Carryfast:
Franglais:
There are no Border checks at Cairnryan because there’s no border there.
Did you actually read this.
You know bits like ‘’ enforcement staff from Glasgow are responsible for managing the risks that exist at the ports of Stranraer and Cairnryan.‘’[…]
To be honest Carryfast I struggled to understand how it supported your point.
We all accept that enforcement staff haunt the ports. But neither people nor goods are systematically checked. You cannot be denied entry simply because you don’t have a passport, for example. An immigration officer can ask you questions, but the burden is on him to prove that something is out of order, not for you to show that things are in order.
So too, a customs officer can dip your tanks or open your doors looking for drugs or contraband, but you don’t have to have any documentation. You don’t even need to know what you are carrying.
And whilst obviously an X-ray machine or dogs can monitor for drugs, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, and so on - limited classes of specific product that are either totally illegal or whose illegitimacy is extremely difficult to conceal - a dog cannot sniff out that a load moving from the mainland to NI is actually destined illegitimately for the Eire market. And because no customs records are being kept, customs officers cannot detect suspiciously high flows either, because they don’t know what volumes are flowing, and any individual random stop will just show that the load is, quite credibly, destined for the NI market. And the potential risks are not limited to a specific class of product.
And if you start having flying squads of immigration and customs officers who are turning out everyone’s pockets and rummaging through lorry-loads of goods at random all over NI, then obviously legitimate businesses will start to face unexpected delays, disruptions, and the costs of cooperating with investigations, the state has to pay for all these flying squads. Moreover, Eire may not trust the British government to make appropriate investments and perform proper enforcement.
Just take “chlorinated chicken”, for example. If we did a free-trade deal with the US, then this would be legitimate in GB and NI, but not in Eire. So what if you have a meat processing operation in NI? The obvious implication is that you now have to have two separate production lines for things that could previously be done with one. Or, if you don’t, you’re going to have customs officers swooping in all the time trying to establish that you’re keeping the meat for each market separate. And once meat has gone into a product, how really are customs officers expected to verify? The horsemeat scandal shows just how lax things currently are. That’s just one product, and of course you need inspectors who understand what they’re dealing with and are trained experienced with the fiddles that are typical of a certain kind of product - an customs inspector who knows all about meat, may well know nothing about circuit boards, and you can’t be an expert in everything and be constantly on top of every criminal innovation. That’s why it’s a smugglers charter.
Bear in mind also, the main issue is not goods flows from NI or Eire to GB. It is goods flows from GB to Eire - flows of goods into the EU area, not out of it.
The “border in the Irish Sea” is the corrolary of “special status” for NI, in which NI will continue to be tied to all EU standards, NI and Eire will continue to trade freely and be inside a common customs area, and effectively the EU will have a border force at Belfast, and businesses in NI that trade with the mainland will have to implement customs procedures when they trade with the rest of the UK (of which they are nominally part!).
