Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:09 pm on 24 October 2017.
Well, firstly, the reason why the committee mentioned it is that I mentioned it to the committee. I was the one who first raised it, this issue of the ports. I discussed it months ago with Leo Varadkar, when he became Taoiseach, and made it clear that we could not support a scenario where there was a more seamless border between Northern Ireland and the Republic than between Wales and the Republic while 70 per cent of trade between GB and Ireland goes through Welsh ports. If there is any incentive to go through the Scottish ports instead, through Northern Ireland, obviously it’s bad and the committee identified that—it’s bad for Wales. So, there have been discussions with the Irish Government on this.
Frankly—I know the Member’s views on Brexit, and I appreciate them—I have now seen many documents from the UK Government that say that the issue of border control will be taken forward by way of innovative technology. It doesn’t exist. This technology doesn’t exist. If it existed we’d have sight of it by now. It talks about having innovative solutions, exploring solutions. That is code for, ‘We have no idea how to deal with this.’
It’s one thing, of course, to have passport-free travel between Wales and Ireland. Customs-free travel is a different thing. There were always random checks in those ports in years gone by, but not every vehicle was checked. There’s a greater problem in Dover, because the UK doesn’t have the capacity at the moment to put in place border controls in Dover without enormous delays, and the same, I suspect, applies on the French side as well, if I’m honest, in Calais.
I do not believe that there is a technological solution to this. If there was one, then by now we’d know from the UK Government what that solution is. One of the solutions that was put to me was that there would be cameras on the border between north and south in Ireland. You put cameras in Northern Ireland and we could open a book as to how long they’d stay there, because they would not. They just wouldn’t stay there. It’s a physical manifestation of the border. People would see them as a breach of the peace agreement.
So it’s an intractable problem. It can be resolved. The resolution is that the UK stays in the customs union. Then there’s no problem. There’s no problem. The UK leaves the customs union and you have to have the same kind of border as exists, for example, between Gibraltar and Spain, because Gibraltar is outside the customs union. That is an extremely hard border. You cannot have a scenario where goods go to two different markets in two different customs unions without any kind of physical checks on crossing a land border. This has always been the problem, to my mind. In the Brexit referendum, nobody thought about Ireland and nobody thought about that border, and it’s still an intractable problem. The solution? Stay in the customs union.