In debates leading up to the Brexit referendum last year, the island of Ireland featured as little more than a footnote. But the question of how to carry out future customs checks along the 500-kilometre land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has dogged Theresa May’s government ever since she became UK prime minister.
Currently, both nations are members of the European Union. But although people and goods can flow freely across the border’s more than 200 road crossings today, when the UK leaves the EU, most accept that this will have to change.
Today, the UK government released its on how that should happen, calling for a “frictionless” border between the two countries. Conspicuously absent was detail on how technology might allow this – despite the fact that EU negotiators will likely press for checks on goods.
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Post-Brexit, products that don’t meet EU standards could end up slipping into the EU via Northern Ireland. The UK government has now suggested tracking such shipments – but it has not elaborated on how exactly that would be done.
Trading privacy
Following the Brexit vote, a variety of solutions for managing the border have been discussed, from to and . These approaches could, in theory, enable people and vehicles at and near the border to be monitored.
“You can create lists of people you know are frequent travellers across the border,” says Zak Doffman of UK security firm Digital Barriers, allowing face recognition to identify them quickly. “We are even now able to recognise family groups.”
Doffman believes that people would trade some privacy for convenience in such a situation. The authorities rather than a company could store the data, he says. However, data breaches have hit UK and Irish government agencies in the past, which may make some uneasy.
And border communities who remember checkpoints from the days of the Troubles may well be wary of surveillance installations, argues Conor O’Reilly at the University of Leeds, UK. A specialist in transnational crime and security, he grew up near the border in Northern Ireland.
“What might be an issue on the ground [is that there] will be a legacy of distrust of surveillance,” he says. “Even if it’s ostensibly to monitor goods, if you’re being recorded on roads people will be uncomfortable with that.”
Number-plate recognition is in use between Norway – which is not an EU member state – and Sweden, but the Irish situation is far trickier to solve. The sheer volume of traffic is worth noting: in total, there are around of the Irish land border every year.
Greater bureaucracy
Nearly 180,000 lorries and more than 200,000 vans pass through every month, , a Brussels-based think tank. Much of that trade involves food and agricultural products shuttling back and forth. Famously, Guinness is made in the Republic, bottled in Northern Ireland and shipped south again for export. Being part of a massive firm, the makers can probably adapt to new arrangements, but smaller food producers will likely be much harder hit by greater bureaucracy.
No electronic system in existence could comprehensively check the provenance of goods being moved across the border, says Brian Lucey, a specialist in international finance and commodities at Trinity College Dublin.
at The Convex Lens, a tech start-up in the Republic, points out that not every single shipment needs to be policed. Random inspections could be part of whatever new arrangement is eventually drawn up, for example. He believes that technology could play a crucial role – for example, smartphones with fingerprint readers to identify individuals – but acknowledges that the cost would be “incredible”.
Late last year, the UK’s House of Lords select committee on the EU concluded that “the only way” to retain the open border would be for the UK to .
But with that option currently off the table, keen observers have been left bewildered. “It is really staggering that we don’t know how any checks would be conducted,” says O’Reilly.
