@Bread , You may know more than me about it, but it seems
to me that our government agreed to the EU rules too
easily Bread, like lambs to the slaughter you might say when we
joined ??
I believe the first minister has just quit as we speak ?
What now??
Donkeyman! 
We didn’t really have choice at the time to be fair DM. Theresa May made a complete pigs ear of our deal with the EU, it would have kept us in the EU’s orbit forever.
Boris did a great job of getting it changed, so we actually left the EU, but not all of it could be rectified at the time - Northern Ireland and Fisheries just 2 areas that weren’t sorted out.
Breaking treaties is normal, it happens all the time, I don’t know why people get so wound up about it. At the end of the day you have to do what’s right - national laws always supersede international laws so halting inspections at the Irish Border is perfectly within the rights of Northern Ireland.
Nobody expected the EU to implement their border checks in such a draconian way, there was a level of trust on either side that there would be no unnecessary checks. The EU have behaved appallingly over it and quite rightly, after years of negotiations going nowhere, the Northern Irish have had enough.
The UK needs to take the advantages of Brexit - opening free ports now is too little too late, we need to take back our fisheries completely, bin EU regulations and lower taxes.
1 Like
@Bread , Sorry, l can’t have been clear enough in my post Bread ?
I was talking about when we first joined the EU in the 70s’ ,
I think it was Ted Heath in charge at the time ??
It seemed to me that they just signed the first thing that was put in front of them by the EU, almost as if they were desperate to
become members ??
I think a lot of our problems started then , due to our not arguing our case sufficiently ?
BTW, l agree with the rest of your post !
Donkeyman! 
Sorry, mate I was in a hurry - here you go.
When we joined, it took years. The EU kept on demanding more from us, using the same phrases as when we left, like “insufficient progress has been made” and all that rubbish.
When Heath signed over our agreement, the Common Market (back then) had amended it in the common agriculture policy parts to include our fisheries - either Heath was too stupid to read it properly again in his haste to sign it or he was incompetent and didn’t read it at all. The rest is history, through Blair and the Lisbon Treaty and Major with trying to get us to adopt the Euro by first joining the ERM (the “glide path to closer integration”) and having it blow up in his face when Germany went legs up, taking the Euro and the ERM down with it in the 1990s.
The architects of Heaths stupidity were (I think) Helmut Kohl and Jaques Delors - remember The Sun with “Up Yours Delors” over the front page ? We were eurosceptic way back then.
1 Like
Going back to the title of this thread, “Has NI triggered article 16?”, it seems that, although Mr Poots told the NI Customs officials to stop checking inbound goods from the UK, the NI High Court has told them to carry on until a judicial review has been carried out.
Now, I was under the impression that Mr Poots had been informed by Stormont’s legal beagles that no laws would be broken. If this is the case, WTF is there a need for a judicial review?
@Percy_Vere , Well l suppose it’s down to the fact that lawyers
only ever have opinions Percy ?
This allows lawyers with different 'opinions to compete with each
other and thus set up a lucrative income s stream for both of
them !!
This is only my opinion BTW !!
Donkeyman! 
You could be right there, Donks, you could be well right.
1 Like