Ever since the Referendum of June 2016, the Brexit ship has been taking on water. Everybody knows the key pledge – a Brexit government would shift £350m a week, supposedly saved from membership costs, into the NHS every year, was an invention. The prospect of throwing out non-British workers so that Brits could take their jobs turned out to be too dangerous for the economy and strongly resisted by employers. And the promise that the UK would get rid of the European Court’s right to rule over the laws we had earlier agreed to “over our laws” and ban our compliance with “their” laws turned out to be a misunderstanding of our legal situation.

Ruairi Quinn, Treasurer of the Party of European Socialists and former leader of the Irish Labour Party writes for the Labour Movement for Europe on the effect of Brexit on the relationships between Ireland and Northern Ireland.