Increased trade with NI post brexit, but reduced from UK

joe sod

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Interesting report from esri on substantial increase in trade with NI post brexit, but reduced trade with UK. My thinking is that this must be substituting of suppliers from UK to NI to avoid all the paperwork associated with trade with UK mainland. All in all though this is very good news for NI.
If unionists can look beyond the cultural stuff associated with NI being in both UK and EU, and if nationalists could turn down the United Ireland rhetoric then this could turn to be a bonanza for NI.
As well as that there is bound to be a tourism bonus as many young people travelling north to party due to much less covid restrictions .
I think it maybe slowly dawning on a lot of people that this is very good for NI once the crazy extremists on both sides stay away
 
No doubt you are right, but there are also further things to consider.

- The Swiss/EU bilateral allows contractors from the EU to quote on Swiss government contracts etc... but they must use goods sourced from within the EU (not necessarily manufactured in the EU) and maintenance must be done under the same conditions. That means anything that was sourced in the UK, must now be sourced via NI.

- As for tourism, you may not know this, but European ID cards are no longer accepted for entry into the UK and EU/EEA/CH resident third country nationals now require both a passport and a visa. So mainland Europeans now need to go through all this hassle to visit one country in Europe. The three secondary schools in my town here in Switzerland used to organise trip once or twice a year to the UK in the past, but for next year, conditions allowing, they are planning to go to Ireland instead (teachers have contact me about it). The main reasons are the extra requirements - all Swiss students would have to get passports and third country nationals would have to get passports and visas, which represents a lot of extra paper work and expense.

I travel on a Swiss national ID card, rather than an Irish or Swiss passport because it takes about 15 minutes at the local community office to renew it once every ten years. We used to pop over to London for a weekend every so often, but we won't be doing this again in a hurry because of the extra hassle - it's Paris or Vienna from now on.
 
No doubt you are right, but there are also further things to consider.

- The Swiss/EU bilateral allows contractors from the EU to quote on Swiss government contracts etc... but they must use goods sourced from within the EU (not necessarily manufactured in the EU) and maintenance must be done under the same conditions. That means anything that was sourced in the UK, must now be sourced via NI.

- As for tourism, you may not know this, but European ID cards are no longer accepted for entry into the UK and EU/EEA/CH resident third country nationals now require both a passport and a visa. So mainland Europeans now need to go through all this hassle to visit one country in Europe. The three secondary schools in my town here in Switzerland used to organise trip once or twice a year to the UK in the past, but for next year, conditions allowing, they are planning to go to Ireland instead (teachers have contact me about it). The main reasons are the extra requirements - all Swiss students would have to get passports and third country nationals would have to get passports and visas, which represents a lot of extra paper work and expense.

I travel on a Swiss national ID card, rather than an Irish or Swiss passport because it takes about 15 minutes at the local community office to renew it once every ten years. We used to pop over to London for a weekend every so often, but we won't be doing this again in a hurry because of the extra hassle - it's Paris or Vienna from now on.
Do you know why the UK have done this, hardly seems sensible? I lived in CH & they had no problem with EU ID cards, despite being outside the EU.
 
Do you know why the UK have done this, hardly seems sensible? I lived in CH & they had no problem with EU ID cards, despite being outside the EU.
Bloody mindedness….. There is no logical reason for deciding not to accept them, especially since they did so before. And the only outcome is to inconvenience tourists, business travelers and so on.

They have stuffed up so many things it’s unbelievable. British goods have more or less disappeared from our shops because there is no bonding agreement with the EU to allow goods to be transferred via the EU to countries like Switzerland. So goods from the UK have to be imported into the EU, exported out of the EU and finally imported into Switzerland.
 
So goods from the UK have to be imported into the EU, exported out of the EU and finally imported into Switzerland.
This rings a bell. Donkeys' years ago I used to buy a French magazine in one of the main bookshops in town (Dublin). I was trying to improve my vocab as I was applying to college. I realised I was paying about two thirds more than the price in Euro printed on the front cover so I wrote to the bookshop to ask why. The reply explained that (despite Ireland being in the Single Market and the Eurozone) the magazine was exported from France to the UK and then onto Ireland from there. If my memory doesn't tell a lie, the reply mentioned something about going from Euro to Sterling and back again, but that does sound too absurd. I was going to write back to ask why couldn't the magazine bypass the UK and be sent directly to Ireland. I guess that problem has gone away by now!
 
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