Ireland border woe no shock

JOHN Tennant (The Journal, Wednesday) offers further evidence of the myopic nonsense perpetrated by some Brexit supporters when he criticises the Northern Ireland Protocol.

John is quick to forget that it was the UK which chose to leave Europe, and did so knowing full well that it would no longer enjoy open borders for trade and commerce.

There are now customs and regulatory borders between the UK and the EU where previously there were none, and this was always going to be a challenge for those living on the island of Ireland.

Sensitive to the ways in which this may weaken the Good Friday agreements and re-awaken old tensions, the EU agreed to the UK government’s pleas to temporarily maintain a form of open border between Northern Ireland and Eire, an EU sovereign country.

This is the Northern Ireland protocol – a temporary, geographically-specific, artificial suspension of strict border controls on the island of Ireland. The natural, unavoidable and inevitable consequence of this is that it has “shifted” the border to somewhere between the UK mainland and Ireland.

Now John laments that this is somehow unfair and discriminatory, and pleads, in effect, for the UK to retain the benefits of open borders whilst simultaneously leaving the EU. Talk about having your cake and eating it!

When he writes that “a border... makes trading unnecessarily complicated” perhaps he should have thought more deeply about this before choosing to be a leading advocate of Brexit?

C Robson, Newcastle