Brexit is about more than the Irish border

IN the media reportage concerning Brexit, the problem is presented by most opinion-makers as the ‘Irish border’. This continual media reference is misleading — the problem is the nature of the external border of the European Union and where it should be placed in the event of Brexit taking place.

If it should divide the North Channel, down through the Irish Sea, separating Scotland from Northern Ireland, Nicola Sturgeon would not have it and would insist on the EU external border crossing the Irish Sea and continuing along the internal English-Scottish border.

With no border in the North Channel, this gives Scotland the same EU status as Northern Ireland — that is, within the EU for some/ most purposes, while remaining within the UK for others. England and Wales would be a part of the UK, free to negotiate trade deals.

Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, has made known that she would support Sturgeon if Northern Ireland were accorded separate status in a Brexit agreement.

The media’s opinion-makers treat this as a one-day wonder and take up again talking about the Irish border, as though the problem is peculiarly with the people of Northern Ireland. But what if such an arrangement were made for Scotland and Northern Ireland until we see how England and Wales develop and until we know what the EU is going to become and what the relation of the UK to it might be?

The EU either collapses under its own contradictions, or the EU decides what it is going to be: a more politically integrated EU, at least within the eurozone, along the lines envisaged by the Greek economist and founder of a new Greek party, Yanis Varoufakis.

For these islands, constitutional arrangements, like relations with the European Continent, have always been evolving. It was from these parts — Mount Stewart, Co Down — that Castlereagh, a chief negotiator of the Congress of Vienna, came.

WA MILLER Belfast