We’d be safely on the home straight by now – Withdrawal Agreement agreed and a political declaration on the future UK-EU relationship undergoing a final polish – were it not for one dastardly issue: ‘the backstop’. And its complexity only appears to grow, regardless of how much the negotiators try to reassure us of their proximity to a conclusion: 80%, 90%, 95%!
Northern Ireland is often associated with the word ‘intractable’. How true it is with Brexit and the backstop. And how unfortunate it is, to say the least, that the negotiations on a withdrawal deal could ultimately fail over what to do with this complicated small region of 1.8m people.
Or, to be more precise, what to do with the border of some 499km between Northern Ireland and Ireland that will, with Brexit, become the border between the UK and the EU.
Both the UK and EU have repeatedly pledged their intention to avoid seeing this boundary become a ‘hard border’. The question, of course, is how.
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Article originally appeared in The UK in a Changing Europe site.
The featured image in this article is used under a Creative Commons licence.
