Firstly, Boris Johnson has precious few options if he is to abide by his promise to leave the EU at the end of October "come what may", and to abide by the law laid down by Parliament.
He then mentioned the suite of alternative arrangements, such as trusted traders, electronic pre-clearance of customs declarations, SME exemptions from EU customs rules and so on, before proposing "the unity of the island of Ireland for sanitary and phytosanitary purposes, in other words for agrifoods. If you can do both of those things you can get a long way through the problem."
Hogan said: "There are constitutional issues that… might have to be improved upon if [the Northern Ireland-only backstop] is a request that’s made. Of course we can look at it. Also we have to have the North-South dimension in the context of the Good Friday Agreement, and if there’s oversight needed there I’m sure we can look at it."Officials are reluctant to get into detail because of the sheer sensitivity of the issues and the excruciating lack of time before the end of October.
"They made clear," the paper reported, "that this would not require the Northern Ireland executive and assembly, which collapsed more than two years ago, to be up and running before October 31." Is it simply the appearance of infrastructure? Or is it any divergence across a range of rules that in any way disrupts the all-island economy and North-South cooperation?"The idea would be," said the source, "that a semi-functional assembly would allow the principle of decision-making within the Good Friday Agreement to decide what is the nature and extent of alignment [with EU rules], or non-alignment. That goes to the ambiguity of what a hard border actually is.
Jim Wells, the former DUP Assembly member for South Down, told BBC Radio any such arrangement which provided for an all-Ireland agrifood zone following EU food safety and animal health – but not customs – rules, "would be controlled by the people of Northern Ireland and not controlled by the bureaucrats in Europe . . . That is the crucial difference."Either Northern Ireland would be aligning on EU rules or it wouldn’t, whether they were agrifood regulations or customs rules as well.
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