Green and Red and the DUP

Am I missing something? Here’s a quotation from the RTÉ website just now: “The new deal would remove checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea from Britain and destined for Northern Ireland only.”

These, we are told, will be ‘Green Channel’ goods, whereas those destined for the EU via the south of Ireland will be ‘Red Channel’ goods. Just like when you come back from your holiers and take the Green exit, because you’ve nothing to declare.

Since, as everybody knows, I am an honourable man, if I take the Green Channel, I say I have nothing to declare and in fact I have nothing to declare. But what if I were not an honourable man? (That’ll be enough from you, Virginia). Supposing I were lying, and was bulging with all sorts of goods that should have been declared and tax paid on them? Well, no sweat. I’m in the Green Channel where no questions are asked.

If your brain is even on life-support, you’ll see this for the nonsense it is. The Green Channel must have monitoring of at least some goods some of the time. Not as frequently as the Red Channel, which monitors everything all of the time, but certainly at some points. And in the case of the Protocol, the EU will be making the occasional Green Channel intervention, not just the UK.  A point worth keeping in mind for sovereignty-touchy unionists.

And then there’s the European Court of Justice (ECJ). This appears to really get under DUP skin. A bunch of krauts/frogs/etc. handing down judgement on 21-carat Brits like us? We sa Never, Never, etc.

But while the ECJ will be screened by a lot of UK court stuff,  so it becomes only a, um, shadowy figure in the background, you can bet your last pound/euro that it will continue to monitor whether NEI is complying with the obligations of the, ahem, Windsor Treaty.

The fact that DUP MPs and MLAs would rather put their head into a vat of acid than admit any of this doesn’t make it any less true.  

Them’s the breaks, as someone once said.