Not just sausages: Brexit, trade and the Northern Ireland protocol

Trade Bites

Part of the United Kingdom, but effectively within the EU single market, but still part of the UK’s customs territory – you’d be forgiven for feeling a little confused about just how Northern Ireland fits into things these days. The problem is that if Northern Ireland remains part of the EU single market, then the EU wants to make sure that anything that enters that single market is compliant with its own rules - even if that stuff comes from Great Britain, which is part of the same country as Northern Ireland. All of which creates a very interesting problem – unless of course you are one of the thousands of businesses involved in trying to move goods to and from Northern Ireland, in which case “interesting” is probably not the adjective you’d choose to use. So what are the next steps in the evolving saga? How did we get into this situation, and, more relevantly, how do we find solutions to the current problems? Chris Horseman is joined by Michael Gasiorek, Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory; Katy Hayward, Professor of Political Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast, and senior fellow of the ‘UK in a Changing Europe’ thinktank; and Aodhan Connolly, Director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium, and International Trade Advisor to the British Retail Consortium.