British eurozone exit could end Ireland’s trade freedom
What does your farm and food industry — supported with billions of EU funding every year — do if the country next door to which you export 42% of your food and drink, decides to leave the EU?
However Ireland does in the CAP reform, it would pale into insignificance if the destination for €4.5bn of our food exports is no longer a member of the EU single market. It’s an elephant in the room which few in our food industry want to talk about.
British Prime Minister Cameron David will campaign for the 2015 election on a promise to re-negotiate Britain’s EU membership.
Mr Cameron has also pledged an in-or-out referendum in 2017, and opinion polls suggest the public is inclined towards leaving the EU.
The possibility of a British EU exit is greater than it has been since the 1970s, and a new word has been invented in Brussels — Brexit.
British voters have never been enthusiasts for Europe, even before the eurozone economic crisis.
They are even less so since the EU brought uncontrolled immigration of Poles and other central Europeans, exploited by the UK Independence party to help them perform strongly in recent local elections.
If UKIP does well in the European Parliament elections in 2014, the pressure on Mr Cameron will increase from his Conservative MPs.
The British also feel sidelined in the EU, as member states that use the single currency pull more closely together.
There could be an EU treaty vote in 2015 or 2016; a rejection in the UK could be the referendum and exit trigger.
A year ago, other EU leaders banded together to sidestep a threatened British veto of an EU fiscal agreement; a repeat of that could be the Brexit trigger.
Britain’s two biggest-selling newspapers, The Daily Mail and The Sun (combined circulation, 4.5m) are deeply Eurosceptic; they will keep the pressure on.
Lobbying by British businesses, the US, and other EU member states may win over some Eurosceptics.
But an equal number might react badly to French President François Hollande’s comment that “Europe existed before Britain joined it”. He is one of the Continental EU leaders unwilling to give Britain full access to the EU single market without playing their part.
Nor would Germany allow the UK choose which parts of the maze of European law and agreements it could opt out from, in the kind of satisfactory re-negotiation of terms which might convince a majority of UK voters to vote for staying in the EU.
Even Ireland’s Europe minister, Lucinda Creighton, can’t see how the UK could benefit from the single market without being a member of the EU.
Ireland joined the EU alongside Britain, our largest single trading partner at the time.
A British exit could end our freedom of trade and of labour and capital movement across the water.
It’s unknown territory; no country has ever left the EU (only Greenland, a Danish dependency, has voted to leave).
So all we can be sure of is that a British exit would take many years to negotiate.
That would be very bad news for all depending on the €50bn flow of goods and services back and forth across the Irish Sea each year.
That includes €3.8bn of Irish food, mostly beef and dairy produce.
That trade could be shut off like a tap, if British leaders sell an EU exit to voters with the promise of cheap food from North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand.
Under World Trade Organisation rules, countries like a non-EU Britain could import barriers for non-EU imports — as long as they do not favour some countries over others.
