Irish Preparations for 'No Deal'

Original uploader Jonto
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 unported
Source Wikipedia

Jane Lambert

The rationale for keeping the threat of leaving the EU without a withdrawal agreement is that the prospect of disruption and other negative consequences for the economies of the 27 remaining member states will force the governments of those countries to require the Commission negotiators to make concessions.  It is not a very attractive negotiating position either for us or for our trading partners and it may well do a lot of long term harm, but, for some in the UK, that will not matter if the threat is effective.

Probably no country in the EU stands to lose more from a disorderly brexit than the Republic of Ireland for two reasons.  First, the UK is Ireland's top trading partner in the EU importing €18,868 million worth of goods from the UK in 2017 and exporting €16,455 million to the UK in the same year according to the Irish Central Statistics Office  (Ireland's Trade in Goods 2017). Secondly, it shares a land border with the United Kingdom that has to be kept open in accordance with the Belfast and St Andrews agreements.  If the threat of 'no deal' in order to extract concessions is to work anywhere, it will have to work in Ireland.

It is therefore worth looking at the preparations the Irish government is making for a 'no deal' brexit.  On 9 July 2019, the Republic published an Update to its Brexit contingency plan Getting Ireland Brexit Ready which was published last December.  The government recognizes that:

"The consequences of a no deal Brexit will be profound, including macroeconomic, trade and sectoral challenges. It will also have implications for trade on the island of Ireland, North and South cooperation and will pose risks for the Good Friday Agreement and political stability. It could have lasting societal impacts for Northern Ireland."

That is clearly not an outcome that anyone in Ireland wants (even though there may be some benefits  for Ireland such as the transfer of some financial services businesses from the City of London to Dublin) but it is one that the government of the Republic seems at least as able to handle as that of the United Kingdom.

In short, there seem to be no signs of panic in either the main report or the update and therefore no indication that in bare-knuckle negotiations the Irish government will blink first.  The value for the British government of keeping 'no deal' on the table as a bargaining chip is less than obvious, to say the least.

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