As somoene who grew up in the UK with the IRA blowing up bits of the country, some rather close to me, I disagree. It's likely that the communities that would be split by a new border in Ireland would disagree too.
The EU is negotiating in it's best interests, as is the UK. There aren't going to be any favours traded on either side.
The UK is leaving the EU, borders are implicit in that, and bi-directional. You don't get to leave the EU and not leave the EU.
Can you cite the Poland/Russia thing? I searched but couldn't find anything. edit You referenced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland%E2%80%93Russia_border in another post.
> Because Kaliningrad Oblast is small, homogeneous and an exclave within the European Union
That's not the same as the NI situation.
Regardless, the EU is negotiating in it's best interests, as anyone could predict it would. If I were French or German or whatever I'd want to get the best deal possible in the negotiations. No-one is going to give us any favours here, everything we want we've got to make happen ourselves. If the EU is using the Irish border as a bargaining position then that's what they should be doing, in the best interests of the citizens remaining in the EU.
The only reason they voted for Brexit was because they think it means they can get rid of all the migrants, they tell me this quite regularly.
One of them moved here from Bahrain, though apparently this means their family were ex-pats, not migrants. The other is from a long line of Christian overseas missionaries.
If they thought for a second that Brexit would mean leaving the border with Northern Ireland wide open, they would be screaming blue murder.
It wouldn't really be a 'new' border though; NI and Eire had border controls from 1922 to 1998, so well into the EEC-EU era. I often had to show my passport on the coach from Belfast to Dublin. My grandparents remembered having to declare NI bacon on the train crossing at Carlingford.
With over 200 border crossing points it wasn't 100% enforced, though.
No, I meant "new" as in, "it wasn't there last year" :) I'm old enough to remember the border, and "the troubles" too.
I also believe the removal of the border was a large factor in the cessation of hostilities, and the reason it's such a hot topic now.
> With over 200 border crossing points it wasn't 100% enforced, though.
My uncle used to have a house (he described it as such, to call it a shack would have been generous) in the south of France close to the Spanish border. Before freedom of movement they used to just walk into Spain as and when they pleased.
Check the "Border area" section. I see no reason why something similar couldn't be implemented for Northern Ireland.
That's not the same situation as NI.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland%E2%80%93Russia_border
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclave_and_exclave
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_border_traffic
NI is not an exclave. There may at some point be a "local traffic" agreement with between NI and The Republic of Ireland, but that is something that needs to be negotiated.
That this negotiation hasn't finished yet is because the relationship that the UK will have with the EU is still rather up in the air. The EU wants a border so it can maintain import duties with external countries, exclude dangerous items and people, and maintain compliance with things like food standards (think lowering of food standards to make a US trade deal possible). The UK wants a border so we (well, not me, the people who voted for this ill-conceived shitshow) can keep immigrants out, and also to collect customs tariffs, block etc. etc. etc.
The requirements that each negotiating position has, as well as the general desire to not trigger a recurrence of "the troubles" are really hard to solve. There are literal opposing requirements that somehow need to work together.
If you take that, and the fact that the UK needs the EU way more than the EU needs the UK (the "UK holds all the cards" blithering of the tea with vicar dancing round the maypole cricket on the green little englanders aside), then you realise that the EU doesn't really need to do anything. It's not going to "throw us a bone" on this, it's going to use it as a negotiating position, and the UK will eventually either give some ground on another issue (freedom of movement perhaps), or we won't and there will be a border.
You have to remember that this is what people voted for. If they didn't vote for this then perhaps they should have listened to "experts" more, and maybe people should be questioning the ability of politicians to so clearly lie through their teeth to get the thing that they want (eg. Boris Johnson: a conservative party leadership bid, "350 million per week" etc.)
The really really simple solution is for the UK to have full regulatory compliance with the EU, something like the Norway model, but all of the "models" have significant disadvantages, such as "pay with no say" as the Norway model is sometimes described. We could of course stay in the EU, that's actually been offered. We wouldn't have a border in NI, we would have access to relationships with other countries via the over 750 treaties that the EU has, but that it seems isn't something we want enough apparently.
edit
Just out of interest, what are your ideas as to how this should work?