Impact case study database

The team’s research has tackled the challenges human rights reform and Brexit pose for Northern Ireland, both before and after the 2016 referendum, and engaged with all phases of the UK’s withdrawal negotiations. The project has made major contributions to public policy, particularly through empowering the work of the Joint Committee:

• UK decision makers have responded to the team’s critique of proposals for maintaining frictionless trade between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

• UK and EU decision makers have assimilated the team’s findings that the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol must address rights and equality issues.

• UK/Ireland Governments have concluded new CTA arrangements under the impetus of the team’s research (more than 300,000 Irish citizens live in the UK, 100,000 UK citizens live in Ireland and an estimated 30,000 are cross-border workers on the island of Ireland).

Shaping Brexit trade policy

The team’s work has shaped a variety of select committee reports on Brexit and trade. Throughout 2017 and 2018, the project team’s research into the impacts of Brexit upon cross-border trade [PUB3] gained considerable attention, with Newcastle researchers making oral submissions to the UK Parliament’s International Trade Committee (13 December 2017), EU Committee (7 February 2020) and twice before the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (13 October 2017 and 13 February 2019).

The 13 October 2017 evidence session (together with a detailed written submission drawn from the team’s research) was crucial in shaping the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee’s 2018 conclusions that the UK Government had not produced any workable technical solution to administration of customs checks at the Northern Ireland border [IMP1]. The Committee relied on Dr de Mars’ evidence to highlight that the impact of EU rules and WTO law would require infrastructure at the Northern Ireland border in the absence of some special legal arrangements for Northern Ireland [IMP1]. Once these realities gained attention in political debate, the backstop became an increasingly prominent (and contested) part of negotiations.

Once the special arrangements covering Northern Ireland were reworked in the October 2019 deal, de Mars and Murray’s oral evidence to the EU Committee underpinned much of the Committee report’s recommendations; highlighting that the UK Government had undertaken broader international obligations regarding customs processes, “at risk” goods and state aids than had been widely understood [IMP2]. Some twenty paragraphs of the Committee’s report drew on this evidence, providing a basis for the Committee’s conclusions that there would be trade friction between Northern Ireland and Great Britain as a result of the Protocol, on the potential impact of state aid rules and on the enforcement options available to the EU. This evidence was recognised by RTE’s influential Europe Editor Tony Connelly as ‘some of the brightest minds in the business’ awakening political discourse over the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol’s implementation [IMP3]. In December 2020 the UK Government moved to agree a redefinition of the scope of state aid rules in response to the issues identified through this evidence [IMP2].

Shaping Brexit human rights policy

In December 2016, the House of Lords’ EU Committee relied on the team’s research [PUB1] to establish how Brexit would impact UK/Ireland relations [IMP4], as did the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement in August 2017 [IMP5]. In January 2017 the team briefed the SDLP’s MPs [IMP6], including drafting parliamentary questions that resulted in the UK Government acknowledging that it would not pursue human rights reform during the Brexit process and that might be obliged to accept human rights obligations under a deal establishing the future UK/EU relationship [IMP6].

The team’s work has also shaped Northern Ireland and Ireland’s statutory human rights bodies’ dealings with the UK and Irish governments (and the EU) on Brexit. The Joint Committee commissioned the project team to produce two Reports to provide the basis of their efforts to sustain cross-border human rights protections in Ireland after Brexit [PUB2; PUB6]. These Reports have been described by Northern Ireland’s Chief Commissioner as ‘vital … for balancing a public narrative that all too often focuses on trade’ [IMP7]. The first of these reports provided the ‘first significant scholarly exposure of the ambiguities inherent within paragraphs 48 to 52 of that UK/EU Joint Report and their implications for Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and concepts such as parity of esteem and non-diminution of rights’, and the statutory rights bodies relied upon it to oblige the UK Government and EU ‘to spell out the choices that were being made in terms of rights protections’ [IMP7].

This research ensured that the statutory human rights bodies ‘had a case that would receive a hearing in the Brexit negotiations’, providing the ‘forensic detail’ necessary to influence these negotiations [IMP7]. Members of the Joint Committee presented the first of these Reports to Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator on Brexit, in April 2018 with the result that a provision was added to the Withdrawal Agreement making the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and Equality Commission the ‘dedicated mechanisms’ for protecting its human rights and equality commitments (Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, Article 2). The Chair of European Network of National Human Rights Institutions has called this provision the ‘fruits and proof of the success of this engagement’ [IMP8].

Shaping CTA policy

The team’s work on the current shortcomings and future stability of the CTA [PUB4, PUB5] has been instrumental in shaping the policy of Northern Ireland and Ireland’s statutory human rights bodies, and has shaped parliamentary debate. The team’s Report [PUB4] was presented to the Joint Committee in November 2018 and immediately adopted as a basis for a major policy campaign pushing the UK and Irish Governments to clarify and further protect the reciprocal rights extended to each other’s citizens under the CTA [IMP7]. Northern Ireland’s Chief Commissioner confirms the influence of this research upon the UK and Irish Governments’ decision to conclude ‘a new Memorandum of Understanding redefining the scope of the CTA and introducing specific legislation covering social security arrangements between the two governments’ [IMP7]. This research provided an impetus for formalising CTA relationships which had existed without a published agreement for almost a century. This research was also the primary basis for the CTA section of the Alternative Arrangements Commission Report on Brexit and Ireland/Northern Ireland [IMP9].

The team’s research [PUB4] was repeatedly cited in parliamentary debates relating to the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill (between February 2019 and September 2020), by both the UK Government as support for the core aims of clause 2 and by opposition MPs seeking to extend the legal protections for Irish citizens in the UK after Brexit [IMP10]. Testimonial evidence confirms that ‘peers drew extensively upon the [team’s] report […] to push the Government to confirm that their changes would be in line with its recommendations’ [IMP6]. These debates demonstrate a direct link between warnings in the team’s CTA research [PUB4] and UK Government policy shifting from a position of discouraging Irish citizens from registering under the EU settlement scheme to a recognition that these 300,000 people ‘may wish to apply to the scheme to make it easier to prove their status in the UK in the event that they wish to bring eligible family members to the UK in the future’ (HL Deb, Vol. 805, Col. 629 (7 September 2020)) [IMP10].

In summary, public debate ‘owes a debt’ to the project’s ‘lucid’ research (Tony Barber in the Financial Times), which has shaped policy and the role of public bodies with regard to some of the most intractable aspects of Brexit for Northern Ireland [IMP3].