NORTHERN IRELAND BIAS: On Friday’s Today programme (May 27), Mishal Husain presented three packages from Northern Ireland about the possible impact of Brexit. In the first she interviewed two Irish farmers – one for ‘remain’ and one for ‘out’- who worked near the Western border with Eire close to Londonderry. In the second she moved to the border itself. She spoke first to two local businessmen who had benefitted from open borders and feared the consequences of Brexit, then to a DUP member who supported Vote Leave, and finally to a local academic who noted that barbed wire had gone up in Hungary and suggested the same might happen in Ireland as this ‘was a frontier as well’. Finally, at 8.34am Justin Webb, in introducing the third package, noted that Ireland had benefitted from EU agricultural subsidies and also from ‘so-called peace money, infrastructure investments.’ He stated:
As a net beneficiary over many years, surely it is a given that it will vote to stay in. The polls suggest that Remain are in the lead, but the DUP – the party of the First Minister Arlene Foster is backing Brexit – the only one of the big parties in Northern Ireland to do so. Mishal is in Londonderry this morning,
Mishal Husain was on the peace bridge in Londonderry which she said had cost £14.1m and had been paid for by the EU. She said that the largest political party, the DUP, supported Brexit, but the majority of the other parties were supporting ‘remain’. She asked Gregory Campbell of the DUP why he supported Brexit, then Claire Hanna of the SDLP why she supported ‘remain’.
The issues here are not imbalance between contributors, as can be seen from the transcripts below. Each feature contained ‘remain and ‘leave’ opinion, and Husain allowed both sides to make their points. There was, however, significant bias towards the role of the EU in Northern Ireland.
In the first feature, Husain said she had heard nothing about immigration being an issue in the referendum debate but the money that came back to Northern Ireland in farming subsidies was mentioned. William Taylor, the farmer for ‘remain’ made the point that whatever happened in terms of the EU, subsidies would continue in one form or another. Husain seemed, however, not to register that, and put it to Robert Moore, the supporter of ‘out’:
But in purely financial terms, if you look at the level of subsidy that does come in to this region, farming subsidy I mean, from, from the EU, we are talking about hundreds of millions of pounds a year, could you survive without that?
In effect, this was a question and a message based on that despite what both farmers had said, the EU contributed ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’ to Northern Ireland.
At this point it is relevant that the exact figure is £349m, A quarter of that, however, is not directly to agriculture but is spent on rural development projects. It would have been helpful to have introduced this into the discussion to get exact scale. ‘Hundreds of millions of pounds’ could have been anything from £300m to £900 million and even beyond.
It would also have been helpful to have stated that farming is actually only 2.4% of Northern Ireland’s economic output; Husain suggested that agriculture it was a key economic issue, and in turn that EU subsidies were an important component of that. But was it actually? Was it not rather one area where EU benefits could easily be identified and extolled?
The second feature, at 7.44am, found Husain actually on the Irish border. She noted first that it was not very obvious that it was a border, but observed that the referendum was raising questions about how border controls might operate in future.
What were those questions? Billy Kelly, a local historian provided Husain with her first raft of answers, but they were totally irrelevant to the referendum. He said that during the troubles, there had been a major terrorist incident in the local check point. Husain then asked what he remembered of passing through. He replied:
It was never something that you liked doing, because if there was even the slightest thing wrong you could be held for hours.
Next up was Kevin McCool, who had started with his father a tyre business that involved a lot of transactions in Eire. Husain asked if he was worried about how the referendum might affect him. He was, especially concerned about the ‘checkpoint’ issue that had been planted in listeners’ minds by the previous section. He said:
If the referendum was to pass . . . you know, is there going to be checkpoints, is there going to be customs there constantly, you know, I would say even a five or ten minute stop . . . it’s going to put people off. You know, there’s a lot of people . . . over the border, just over the other side of the border that do what we do, erm . . . at the minute there is a lot of people that pass them to come to us, but if it got to the stage where . . . for the sake of 5 . . . €5 or 5 sterling . . . or half an hour at, at the checkpoint, then they’re not going to cross, you know?
Husain went over the border to talk to Donal Doherty, another local businessman, the owner of a restaurant. He said:
Everything he has changed. Two things: peace has got rid of all the army and checkpoints and everything associated with that, and as far as I’m concerned Europe and the free movement of goods made a huge difference in terms of taking customs posts off the roads and literally we can now see in this village where . . . this village was a stop village, because customs major stop, now it’s just a business…to trade in the whole of the North West.MH: People here think in two currencies, making daily decisions about what to buy where, in sterling or euros. Many see themselves as part of a single, cross-border economy. But for Donal, the referendum means it’s an uncertain one.
DD: At this site here in Bridgend, for example, we are holding off on an investment on this site, heavy investment on the site, until we’re sure about Brexit, because there is nothing good about Brexit for any business around this border.
No doubt about that, then. Brexit would be the equivalent of Armageddon for local businesses. Having carefully established this point, Husain then spoke to the DUP, which, she said, ’has come out in favour of Brexit’. Local director of Vote Leave Lee Reynolds said that existing open border arrangements would not change, and explained that they pre-dated Ireland joining the EU and were enshrined in treaties. Husain was not convinced. She said:
But it would be much more than the border between the UK and Ireland, in the event of Brexit, it would be the UK’s only land border with the European Union. Are you saying it would be entirely unchanged? People would . . . cross it with exactly the same ease as they do today?LR: Yes. We’ve looked at this, we are convinced that the Common Travel Aarea can continue to exist, and that people’s lives can carry on normally, that people will be able to travel across the border and trade across the border.
Husain then said:
Back on the road between Derry and Donegal, the traffic is flowing freely from one country into another. But Brexit would turn this border into the European Union’s external frontier. In that event, there would be more than trade to consider. Dr Eamonn O Ciardha teaches history and Irish language at the University of Ulster.DR EAMONN O CIARDHA: There are considerations with, you know, money laundering, with drugs, you know, human trafficking et cetera, and you know, Churchill famously talked about the Iron Curtain going up all over Europe. An Iron Curtain has just gone up along the Hungarian border and the Slovenian border and the steel shuttering went up very quickly along the frontier of the European Union, and, you know, this is a frontier as well.
No doubt about that, either. Exit from the EU – despite what the DUP said – would lead to iron shutters going up.
At 8.34, Justin Webb, as has already been noted, introduced Husain’s next piece by stressing that Northern Ireland received a great deal of money from the EU in the form of agriculture subsidies, infrastructure investments and ‘so called peace money’, and was a ‘net beneficiary’. He said the money also benefitted the ‘healing process’, but did not say how much was involved. In fact, since 1995, the EU has contributed around £900 million to Northern Ireland on a match-fund basis. Webb made no effort to say that this was actually UK money in the first place, but did suggest that the EU grants were the reason that polls showed the ‘remain’ side was in the lead and noted that only one party, the DUP, was for ‘exit’.
After that curtain-raiser, Husain pushed home further to listeners the importance of the EU cash. She said she was on Londonderry’s peace bridge, ‘a symbol of the money you (Webb)) talk about’ that was part of the peace process. She said specifically that the £14m bridge had paid for by the EU.
This was only partly true. EU money (originating from UK taxpayers) had contributed towards the bridge but the UK and regional bodies had contributed match funding, so only half the cost was actually met by so-called EU funds.
Husain then spoke to Gregory Campbell, the DUP MP for East Londonderry, and Claire Hanna, the SDLP MP for South Belfast. Campbell said that exit would lead to less bureaucracy and contended that the ‘European superstate’ could not be changed from within. Husain countered by again stressing the importance of EU money. She said:
But the reason that that is surprising, coming from where we are is because of the way that this region in particular benefits from money coming in from the EU. We’re standing on this peace bridge right now, so financially, don’t the sums suggest that you should be in favour of remain?
Campbell made the point was that the EU money involved actually came from the EU. Hanna, in a contribution longer than that of Campbell, said:
Well, we’re very firmly, we think, firstly the economic case is very clear, one in eight jobs here is linked to EU trade, about 3% of GDP. And as you said, investment across sectors, not least agriculture and, and, and community development, but invest like that under your feet. We . . . we do get considerably more than our nominal share of the UK’s fees, so we think it would be lunacy for Northern Ireland in financial terms, but obviously, it’s a wider debate than that, and because of the values of Europe and the fact that in a big, wide and certain world, we don’t want to retreat into our shell any more than people across the water, who are supporting the Remain campaign too.MH: But if you look at one of the streams of money that’s coming in, farming subsidies, and talk to farmers as, as I have done today, you can see how hard it is for them already, how much farming income have dropped, so it’s not as if this region is doing fantastically well because of some of those streams of funding?
CH: Well, we believe it would do considerably worse outside Europe, we have absolutely no expectation that the Conservative London, er, current Conservative London government would replace the money that we lose from the EU, we would, on the Barnett consequences, on the basis of need, we wouldn’t necessarily get that. But the investment in our farming and our fisheries has allowed those sectors to modernise and to diversify, and the fact is, Northern Irish producers and agri-foods is a much bigger part of our economy here than it would be in England . . .
Husain did not challenge Hanna at all about the nature of the EU money (in line with Campbell’s point) but instead only suggested that the sums emanating from the EU were not enough to deal with Northern Ireland’s problems. She then put it to Campbell that he could not be sure that the government would continue giving money to the province in the event of a UK exit. Campbell replied that the there was no guarantee wither that EU money would continue.
Husain then suggested that most Catholics favour ‘remain’, and Hanna responded:
Well I think the beauty, I think the beauty of this issue is that it is too important to view through any green or orange prison, and the fact that the Remain campaign is very cross-community, it includes two . . . nationalist and two Unionist parties. I mean, yes, if you’re a nationalist it would copper-fasten partition, and it would throw up issues around the border again that we have got past, but, you know, for a Unionist like Gregory, we think it would precipitate the breakup of the Union as well, because the Scots would inevitably vote to leave if the UK leaves Europe.
Campbell countered by stating that the Scottish Nationalists were looking for any excuse for a second referendum. What counted was that exit from the EU would allow the UK to become more progressive.
Overall in the final feature, Husain and Webb stressed heavily how important that EU money was to Northern Ireland, not only for improving infrastructure but also in the peace process. Husain’s main intent thereafter was to push that point. She gave Gregory Campbell the opportunity to explain why exit would be beneficial and he did so in general terms, but her question to him again pushed the importance of EU cash to Northern Ireland to the forefront. Hanna was clearly attuned to Husain’s theme and all her points were crafted to amplify it.
Taking the three features together, the perspective pushed most strongly was that Northern Ireland benefitted from EU money in terms of agriculture and general infrastructure; that it was vital to the local economy and in the peace process.
The money was said to be ‘hundreds of millions’ but the exact sums were not given. There was no explanation, either, of the scale of the EU money in relation to GDP. If it had been said that agricultural income was only 2.4% of local GDP, it would have helped viewers to put into context the EU’s contributions. The deliberate editorial vagueness over-emphasised the money’s importance.
Husain compounded this by wrongly giving the impression that EU funds had paid entirely for the peace bridge in Londonderry.
The sequence that explored what would happen to border controls if there was a Brexit vote, was also deeply misleading. A major omission was the absence of an explanation that current border arrangements are based not on the EU at all, but on a bilateral agreement between the UK and Eire called the Common Travel Area (CTA). This was mentioned tangentially by the ‘exit’ speaker, but this only underlined the editorial failing to explain it. Another major problem was that the first speaker talked about the checks that were in force at border crossings during the Troubles. These were focused entirely on national security, and anti-terrorism measures, and nothing to do with routine border controls. That was not explained to the audience and thus a highly misleading impression was generated that Brexit could result in the introduction of similarly highly inconvenient controls once more.
The two businessmen interviewed by Husain compounded this misleading picture. They were both strongly in favour of ‘remain’, and said in effect that their businesses would go bust because customs posts would be re-introduced. Lee Reynolds of Vote Leave begged to differ, but Husain completely over-rode his important core point about the CTA by concluding the sequence with observations from a historian who claimed that the Irish border would follow the examples of other frontiers in the EU where ‘steel shuttering went up very quickly’. The Brexit points advanced by Reynolds were completely overwhelmed by the other material in the feature.
As already noted, the main thrust of the closing feature, both in the introduction and in Husain’s handling of the piece, was to stress the importance of so called EU money in Northern Ireland. No editorial effort was made to explain that this was not ‘EU money’ but that it came from British taxpayers. Gregory Campbell pointed this out, but his points were in effect neutered by the overall editorial framework and comments.
Overall, Husain and Today wove a highly misleading impression that EU ‘investment’ was vital to Northern Ireland’s economic well-being; that exit would lead to the introduction of oppressive and highly inconvenient ‘steel shutters’ across the EU-Northern Ireland frontier; and that vital local infrastructure projects would be put at risk. Counter views were included, but they were swamped.
6.50am Report from Northern Ireland
JUSTIN WEBB: Now, how is the referendum debate on our future in the EU playing out in Northern Ireland? Mishal is in Londonderry, all this morning, in the latest of our series of reports from around the country ahead of June 23. Mishal, good morning to you, your with farmers?
MISHAL HUSAIN: Morning Justin, yes, we’re in north-west Ulster, this morning, when people hear talk about the Republic, they say the South, but it’s really out to the west from where we are Molenan Farm, just outside Londonderry, and we are here because agriculture is such a big part of the economy in Northern Ireland, and therefore an important aspect of how people here see the EU. It’s interesting that since I arrived yesterday I’ve heard no mention of immigration being an issue in this referendum for people in Northern Ireland, but I have heard a lot of talk about money. The UK contribution to the EU and the funds that come back to Northern Ireland, for example, in the form of farming subsidies. And I’m joined here by Robert Moore, whose family has farmed here at Molenan for 200 years, he grows barley, wheat, oats, oilseed rape, and he also has beef cattle, and by William Taylor who is a beef and sheep farmer from nearby Coleraine, and the Northern Ireland coordinator for the pressure group Farmers for Action UK&I, which is in favour of remaining in the EU, and William Taylor I would assume, that that is because of the farming subsidies?
WILLIAM TAYLOR: Well, you’re partly right. Let me be clear, with we stay in the EU or whether we leave, then everybody assumes that farmers will get subsidies, but the part that is always missing is that the corporate food giants take the subsidies from farmers by stealth, so therefore we have a problem on farm incomes, a problem that we think we can resolve by staying in the EU – in other words, holding the EU to account on the legislation, treaties and promises that are already in place, in other words the EU promises, through Article 39 of the Lisbon Treaty, that rural dwellers in short are to be properly rewarded for their work. This is not happening, so we want to hold them to account on it, so we say, stay in and force them to walk the walk.
MH: Robert Moore, you see this rather different?
ROBERT MOORE: Well, we agree on many things, but yes I do, I, I think if we stay in, we won’t get any change. Britain has been the biggest thorn in the side of the European Union for many years now, and I think if we vote to stay and then try to change things, the rest of Europe will say, look, either put up or shut up.
MH: But in purely financial terms, if you look at the level of subsidy that does come in to this region, farming subsidy I mean, from, from the EU, we are talking about hundreds of millions of pounds a year, could you survive without that?
RM: Well, I think you have to start by looking at the total income from farming last year, which was, in Northern Ireland, about 183 million – that’s £53 million less than we get in subsidies. It equates to approximately £7000 on average per farm business in Northern Ireland. If I employ somebody, I have to legally pay them double that. Now, that level is clearly unsustainable, and we have to change it, we have to do something different. And I don’t see why we can’t do that, even if we leave the European Union.
MH: So you’d be looking for a greater level of support from the UK government than you get at the moment from the EU?
RM: No, not necessarily. Erm . . . I think a different system would, would deliver that. The biggest problem is within the supply chain, as William has alluded to. The . . . we are not getting our fair share of the margins within the supply chain. And I believe that EU policy is partly, maybe greatly to blame for that.
MH: And yet, you see the EU as being a potential solution to that?
WT: Let me clarify the situation, I have been to Brussels, as indeed Robert has and we understand how it works and ticks. You have the Commission who work for the purpose that they serve, you have the . . . European Parliament that serves its purpose, and you have the Council of Ministers, who in effect, the guys that hold the purse strings and control, to a certain extent what the EU does financially. But the bottom line is that we are not getting our fair share of the cake, as Robert has alluded to, and we therefore have to find a way forward to solve this problem before all our farmers go bankrupt. So, for us does not mean that consumers have to pay any more for their food, other than normal inflationary increases what it actually means is that we need legislation in place to force the corporates, the corporate food giants to pay farmers properly for their produce.
MH: And you think the EU is a better place to do that. Although you’re on different sides of the referendum debate, the strong sense I get from you is how hard it is to earn a living, let alone a decent living from a farm like this?
RM: Yes, it’s become ridiculous, particularly the last few years. This conversation would be very different if we were at least getting cost of production, and then the EU subsidy we get would be our income. But now that we’ve gone below that, and the EU is doing nothing or saying nothing to either of us, to actually change. They don’t seem to have a plan. They’ve lost all direction, and I don’t think it’s beyond the possibility for the fifth largest economy in the world to devise a better system of its own.
MH: Wouldn’t it be a simpler framework to get what you want out of, William . . . Taylor, if you were just dealing with the UK government, briefly?
WT: Well, the UK government has had 20 to 30 years to help to do something for farmers and they have totally ignored the situation, because, like the EU, they’re in bed with the corporates.
MH: Okay. But nevertheless you . . . well, yes, so you still think the EU is a better . . . better framework to do business in?
WT: Purely because there is a legal route for us to achieve our legislation on farmgate prices, which is what we’re trying to do in Northern Ireland.
MH: William Taylor, Robert Moore, thank you both very much. This farm’s only about half a mile from the Irish border, but after 7 o’clock we will be right on the border to explore the particular issues that arise there.
7.44am Report from Northern Ireland
SARAH MONTAGUE: How does the EU referendum look from Northern Ireland? That’s what we’ve been asking this morning, in the latest of our reports from different parts of the UK, ahead of the vote. We heard from her earlier, let’s go back again now to Mishal who is there, hello again Mishal.
MH: Sarah it’s not often you can say, ‘I have one foot in one country and the other in a second’, but I am standing this morning right on the border of the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The traffic you might be able to hear now and then is on the main road between Londonderry and Northwest Ulster and County Donegal. It’s not a border that’s very noticeable, you have to keep your eyes peeled to spot where the road signs start to appear in Irish as well as English, the speed limit is in kilometres rather than mph, and the petrol suddenly gets cheaper. But the EU referendum is raising questions about how this boarder might operate in the future – questions coloured by difficult memories of the past.
BILLY KELLY: We’re on the site of a former British Army border checkpoint, which would have been a very substantial military construction or military base.
MH: Historian Billy Kelly lived in this area through the troubles.
BK: (fading up) The IRA kidnapped a man who worked for the British Army, they put a bomb in his van, told him to drive the van into the checkpoint, and when he drove it into the checkpoint, they detonated the bomb.
MH: What do you remember of passing through this checkpoint?
BK: It was never something that you liked doing, because if there was even the slightest thing wrong you could be held for hours.
MH: With the referendum coming, the border is once again a talking point for local people and businesses.
KEVIN McCOOL: My name’s Kevin McCool, it’s my father’s business, it’s a tyre depot, we started it twenty years now, so it’s only . . . the last four to five years that I’ve come in and started taking over. It’s gone from strength to strength so . . .
MH: Are you worried about the referendum and how it might affect you?
KM: Worried, aye, I mean, we’re not too sure about what way it’s going to affect things at the minute, obviously we do a lot of cross-border trade.
MH: Kevin now lives in the Republic, where properties cheaper, and crosses back and forth several times a day. He relies on his suppliers and his Irish customers doing the same.
KM: If the referendum was to pass . . . you know, is there going to be checkpoints, is there going to be customs there constantly, you know, I would say even a five or ten minute stop . . . it’s going to put people off. You know, there’s a lot of people . . . over the border, just over the other side of the border that do what we do, erm . . . at the minute there is a lot of people that pass them to come to us, but if it got to the stage where . . . for the sake of 5 . . . €5 or 5 sterling . . . or half an hour at, at the checkpoint, then they’re not going to cross, you know?
MH: Just across the Irish side is another family business, Harry’s Restaurant, run by Donal Doherty.
DONAL DOHERTY: Everything he has changed. Two things: peace has got rid of all the army and checkpoints and everything associated with that, and as far as I’m concerned Europe and the free movement of goods made a huge difference in terms of taking customs posts off the roads and literally we can now see in this village where . . . this village was a stop village, because customs major stop, now it’s just a business (?) to trade in the whole of the North West.
MH: People here think in two currencies, making daily decisions about what to buy where, in sterling or euros. Many see themselves as part of a single, cross-border economy. But for Donal, the referendum means it’s an uncertain one.
DD: At this site here in Bridgend, for example, we are holding off on an investment on this site, heavy investment on the site, until we’re sure about Brexit, because there is nothing good about Brexit for any business around this border.
MH: But Northern Ireland’s dominant political force, the DUP has come out in favour of Brexit. Lee Reynolds is the regional director for the Vote Leave campaign.
LEE REYNOLDS: The border would operate essentially as it operates now. We’ve had a common travel area between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, with the land border we’ve had, open freely for travel. The arrangements predated European Union, they’re already recognised inside EU treaties and EU law, and it would be in our interests, islands interests and the EU’s interests for those to carry on afterwards.
MH: But it would be much more than the border between the UK and Ireland, in the event of Brexit, it would be the UK’s only land border with the European Union. Are you saying it would be entirely unchanged? People would . . . cross it with exactly the same ease as they do today?
LR: Yes. We’ve looked at this, we are convinced that the common travel area can continue to exist, and that people’s lives can carry on normally, that people will be able to travel across the border and trade across the border.
MH: Back on the road between Derry and Donegal, the traffic is flowing freely from one country into another. But Brexit would turn this border into the European Union’s external frontier. In that event, there would be more than trade to consider. Dr Eamonn O Ciardha teaches history and Irish language at the University of Ulster.
DR EAMONN O CIARDHA: There are considerations with, you know, money laundering, with drugs, you know, human trafficking et cetera, and you know, Churchill famously talked about the Iron Curtain going up all over Europe. An Iron Curtain has just gone up along the Hungarian border and the Slovenian border and the steel shuttering went up very quickly along the frontier of the European Union, and, you know, this is a frontier as well.
JW: Hmm, that was Mishal in Ireland, North and South, and we’ll hear more from her later on in the programme.
8.34am Report from Northern Ireland
JUSTIN WEBB: Of all the nations in the UK, Northern Ireland has received a great deal of money from European Union, farming subsidies, infrastructure investments, so-called ‘peace money’ to help heal the divisions of the Troubles. As a net beneficiary over many years, surely it is a given that it will vote to stay in. The polls suggest that Remain are in the lead, but the DUP – the party of the First Minister Arlene Foster is backing Brexit – the only one of the big parties in Northern Ireland to do so. Mishal is in Londonderry this morning, good morning, hello Mishal.
MISHAL HUSAIN: Justin, hello, we are in the Londonderry, Derry, city centre now, right on the peace bridge across the River Foyle, it’s a cycle and footbridge that was paid for by EU money, it cost about £14 million and it opened in 2011, a symbol of that money you talk about that did come in from the EU, is coming in from the EU, in support of the peace process. So, let’s have a look at where Northern Ireland’s political parties stand overall on the referendum. As you said, the largest party, the DUP has opted for Brexit, the majority of the other parties, Sinn Fein, the SDLP, alliance, and even the Ulster Unionists, the UUP, are backing Remain. We’re joined now on the bridge by Gregory Campbell, who’s the DUP MP for East Londonderry, and from Belfast by Claire Hanna, the SDLP assembly member for Belfast South, good morning to you both. Gregory Campbell, that would be surprising to many people that your party has chosen to come out for Brexit, why?
GREGORY CAMPBELL: Well, we think that the . . . the issues are fairly . . .while they are complex, they are fairly dramatic in terms of the emancipation that would occur to the United Kingdom if it were to leave the EU, restrictions of bureaucracy, the cost, the implications for continued European expansion, all of those things we think should propel most people to believe, even those who want change in Europe, but don’t, aren’t as dramatic as those who want to live completely, even those people should say, ‘We’ll only get change if we vote to leave,’ because there’s been a 40 year impetus, which has created the basis for a European superstate in Europe, and we will never change that from within.
MH: But the reason that that is surprising, coming from where we are is because of the way that this region in particular benefits from money coming in from the EU. We’re standing on this peace bridge right now, so financially, don’t the sums suggest that you should be in favour of remain?
GC: Well, I think it would, if that was EU money, some sort of extraneous money that was injected into Northern Ireland, but most of it is our money, most of it is UK money that is recycled through Europe, and they keep most of it and then, out of their largess allow us to have some back to, to build structures like the one we’re standing on, on the peace bridge.
MH: Well, let me turn then to Claire Hanna of the SDLP – why are you in favour of remain.
CH: Well, we’re very firmly, we think, firstly the economic case is very clear, one in eight jobs here is linked to EU trade, about 3% of GDP. And as you said, investment across sectors, not least agriculture and, and, and community development, but invest like that under your feet. We . . . we do get considerably more than our nominal share of the UK’s fees, so we think it would be lunacy for Northern Ireland in financial terms, but obviously, it’s a wider debate than that, and because of the values of Europe and the fact that in a big, wide and certain world, we don’t want to retreat into our shell any more than people across the water, who are supporting the Remain campaign too.
MH: But if you look at one of the streams of money that’s coming in, farming subsidies, and talk to farmers as, as I have done today, you can see how hard it is for them already, how much farming income have dropped, so it’s not as if this region is doing fantastically well because of some of those streams of funding?
CH: Well, we believe it would do considerably worse outside Europe, we have absolutely no expectation that the Conservative London, er, current Conservative London government would replace the money that we lose from the EU, we would, on the Barnett consequences, on the basis of need, we wouldn’t necessarily get that. But the investment in our farming and our fisheries has allowed those sectors to modernise and to diversify, and the fact is, Northern Irish producers and agri-foods is a much bigger part of our economy here than it would be in England . . .
MH: (speaking over) Okay, Gregory Campbell (words unclear due to speaking over)
CH: (speaking over) those (words unclear) compete on volume, they compete on quality.
MH: I just want to put that to Gregory Campbell, you can’t be sure that the Chancellor, whether it’s George Osborne or someone else is going to match what you would lose?
GC: But we can’t be sure that we’re going to continue to get the funding, that, that amount of funding of our own money in the future, in fact, whenever Turkey and the other accession states come into the EU, there is one inevitability about the money that is going to be available to UK farmers – it’s going to go down. The uncertainty is by how much. So, for those who remain (sic) to try and project the issues as being certainty now within the EU and uncertainty without is really a total nonsense, there is uncertainty on either side.
MH: Is there a relative certainty, though, that there is a sectarian divide in how people are going to . . .
CH: (speaking over) No.
MH: . . . vote here, Claire Hanna, most Catholics would be in favour of Remain (words unclear due to speaking over)
CH: (speaking over) Well I think the beauty, I think the beauty of this issue is that it is too important to view through any green or orange prison, and the fact that the Remain campaign is very cross-community, it includes two . . . nationalist and two Unionist parties. I mean, yes, if you’re a nationalist it would copper-fasten partition, and it would throw up issues around the border again that we have got past, but, you know, for a Unionist like Gregory, we think it would precipitate the breakup of the Union as well, because the Scots would inevitably vote to leave if the UK leaves Europe.
MH: (speaking over) Right . . . that . . . potentially on your shoulders, Gregory?
GC: (laughs) (laughter in voice) Well, I think we’ll, we’ll wear that quite well, no, I mean, the Scots and the Scots Nats particularly are looking for any excuse to rerun a second referendum, that, that, that simply doesn’t wash. Do we want an outward-looking progressive United Kingdom that can trade freely across the globe, or do we want to stay within the confines of the EU that are going to restrict our growth?
MH: Gregory Campbell, Claire Hanna, thank you both very much.
