Courtney McGrailDear Editor, Your front page story ‘North feels “forced out of EU” by Brexit, Bishop warns’ (IC 6/10/2016) was as predictable as it is alarming.
The concerns Bishop Donal McKeown expresses about and on behalf of ordinary working class people in Derry and elsewhere in the North following Britain’s vote to quit the EU give the lie to the constant claim from the cheerleaders for Brexit that only a ‘liberal elite’ opposes the UK abandoning the European project.
It beggars belief that anybody could describe ordinary people in an unemployment blackspot – as Derry is in the North – faced with worsening employment prospects due to the loss of their economic hinterland (and quite probably reduced investment) as an elite of any sort.
If those in England who are hell-bent on dragging the UK out of the EU are not determined to harm Northern Ireland, it seems they must have given Northern Ireland hardly any thought whatsoever. Dr McKeown says that there is a risk of resentment growing among the North’s nationalist communities if Britain forces the North out of the EU, and it takes little imagination to foresee how rising unemployment combined with resentment against Britain could prove a dangerous cocktail.
Making matters worse is the fact that Brexit could make the Good Friday Agreement, upon which the entire constitutional settlement for the North rests, null and void. EU membership is stitched into the agreement, not least in the treaty commitment that Ireland and UK are bound to develop their relations with each other as members of the EU, but also through constant references to the ECHR, which all EU members must abide by, and the entirety of the agreement’s second strand, which explicitly refers to the EU but deals with a range of cross-border activities that implicitly assume EU involvement and regulation.
Did those who voted for Brexit intend this? Or did they simply not think?
Yours etc.,
Geraldine Kelly,
Drogheda, Co. Louth.