If you were born in Northern Ireland you have the right to an Irish passport. The Good Friday Agreement requires both British and Irish governments to "recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of
Northern Ireland".
These EU citizens will not have come from elsewhere in the union - they started here - but questions such as whether they can bring in a foreign, non-EU spouse (still undecided last time Davis reported anything definite) is potentially a live one for them. The EU will now have an interest in the future of these British citizens, as well as the British citizens based in other EU countries at the time of Brexit and the EU citizens based in the UK on that same date.
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Shortly after his appointment in July 2016, David Davis was telling the world (via the Commons foreign affairs committee) that his then rapidly growing department would be conducting "quantitative assessments" of scenarios for Brexit, with input from business, and this work would be done before the triggering of Article 50. (I'm referring for much of this section to David Allen Green's excellent blow-by-blow account.)As 2016 progressed, Davis told us "we are analysing over 50 sectors and... engaging very closely with other Government departments [to] establish... the best possible terms for departure" and, importantly, "This is a single-shot negotiation, so we must get it right, and we will get it right by doing the analysis first and the notification second".
We were constantly reminded that the work was extensive and thorough (and so I would hope) but only days before the fateful 29 March 2017 the work was still "going on to address all sorts of eventualities". Shortly afterwards one of Davis's ministers told us "The Department has carried out an in-depth assessment right across 50 sectors of the economy".
There is obviously far more to say about the supposed impact assessment reports, but the assumption since then has been that they do exist. David Allen Green continues the trail in his series of tweets but I want to add a few other things here. I heard Philip Hammond tell another select committee about modelling, as if the results were not fixed (unsurprising - you rerun a model to test new possibilities) but otherwise the language was similar to that about sectoral impact assessments. Some people saw the list of sectors - provided as Annex A to a letter to the Chair of the Lords EU External Affairs Sub-Committee - and read it as a list of reports.
Around this point it started to fall apart, when Scotland Secretary David Mundell talked about an impact assessment report for Scotland then had to admit there wasn't one. Labour lost patience and won a vote which required the government to produce "the reports", though Davis's ministers protested that they don't exist "in the form requested". And yesterday evening they arrived at DExEU committee chair Hilary Benn's door. Two ring binders (everybody assumes they're red) and a new Commons battle started.
These are assessments which have been completed, which are comprehensive and in excruciating detail, but they don't actually exist as reports; which were an essential input to the Article 50 decision and are still being worked on. In many ways I'm not surprised - it's ongoing work - but ministers only have themselves to blame and they will obviously now have to dodge the question "If they're any good, why are you hiding them?".
