Muir says DUP ‘ploughed on’ with Brexit despite Tony Blair and John Major warning of damage during Derry visit

“Tony Blair and John Major visited Derry/Londonderry to set out those issues. However, the DUP carelessly ploughed on regardless, mistakenly trusting charlatans such as Boris Johnson, just like it is doing now by putting its faith in Nigel Farage, despite all the warning signs,” said the environment minister during exchanges at Stormont this week.

He was referring to a visit by the erstwhile British premiers to Magee on St. Columba’s Day in 2016, a few weeks before the referendum.

Mr. Major blasted the Brexit campaign.

“All the people who have said to us that we’d be mad to leave, the World Bank, the OECD, the IFS, the Treasury, some of the greatest businessmen in the world, Michael Bloomberg...Bill Gates, they’re all wrong apparently and the Leave campaign are right, that we should leave Europe. It isn’t so and Europe is not for the elite. It’s for you. It’s for your generation,” he told school pupils gathered for the event in the Great Hall.

Mr. Blair told the same audience: “If we pull out we make our economic challenges worse, the Europe funding that comes to us, doesn’t come to us, and instead of debating these challenges and how we meet them, we will end up trying to unpick relationships that were incredibly important to build."

The former Labour Prime Minister said EU membership helped cement peace in the North.

"We could come together, in part, because we were both members of the European Union. So Europe played an important part in that. These things took a long time to put together and it’s foolish, profoundly foolish to take any sort of risk with those foundations of stability.

"In addition to that Europe was also an important part of the context, in which we were able to make peace in NI,” he said.

At Stormont this week Mr. Muir said the Windsor Framework, a mechanism introduced in 2023 to supersede the Brexit Protocol and remove red-tape on goods flowing between Britain and the north, was an inevitable consequence of the decision to leave, not only the European Union but the single market and customs union as well.

"The Windsor Framework is the outworking of Brexit. Although it is not perfect, it provides the best way forward, short of the UK's rejoining the single market and customs union, which it really should.

“The Windsor Framework and the unique dual market access that Northern Ireland enjoys is a real economic benefit and a safeguard for many in the agri-food sector in Northern Ireland. Without the Windsor framework, the dairy industry, for example, would be sunk,” the minister said.

He was addressing a DUP motion tabled by Michelle McIlveen that complained that ‘agri-food businesses face significant trading barriers as a result of the Windsor Framework and the application of EU law’.

A Sinn Féin amendment acknowledging that the ‘Windsor Framework provides a pragmatic way to manage the new trading realities that now exist, preventing a hard border on the island of Ireland and securing dual market access for our food produce’ was ultimately resolved.