in an earlier life, is sure that it absolutely does not mean that and that the reference to the Good Friday agreement is a reference to a specific set of economic activities in the Northern Ireland setting. Exactly how that plays out is very difficult to know. Perhaps the wise thing to say is that we will not really get back to this for two or three years, by when the scene will have changed a lot. My hope—it is perhaps the hope of most sensible people—is that this will be dealt with in a free trade agreement that will somehow cover it and take the sting out of it.

The Chairman: It sounds like a delicate piece of diplomacy. I am putting words into your mouth.

Dr Graham Gudgin: My view or paragraph 49? Are you talking about paragraph 49?

The Chairman: I am.

Dr Graham Gudgin: I was not close to it, so this is not a very informed view, but my view is that it was a rather frantic attempt to confuse things at the last minute, with the British Government having got themselves into something of a corner. I do not know whether that is true but, whether it was meant to or not, it certainly has confused people.

Professor John Garry: I have a slightly broader and maybe complementary response. The whole debate about where Ireland fits in to the Brexit negotiation seems to me completely integral to the wider UK exit debate. It seems that, in dealing with Ireland, you need to have a clear vision or image of where the UK is actually going to be after it leaves the EU. I might be answering a slightly different question, but I cannot help but answer it in this way. There are a few options. The UK can stay in the EU if wants to do a Republic of Ireland and have another referendum. It can leave the EU but stay in the single market and the customs union, which would help with a lot of issues. Or it could leave those and mimic staying in, which seems to be what might be happening. If it did that—I defer to Graham on this—and mimicked it as closely as possible, you would probably overcome a lot of the border problems, whether they be north-south or east-west. The difficulty comes with the greater divergence—if the UK actually leaves the EU and wants to be different in the long term from the rest of the European Union. Making sense of Ireland is difficult outside the context of having an articulated vision over the medium term, not just over the next two or three years. In 15 years’ time, what on earth is the UK going for? What will it look like in its relations with the EU? If you have that image, you can work backwards and say, “That means this for the north-south border and that for the east-west border”.

Baroness Falkner of Margravine: Could you also briefly tell us how you see the priorities for the next stage of negotiations in terms of the Ireland and Northern Ireland perspective?

Professor John Garry: I would repeat what I just said. The priority to deal with the Irish issues is to have a great amount of clarity on what the long-term vision—10 or 15 years—is for the United Kingdom after it leaves the EU.

Dr Graham Gudgin: I am one of those who think that we have greater clarity on this than many people claim. The priority clearly is to get a free trade agreement. The Government want something rather better than the Canada-EU agreement, because they want financial services to have a better role. But I do not think that there is any doubt about their wish to have a free trade agreement, nor is there very much doubt about the EU’s willingness at least to agree that. Michel Barnier has said that the UK either has to take a Norway-type agreement or a Canada-type agreement—one of the two. I take that as an offer at the very least of a Canada-type free trade agreement. That is certainly what we will end up with, in my view. The question is how much extra financial services will be built into that. This is terribly important for the Irish border and, I think, for the Republic of Ireland. The huge tariffs on agriculture on things like dairy products and beef, coming on top of a devaluation of sterling and an appreciation of the euro, would put a huge hole in the Irish agricultural industry. By the way, if that were to happen, it would present Northern Ireland with quite an opportunity, because Irish producers would lose big market chunks in the UK that Northern Ireland producers would be able to take up. The point made in, I think, in box 7 of the “Deal or No Deal” report rather underplayed the role of those opportunities. For the Republic of Ireland, it is essential to get a free trade agreement. It is slightly odd to me that this got no mention whatever in the joint progress report. Presumably that has been put on the back burner until everybody agrees to come back to it later, but that is the key thing to talk about now.

The Chairman: Thank you. We will move on from that, but before we do I have a short factual question, to which uncharacteristically I do not know the answer at all. There has been some discussion about financial services and indeed the potential transfer of London-provided financial services to Dublin. Dr Gudgin, it would be helpful if you could give us a sentence on the strengths of the financial services sector in Belfast and whether this is a consideration at all for the Northern Ireland Administration, or is it really such a small matter that it will come out in the wash alongside, for example, the agricultural interests that you have discussed?

Dr Graham Gudgin: As you know, there was a big hope in Dublin that tens of thousands of jobs might move out of London to Dublin. It is now looking as if that figure might be 1,000 or 2,000—it is dribs and drabs rather than a great wave. I do not think that it is a Brexit issue for Belfast. Belfast has done much better in inward investment in this area than many people realise. In particular, American legal services firms have come in, as there are low-cost and good-quality law graduates in Northern Ireland. Much more important here will be low corporation tax. As you know, corporation tax has already been devolved in principle to Northern Ireland, but until we get an Assembly it will not be operational. When it is, the idea is that the rate in Northern Ireland will be taken down perhaps to the Republic’s 12.5%, but it could be lower—10%, say. That, again, will make Northern Ireland much more attractive for a lot of service sector firms in financial services and legal services.

Q3 Baroness Wilcox: Dr Gudgin and Professor Garry, thank you. I have three questions and I am going to give you all three, as afterwards I think I will be better able to understand what you are telling us; it will help me if I can give them to you all in the same go. First, does the UK Government’s position paper on Northern Ireland and Ireland, in particular with regard to the movement of goods, provide a coherent way forward on solving the issues arising from Brexit for the UK-Irish border? The second question follows on from that. The government paper envisages “technology-based solutions to make it easier to comply with customs procedures”, waivers from security and safety declarations, a cross-border trade exemption primarily benefiting smaller local traders, streamlined processes for other trusted traders and the tracking of imports to the United Kingdom. How politically and logistically feasible are these proposals to you? Lastly, to what extent have the proposals in the Government’s position paper been superseded by the December agreement?

Dr Graham Gudgin: My view is that the UK Government’s position paper of last August set out a constructive, generous and helpful, although not always totally worked-out, offer to proceed on this. The Irish Government were going down the same lines and were looking at electronic customs clearing. Early last year—I am not sure that it completely coincided with the accession of Leo Varadkar as Taoiseach—all that stopped and the view was taken that the diplomatic effort in the Republic to try to push the United Kingdom to stay in the customs union and the single market was more important and that anything done on electronic border clearing would undermine that diplomatic effort. That was greatly to be regretted. It goes against your last report on this issue about a year ago, where the recommendation was, if I remember it correctly, that the British and Irish Governments should get together to sort this out between themselves as much as they could. The Irish Government, for whatever reason, decided that they would not do that and that solidarity with the EU was much more important.

I assume that we will return to this. There is no doubt that there must be a border of some sort. My reading of the electronic border clearing, automatic number plate recognition and things like that on the Norway-Sweden border or the US-Canada border is that they work perfectly well. Most clearing in the world is now done electronically. I watched “McMafia” last night. It was very interesting. To get into the port in Mumbai, you have to use barcodes. That is how it now works across the world. The technology is there, although it is perhaps not completely there and there are still things to work out. It will be expensive and somewhat disruptive. The main checks might have to be back from the border so that we do not tempt dissidents to try to shoot at cameras and so on. But it all seems doable and practical to me. Just to repeat, the fact that the Irish Government have gone against this is very much to be regretted, but there are sensible ways of handling it.

The Chairman: I would like to ask Professor Garry about the same point, for a bit of a political interface. Is there correspondence in the Northern Ireland media about potential difficulties? Do you get small shopkeepers in Newry complaining and saying, “If this happens, I’ll have a problem”? Are people who sell their labour services across the border saying this? Is it an issue to which the Northern Ireland public, and the public in the Republic, are addressing themselves, or is it somewhat—if I can put this without disrespect—at the economists’ level of argument?

Professor John Garry: As you said in your opening remarks, the economics and the politics are closely related, but there are different concepts and sometimes you have to make a call on one rather than the other. The challenge of the border in Northern Ireland post Brexit is one on which you have to make a fairly serious political call. I agree with Graham that there has been a change of tone, at the very least, and perhaps of activity since Leo Varadkar took over from Enda Kenny. What might have been said privately is maybe now said publicly. There might not have been potentially as much movement as could have been made on realising and articulating in a detailed manner a technological solution. As Graham said, technologically this could well be doable and you can point to other parts of Planet Earth where this is doable, but other parts of Planet Earth are not post-conflict places; they are not deeply divided places. It is true that one could minimise potential threats by having any physical manifestations of border technology away from the border, but it is a big judgment call now, because you can predict how this game of chess is going to pan out. If there is divergence between the United Kingdom and the European Union, if Northern Ireland does not have special status and there have to be “checks” of one kind or another between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and if there is a physical manifestation of the checking, it is not at all unlikely that it will be attacked. Hopefully it would not be, but it only takes a small amount of people.

The Chairman: If this were to come about, it might also, I anticipate rather than predict, have long-term implications for political opinion in Northern Ireland.

Professor John Garry: Almost everyone in Northern Ireland would be concerned about this term “hard border”. What on earth does a hard border mean? It probably means having, at the very least, a camera at the border. That could be construed in many people’s minds as a hard border. You have to take that policy decision now on what to do if the camera comes down. Do you leave it down or do you put it back up again? If it comes down again, do you put it back up again? At what point do you put it up again, with an armed security guard beside it? It is quite possible to make that as a policy decision immediately. I do not mind either yea or nay. Maybe I am overdramatising it, but it is a question that comes up.

Baroness Falkner of Margravine: On that point, of course, we, the United Kingdom, have more CCTV than anywhere else in the world. Given the extent to which people are accustomed to being on camera somewhere or other all the time, do you really think that a simple thing like a camera would create those complexities and problems?

Professor John Garry: For what it is worth, it is the most serious concern—the politics of it, not the economics—in the entire Brexit process. By the way, it is UK exit, not Brexit, as that does not include Northern Ireland. That is a flippant point, but not entirely flippant.

Dr Graham Gudgin: It is a good point.

The Chairman: We understand the distinction.

Professor John Garry: Oftentimes in discussions and debates about the Brexit negotiations, we say things such as, “We’re not quite sure. We’ll see how it pans out. We’ll kick the can down the road a bit and hope it all works”. There are some things that we know and we can make the call on them now. If there is a physical manifestation of a border, the question comes down to, “What do you do?”

Dr Graham Gudgin: I will just add a quick point. There are already cameras at the border. There are cameras on the Newry-Dundalk road, for instance. There is already an economic border, of course. There are different excise duties on either side. There was a large amount of smuggling when I worked in the First Minister’s office, to the extent that it was ruining the legitimate forecourt business.

The Chairman: This is excise.

Dr Graham Gudgin: Yes, this is excise duties. There is a lot of smuggling. There are customs men and police surveillance on this already. This issue is being dealt with today. If we have a free trade agreement and there is no extra incentive for smuggling, the situation will not change much from what it is today. To give you an idea of the scale, about 5,000 heavy goods vehicles cross the border every day. Half of them cross on the Belfast-Dublin road. This is not as big an issue as many make it out to be. The clearance will be done well away from the border. There may be some need for automatic recognition, but that is done already and these cameras have not been shot up, as far as I know. It is not such a big issue. On the other hand, I do not fully disagree with Professor Garry. There are instances of that sort of thing in Northern Ireland and we always have to guard against it.

Q4 Baroness Neville-Rolfe: Still on the same issue, the December joint report refers to the UK’s intentions to develop “specific solutions” to address the unique circumstances of the island of Ireland. That is a promise. Are there any solutions, in your view, short of continued UK regulatory alignment with the EU? I would be interested in whether you are aware of any helpful precedents. You mentioned the Norway-Sweden border and there are other areas on the periphery of the EU where business goes on—for example, on the eastern border of Europe in places such as Hungary, where there is movement of people, goods and services, but differences with excise arbitrage and currency. Are there precedents that can help with that? Do you have ideas or does it have to be the UK regulatory environment and therefore the mimicking that Professor Garry talked about?

Professor John Garry: I suppose one solution—I am being slightly flippant about this, but it is not talked about—would be to try to persuade the Republic of Ireland to leave the European Union. That might help. It is highly unlikely but it would be a novel solution to this.

I find it hard to come up with precedents that would help greatly, because I cannot help thinking that what has happened before and what might be put forward as precedent does not come from a deeply divided place, even though there may be, I hope, very little potential for political disquiet and unrest, which might undermine the peace process. I am perhaps more attuned to looking at more economic than political precedents, so I am afraid that I do not have a very good answer to that.

Dr Graham Gudgin: I do not want to get repetitive on this, but it seems to me that a free-trade agreement is so important. We then would not need much by way of special status. If we get that then it comes down to regulatory alignment. A special thing that should be possible, despite DUP pronouncements to date, is to have some different regulations in Northern Ireland for things such as animal health and food safety. It could involve some checks of goods going into Northern Ireland from Great Britain. It is not an entirely new principle. I sail in Northern Ireland. Every time I get off my boat I face a sign about anything that might have rabies and what to do. During the foot and mouth outbreak there were checks at the border. Pragmatically, if there are issues of food safety and so on there have been checks at the border. This does not seem to involve any great matter of constitutional principle for the DUP. It will get their backs up immediately, but I would have thought that sense might prevail on this so we can end up with a degree of regulatory difference between Northern Ireland and Great Britain on a few food issues.

The Chairman: Lord Whitty has a supplementary. I am sorry to keep moving this on.

Lord Whitty: The problem with that is that the exports of Northern Ireland and the Republic are much greater to Great Britain than to each other. For regulatory compliance, what happens in the rest of the UK is more important than what happens between north and south.

Dr Graham Gudgin: We are focusing here on the Northern Irish border. It might just help as a special measure if Northern Ireland, at least in some of its food industries, was more compliant with EU regulations than the rest of the UK. You are then faced with the now famous chlorinated chicken problem: if chlorinated chickens get into England, had do we stop them getting into the Republic of Ireland through Northern Ireland? That is where you need some border checks. Personally, I would not have great exception to those. I do not think most people in Northern Ireland would.

When we talk about public reactions to reporting on this, from talking to people on the ground the big issue is being stopped personally. People who are rushing for a plane to Marbella from Dublin do not want to be stopped. That was the big thing. As Professor Garry said, the unionists and the DUP were as keen on not being stopped at the border as anybody else.

The Chairman: Thank you. That is helpful.

The Earl of Kinnoull: Are either of you familiar with the local border traffic regulation 2006? It is a regulation that applies to EU countries that are Schengen signatories, so not Ireland and the UK. That is the regulation that Lady Neville-Rolfe was talking about for Finland and Russia, and a whole lot of places where there is terrific interplay across borders and the border is totally porous. It seems that you would not need to do much to that regulation to make it work in Northern Ireland. To what extent do you feel that any thinking along those lines is going on?

Dr Graham Gudgin: On the Irish side there is certainly very little. I am not getting terribly much information on the British side, so I cannot really answer your question. Something of that sort seems eminently sensible. What I read about the Norwegian-Swedish border is that the good relations between the two countries is essential. People say that when the border officials talk to each other they give each other a hug. They are personal friends. Some people cannot imagine that happening on the Irish border, but I would be very disappointed if it did not. What it comes down to for these sorts of regulations and legal frameworks is that if you have good, friendly relations between the countries and the officials the whole thing can work very well. The average hold-up on the Norwegian-Swedish border is about three minutes, but on the Turkish border into Bulgaria it can be hours, although the regulations are much the same.

The Chairman: John Garry, do you want to come in now?

Professor John Garry: I have no specific response to that.

Lord Liddle: I have a quick question. It is not just a question of what is acceptable to the Republic and what is acceptable to Northern Ireland. It is also a question of what is acceptable to the European Commission, which has a legal responsibility to make sure that the borders of the European Union are properly policed. For Norway-Sweden, Norway is in the single market.

Dr Graham Gudgin: But not the customs union.

Lord Liddle: Not the customs union, but the single market. There is the question of rules of origin regulation, which I know from my period in Brussels that the Commission gets very excited about. What do you think about that?

Dr Graham Gudgin: The rules of origin problem is a big issue. It means that there has to be a border, whether we have a free-trade agreement or not. That is why all the electronic and computer clearing is so important. I will have to come back to that. I am taking Theresa May at her word that we will be leaving the single market and customs union. If we do that there will have to be a border of some sort. There are sensible ways of handling that, but I very much agree with the premise of your question. We talk about the Irish, but it is actually the negotiations between the UK and the EU. It is an EU border that really matters.

Professor John Garry: It is an interesting point. A lot of the responsibility might fall on Leo Varadkar if various people in Europe ring him up to say, “The UK isn’t policing the north-south border very well. You are our representative at the border. Will you go and do it?” That has not attracted sufficient comment.

What is relevant is the whole notion of a potentially differentiated UK exit where Britain leaves and Northern Ireland stays. That is, Britain leaves in all the ways you can possibly leave—it leaves the EU, the customs union and the single market—and Northern Ireland leaves the EU but stays in the customs union and the single market. That is one iteration of being respectful to the result of the referendum while saying that the result varied across the four component parts of the union.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that those component parts which voted to stay—not that they should necessarily stay; they should not have a veto power—should have a strong voice in the negotiations. With the north/south Irish border, we are dealing with one of the three issues that had to be addressed to some significant extent to get on to stage 2. It will be incredibly difficult in the remaining negotiations. It is not unreasonable to put on the table that Northern Ireland essentially not only mimics the single market and the customs union but stays in it. I am not advocating that, but if the conundrum, the difficult jigsaw puzzle to resolve, is being respectful to the leave vote UK wide while not having a problematic emergence of a north/south border, keeping Northern Ireland in is one way out of that. However, that brings up other problems. Do not get me wrong; I am not advocating it, but it is a way to go. It creates other problems, but let us worry about them later.

The Chairman: I have two micro points to make and then a question. First, I imagine that what you have just said would be of some interest to the Government in Scotland if that were to happen. In a sense, they would have arguably a stronger case than Northern Ireland in terms of their political support for remaining. My second micro point picks up on something you said a little while ago. At the time of the Wilson referendum—many of us here may well remember that—there was a serious suggestion that if Britain had voted to leave, the Irish Republic would also, tacitly. That was the assumption, I think, but it would not be the case now.

Professor John Garry: On the Scotland case, if I were Prime Minister tomorrow, I would say that Northern Ireland is different from Scotland and Wales. It is not just a devolved component part of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland has special status—that term could be defined in all kinds of ways. We have the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday agreement, which sets out that Northern Ireland, if a majority so desire, can unite with another country. Wales does not have that; Scotland does not have that. One could make a very reasonable case that Northern Ireland could be an exception and base it not on what I said a moment ago about there being a majority in the component part but just on the fact that it is different. On the Ireland case, I somewhat, but not totally, flippantly raised the spectre of the Republic of Ireland leaving to solve the north/south border issue and not leave all the responsibility somewhere else. That is highly unlikely, because Ireland is seemingly totally committed to the European Union and sees its successful economic interests as firmly a function of that. Again, at the end of the day, if you have to make a politics call rather than an economics call, the theoretical option is there.

The Chairman: We move on to a question which it might be a good idea to ask Graham, but if you want to comment, please feel that you can. It is a more political question and, in this case, directed primarily towards the unionist community although not exclusively. There is the commitment in paragraph 50 of the joint report. Does it go far enough to assuage the concerns of the unionist community that the links between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK will not be undermined by Brexit? Do you want to have a go at that, Graham?

Dr Graham Gudgin: My feeling is that it does. It is fairly strongly worded, and I think that it is accepted. On the other hand, it is worth noting that Arlene Foster and the DUP did not sign off on the joint paper. They were not shown it until very late; there was another week of renegotiation. I never saw a complete version of the previous paper, but it looks as if the revised paper may have hardened up in an Irish direction. The DUP got its paragraph in. Even though it did not sign off on it, I think that it will live with it.

The Chairman: Is that your view, Professor Garry?

Professor John Garry: It is a bundle of contradictions. You are committing to maintaining the integrity of the United Kingdom, which is not having a sea border, you are committing to not having a north/south border and you are committing to leaving the European Union. If this was a mathematical equation, it seems quite difficult to solve. It may well be solvable, but it seems difficult to solve. The sentences may well be very comforting for the reader.

The survey work that I did as part of my project—this was field work conducted last September—revealed a certain amount of flexibility on the part of people in Northern Ireland towards the possibility of what is called an Irish Sea border. Since the fieldwork was done, it has become highly politicised and opinions may have changed, but there was a perhaps surprisingly relaxed view.

Dr Graham Gudgin: On that very specific point, it seems likely that that question has been misinterpreted, since it seemed to be unionists, or leavers at least, who were supporting a sea border and remainers who were not. When I read the question the first time, I personally misread it. It was not that it was a badly worded question; it is just what we are used to reading.

The Chairman: Thank you for that. We will need to motor on. We are getting a lot of very valuable stuff on this.

Q5 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: I come to the issues raised between the Good Friday agreement and Brexit. I would like your views on the whole citizens’ rights issue and on the common travel area. Everyone says that the common travel area has been there a long time and is not an issue, but, actually, it has never been there when part of the island of Ireland has been in the European Union and another part has been out. Also, on common and continued access to cross-border EU funding, there have been commitments that they will be honoured, but I would like your views on that. I would also like your views on what further assurances there need to be in order to sustain what I know, having been in government, is a very complex Good Friday agreement.

Dr Graham Gudgin: It certainly is. It is where the term “constructive ambiguity” was first popularised. I used to know it off by heart, but I am getting older now. On cross-border funding, it seems that in evidence given on this its importance is greatly exaggerated. The amount of money involved is about 1% of the amount of money that GB puts into Northern Ireland. GB puts in about £10 billion a year, which, coincidentally, is about the same amount as we put into the EU, so we are not talking small amounts of money. But in terms of EU funds, we are talking small amounts of money. If you take the CAP payments out of that, it costs about £100 million. That is British money recycled into Northern Ireland anyway. Northern Ireland is quite close to being not a net recipient of EU funds any more. As the funding has gone down and the income has come up, Northern Ireland’s share of UK payments into the EU has gone up.

The Chairman: If you have any figures on that, would you let us have them at your leisure?

Dr Graham Gudgin: I will. My main point is that the EU funding into Northern Ireland is not a very big issue. It should not be put into any EU-UK agreement; it should be left to the Assembly and the Irish Government to decide what they want to fund on the border or anywhere else. I imagine that a degree of cross-border funding would continue under any Stormont Assembly. It is not a big issue financially. Perhaps I will leave the common travel area to Professor Garry. On citizens’ rights, I do not think there are any great issues, although I worry a bit about odd references I see in the Irish press to Northern Irish nationalists as Irish citizens.

Of course, they would also be EU citizens. It seems a bit of a dangerous way to go. People in Northern Ireland are not full Irish citizens. They may have Irish passports but they are not allowed to vote in Irish elections or even in EU elections from the Republic’s point of view. We will have to see whether that changes. It seems a bit dangerous if the idea grows that there are half a million EU citizens living in Northern Ireland who would expect to get EU civil rights—if those start to diverge; they may not do so. If they start to diverge, it will set up a problem—expressly, one can imagine, on issues such as abortion and gay marriage.

Professor John Garry: Briefly, there has been continued commitment on all sides to respecting the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and to ensuring that it is not undermined in any way by the consequences of Brexit or part of the Brexit negotiations. Continuing to buttress that position would be helpful. Somewhat ironically, there are elements of the Good Friday agreement that could benefit from being tweaked because of the Brexit process. I am talking specifically about the fact that we do not have a Government in Northern Ireland. There may be tweaks associated with the Brexit process perhaps to enable the reoccurrence of a Government in Northern Ireland.

The Chairman: Any thoughts at leisure on that would be appreciated.

Q6 The Earl of Kinnoull: I turn to the power-sharing institutions, which have now been suspended for more than a year. Have you had any thoughts about how the democratic deficit might be addressed so that there was effective representation in all the communities in Northern Ireland in the Brexit process?

Professor John Garry: Yes. Part of the project that I am involved in, funded by the ESRC and UK in a Changing Europe, is to make some attempt to address the democratic deficit on this point. We have Brexit negotiations of great consequence and import for Northern Ireland in the absence of a Northern Ireland Government, whereas Wales and Scotland have clear voices. One small thing we are doing in our project is to have a deliberative assembly, or forum, with a diverse set of Northern Ireland individuals who are representative of leavers, remainers, Catholic background and Protestant background. That is happening in February. It will be a deliberative space in which citizens are given relevant information of a balanced variety about the process. We then encourage them to engage in discussion and deliberation and come up with recommendations. In the absence of a Government, it is good to think constructively about engaging and systematically getting a handle on what citizens’ concerns are. You can do that through opinion polls, but this will be a deliberative environment.

The Chairman: We are obviously in touch with the ESRC and UK in a Changing Europe programme and have had some evidence on citizens’ juries in the past, so it would be of interest to us to keep in touch with the outcomes in the Northern Ireland situation.

Dr Graham Gudgin: I agree with what Professor Garry has suggested. It would be quite good if it could be institutionalised, with consultation of the representatives, particularly of the pro-remain parties in Northern Ireland. As long as the whole remain community is dedicated to reversing Brexit or talks about second referenda, it makes such consultation really rather difficult and impractical if you are just talking to people and saying, “Well, we don’t want what you are doing and we’ll oppose it”. If the remain groups could soften their objection a bit and say, “Look, we will talk about the practicalities of this and we will accept we are coming out”, it would be very good, particularly if the nationalists parties could get more say—of course, the DUP is well represented at Westminster. We need more balance.

Q7 Lord Selkirk of Douglas: It has been suggested that events in recent weeks have placed north/south and east/west relations under strain. What needs to be done to ensure that effective intergovernmental relations are maintained during the Brexit negotiations and afterwards?

Professor John Garry: I guess that the more constructive communication there is the more it should be applauded by all concerned. One can try to utilise as much as possible existing infrastructural vehicles. The Belfast/Good Friday agreement is known largely because it set up a power-sharing Executive in Northern Ireland, but it had vehicles for communication between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and between the Republic of Ireland and the UK—the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, for example. A look at the existing institutional avenues of communication and either utilising those as much as possible as per the remit in the 1998 agreement or beefing them up a bit is possibly something to think about. In other words, the tools are there; it might be a question of utilising them a bit more.

Dr Graham Gudgin: It is partly a matter of establishing more civil dialogue and better relationships. Arlene Foster’s speech a couple of days ago was a good example of trying to reach out. It would be very helpful if senior Irish Government figures reciprocated on this. For Foreign Minister Simon Coveney to remark, in the middle of Brexit negotiations, that he would like to see a united Ireland within his political lifetime—in 15 or 20 years or something—caused real concern among Northern Ireland unionists. That sort of thing is very unhelpful. Perhaps that is what they really want and Brexit is being used. As the letter from the 200 prominent nationalists in the north said, the trouble with Brexit is that it reinforces partition. It is very hard to know what the British can do about that. On the other hand, from the British side, we can just keep saying, “Look, the British Government is concerned about Ireland’s position in all of this and, as it has said on many occasions, it is dedicated to having the lightest possible border and will work with the Irish in any way to achieve that”. More than that, it seems hard to know what we can do. There is more for the Irish to do than us.

Lord Selkirk of Douglas: Taking all these considerations into account, are you confident that a meeting of minds can be brought about?

Dr Graham Gudgin: Not at present. The EU is taking a hard line. Reports in the Times today say there is to be no backtracking on the joint agreement on citizens’ rights. The Irish are very keen that there should be no border and to keep that up in phase 2 of the talks. The British position is under quite a bit of pressure here. The British point of view seems to be constructive and helpful—that nobody wants to cause Northern Ireland or Ireland any problems in this—but since Leo Varadkar has been Taoiseach and Simon Coveney has been there, the tone has not been good and it needs to improve. I assume that that was what Arlene Foster was trying to do in her speech.

Professor John Garry: I am cautiously optimistic, on the basis of the immense amount of fundamental goodwill there is between people of these islands. To follow on from Dr Gudgin’s point, I would say that the whole debate about a united Ireland has gained salience. Whether that is helpful to good relations in the context of Brexit is a moot point. I would have said a few years ago that the survey evidence strongly points to it not being a plausible option, but I am slightly less confident in saying that it is not a plausible option now.

The Chairman: We come to the end of our hour’s session. I thank colleagues for their forbearance and expeditiousness in getting through a wide agenda this afternoon but I thank in particular our two witnesses, John Garry and Graham Gudgin, both for their expertise and their wisdom, as well as the tone in which they have addressed what we know are very difficult issues. As I indicated earlier, as far as we as a Committee are concerned, this is a living dialogue. If you have further contributions—for example, on the enhancement of the British-Irish parliamentary process or the Good Friday process, or on ways in which constructive solutions can be produced, developed or analysed—or any subsequent evidence on shifts in public opinion or the situation in Northern Ireland, we would be very grateful to receive it. It would be churlish not to record our thanks, which are real, and to say how useful it has been to us. At this point, we will close formally the first session and go immediately, in the interests of time, to the second panel of witnesses, who follow on seamlessly.