Former British Prime Minister Theresa May was in Belfast earlier this week where she addressed the Literific society at Queen’s University and answered questions. Unsurprisingly, people in the audience were interested to hear her thoughts on Brexit, given her two year premiership was dominated by her need to do a deal with the European Union, an endeavor ultimately derailed by difficulties over reconciling the status of Northern Ireland with Brexiteer desires for maximum separation.
As ‘Belfast Live’ reports
“During the interview, Baroness May was asked if she found it “strange” that a vast majority of unionists in Northern Ireland put their support behind Brexit, knowing that it would lead to issues with the border or put Northern Ireland in a different position to the rest of the UK…
“In terms of the deal that I was pressing, it would have ensured that you would have continued to have no border between Northern Ireland and the Republic and you would have no border down the Irish Sea. That is what I was trying to achieve in my deal, so Northern Ireland still had peace and stability that had been brought about as a result of the Good Friday Agreement and I happen to believe that that seamless border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is an unwritten but key part of that agreement.
“What has developed since, and we wanted to keep Northern Ireland plainly in the United Kingdom, so it was important not to have a border down the Irish Sea.”
When asked why she felt that her deal didn’t gain the support of the unionist parties here including former DUP leader Arlene Foster saying that it damaged the Union, Baroness May said: “I spent a lot of time talking to the DUP and others in Northern Ireland. I regularly met all the political parties in Northern Ireland. I don’t know what the DUP now think about where they ended up, but the suggestion that I didn’t understand the Union when we ended up with a Brexit deal that threatened the Union because of the border down the Irish Sea, I think is an unfortunate turn of phrase from Arlene.
“In terms of Northern Ireland, there were three issues in play in my mind; you couldn’t actually deal with all three at the same time, so you had to decide where you wanted the emphasis to be. The three issues were peace and stability for Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom, and the ideological purity of not holding onto any EU regulations.
“I took a view that the first two were most important, and we should have a deal that would deliver on those two. Others who came behind me and the hardline Brexiteers took the view that what mattered was the ideological purity of Brexit and not taking any EU regulations. As a result of that, we ended up with the deal that we did rather than a deal that would actually have put Northern Ireland, as it now is, in the Windsor Framework, which has helped to allay some of those problems, a deal where Northern Ireland could actually economically be in a very good position.”