ONORA O’NEILL: PEACE AND BEYOND
22 April 2018
This is the text of a speech delivered on 11th April 2018 by These Islands Advisory Council member Onora O’Neill, at the British Council’s ‘Peace and Beyond’ conference in Belfast, marking the 20th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

Yesterday at the Ulster Hall event at which President Bill Clinton and Senator George Mitchell received the freedom of the city of Belfast, Senator Mitchell said “No peace is ever permanent”. His comment could not be more apt or more sobering. For this is a time not merely — as we might have thought and hoped a couple of years ago — for celebrating the achievement of moving away from conflict towards a lasting peace, to which so many present, and so many others, have contributed, and are contributing, but also a time for taking stock of new risks to maintaining that peace. Peace building (as this audience knows all too well) is a slow matter. It is not a matter of trust miraculously arising between those who have been in conflict, but of managing little by little to convince others with whom one has been in profound disagreement that despite that disagreement one is trustworthy. Trust is very unlikely to be secured or maintained unless it is linked to sustained evidence of trustworthiness. That is why peace-building is mainly a matter of building bridges, rather than walls, and why I shall say something about walls and borders.
The significant peace process in Northern Ireland has taken decades to build. Not merely the decades since 1998: for 1998 was the culmination of long years of effort and the worst years of conflict were long ago in the 1970s... and earlier. Unfortunately this peace process now requires renewed efforts because it is being affected by the negotiations for UK withdrawal from the EU. These new risks have not been created by those who have worked across years to build a more peaceful and inclusive society in Northern Ireland: but they are risks that make it harder to build and to maintain peace, and more important than ever to support those who seek to do so.
In current discussions of the peace process in Northern Ireland all parties stress the importance of making sure that we do not return to the days of a hard border. However, it is often left unclear what makes a border hard, whether there is only one way of making a border hard, and whether hard borders always harm peace. Today when we hear the phrase hard border we tend to think of the worst years of the troubles in Northern Ireland, of tightly enforced controls on all border-crossing activities, of threats and action by armed paramilitaries, and of police and military surveillance and action. But in fact since the 1920s there have been many variations in the controls at the Irish border, and in the ways those controls have been challenged. The Border itself was created as part of a peace process of another time. To move forward we need to be clearer about what people have in mind when they say that they are committed to ‘avoiding a hard border’.
I first heard about the border when I was a small girl, and my mother went down to see a friend in Dublin for a few days, leaving us in Co Antrim. On her return she told us about an old lady in her train carriage, who was travelling complete with blankets and a hot water bottle (trains were colder then). After they had gone through customs the old lady asked her fellow passengers what they thought was in her hot water bottle. The answer was whisky — probably not improved by being smuggled in a hot water bottle. Is this a story about a hard border? Or about a hard, but not very effective, border? Or about a border that was not really hard? Borders can vary in many ways and there is no single demarcation between hard and soft borders: the details matter.
Good Fences?
On some traditional views hard borders are needed for good relations. There is an old saying that good fences make good neighbours. It expresses a wary anti-cosmopolitanism, and sees the inclusions and exclusions that (some) borders maintain as helpful, sometimes necessary, for realising peace, justice and other legitimate purposes. If we consider ways in which conflicts have ended we can find many examples where defining a border has helped. But do hard (or harder) borders help end conflict? Do they make us better neighbours?
In his poem, Mending Wall, the New England poet Robert Frost questioned this thought about good fences (In New England, as in these islands, fields are often separated by dry stone walls, but over there they call them fences). Frost imagined a dialogue between neighbours in New England, where the land is no longer farmed in the old ways and the old fences may be redundant.
In the poem an old farmer asserts:
[…He only says,] "Good fences make good neighbours."
His neighbour replies in words that I think speak to our current situation:
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.”
(Donald Trump: please note!)
I think this poem speaks to the present situation in the island of Ireland. An increasingly open border has been both an achievement of peace and a means to making peace more secure. That is why I think Frost is right: Something there is that does not love a border, and wants it kept open or at least ‘not hard’ (although there are cows in this case, and I shall come back to them). An increasingly open border has been both an achievement and a means for securing peace. But what seems to me apt is Frost’s assertion that those who build or strengthen walls or borders should first consider what they are walling in and walling out, and to whom they are likely to give offence.
Seemingly it is agreed by virtually everybody who thinks about the situation in the island of Ireland that there must be ‘no hard border’ or ‘no return to a hard border’. But what this means to different people remains obscure. About 18 months ago I heard a former British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland state that there must be no hard border. So I asked ‘How?’, and was told: ‘By passports’. I will come back to the passports, which may or may not be the right answer, but certainly needs clarifying.
How is the Irish border to work if the UK leaves the EU? How will it work if the UK leaves both the single market and the customs union? How will this change affect the task and the prospects for those who are working to show their trustworthiness, to cooperate and to sustain peace and inclusion in many parts of this island? There is still no clarity.
Let me first turn to the grubby details of legislation, where a great deal remains obscure. The UK Parliament is considering a Withdrawal Bill and despite being at a very late stage in a very lengthy Parliamentary process, we are still in the dark about how this will bear on relations between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and on the peace process. The Withdrawal Bill aims to ensure that if and when Brexit happens there is no legal vacuum, by incorporating EU Law into UK Law, with the intention that any substantive changes to the retained EU law could be a matter for subsequent legislation.
This sounds simple, but is immensely complex. The Bill has been slated from all directions — including by senior Conservative ex-ministers — because it gives Ministers excessive powers; because it pays too little regard to the (varied) Devolution Settlements; and because it is unclear about the demands of the Belfast agreement — the international treaty that we are here to remember and to celebrate.
For this reason I think it can be helpful to think a bit about what makes borders harder or softer, and what makes them helpful or risky to peace. A border looks like a simple deemarcation when you look at a map, but its effects on different aspects of life can vary hugely. Some activities are sharply differentiated at borders, but create no threats or problem. For example, the Irish Border is the line of demarcation between the Eurozone and Sterling, but this does not cause anyone more than minimal inconvenience. The Irish Border also separates different tax regimes, but often this does not lead to problems worse than a bit of canny shopping. (However, sometimes differences between the tax regimes in Ireland and Northern Ireland have created more serious problems — e.g. diesel laundering.)
Three matters for which the Irish Border raises the serious and unresolved issues that bear on the future of the peace process are the movement of people, of goods, and of animals, (and not only cows!) I shall comment on each very briefly.
Let me first go back to that casual answer about the movement of people: ‘By passports’. Who would have to show a passport, where, and for what purposes? We know that it is not to be when crossing the Irish Border, since all are agreed that it is not to be a hard border, and since so many people’s lives straddle the border and would be unmanageable if they faced passport controls with each crossing. The problems would be particularly acute in areas such as Derry/Londonderry, where local leaders on both sides of the border have done much to foster a border-straddling city region. The Irish border, as it is sometimes put, is a borderland: not an impenetrable demarcation (as the Berlin Wall used to be) but a place where lives are led and connected, and these interconnections have been energetically fostered and grown closer in the years since 1998.
However, welcome as a commitment not to return to a hard border is, we need to know more. At present we know only some of what is proposed, including the following:
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Passports will not — despite some aspirations to this non-solution — have to be shown when people cross the border between the island of Ireland and Great Britain.
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Thousands of British and Irish people constantly cross the border and cross the Irish Sea, and not all of them have passports or can afford them.
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Presuming Ireland remains in the EU, Irish policies on the movement of workers from other member states will differ from those of the UK post-Brexit, so there will have to be an enforceable policy regulating the free movement of labour.
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The British and Irish governments are both committed to the common travel area, which since the 1920s has underpinned the rights of British and Irish citizens in the other jurisdiction, giving them rights there that are stronger than EU rights to freedom of movement or of labour. (Indeed the Common Travel Area rights are stronger than the Schengen rights: they include rights to vote and to enter the armed forces in the other jurisdiction).
But we do not know how these rights will be maintained. My guess is that any workable approach will require everyone in the UK to have a passport or equivalent secure ID document and to show it not at the Irish border but when performing significant life transactions, such as taking up employment or opening a bank account. I do not think this need be a violation of privacy and it is used in many countries. It would disclose less information for better defined purposes than the practice of carrying a smart phone. (Your passport does not tell people where you are, or what payments you are making and receiving). But this is a sensitive matter for many Conservatives and we have not been told how free movement is to preserved. However, who wills the end must will some adequate means, and if there is to be a border that does not damage the continuation of the peace process, measures to verify identity will have to apply both to those entitled to work in the UK and to those not so entitled, since nobody can tell them apart without identification. This is one urgent example of clarification that is needed if the peace process is to be safeguarded.
A second example, of great complexity (with which I shall not bore you), is the cross-border movement of goods and changes in tariffs and customs. If the UK leaves the customs union this will increase the scope for divergence in taxes and regulations, and thereby also incentives to take advantage of differentials. Diesel laundering is not the only economic activity that might tempt some people if there was a growing divergence between jurisdictions...
Quite a lot of people hope that the movement of goods across the Irish border could be handled by using online documentation and electronic checks, and by exempting small traders. If the problem were only that there might be traffic jams at border crossings, this might offer a solution. But it is a solution that presupposes a (more or less) hard border for purposes of trade. Systems of online documentation and processing of cross border trade are ways of managing borders, not ways of eliminating hard borders.
Finally and briefly back to the cows, other animals and plants. In Brussels-speak these issues are called phytosanitary requirements, but I shall use the everyday word biosecurity. Biosecurity is not a trivial matter for the Irish economy, North or South. The border is long, and offers no natural barrier to the movement of plant and animal pathogens. Moreover the dairy and meat industries across the island are highly integrated and of great economic importance. So Ireland and Northern Ireland have a common interest in securing and enforcing robust and coordinated standards of biosecurity. The risks of spreading plant and animal diseases are high: we have only to think of foot and mouth, avian flu, swine flu (which this island has largely avoided), or of plant pathogens such as Phytophthora ramorum and now ash dieback (which are here and have spread in the woodlands). Would it, I wonder, be feasible for Westminster to delegate biosecurity to Stormont while requiring that Northern Irish regulations not go below either UK standards or EU standards? Is an all island solution the right approach to avoiding this large range of potentially hazardous and provocative differentials in standards for biosecurity?
Robert Frost was right. Those who care about maintaining and extending peace must ask themselves, now and urgently:
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walking in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Asking these questions will be an important part of a continuing commitment to peace building.
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