EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT BREXIT REPRESENTATIVE VISITS CO. MONAGHAN

Michael Fisher

“We must absolutely avoid a hard border”. That was the view of the European Parliament’s Brexit Co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt MEP when he visited Belfast and County Monaghan yesterday. He was on a fact-finding tour on how a UK withdrawal from the European Union will affect the island of Ireland.

After talks at Stormont with the main parties in the North, the former Belgian Prime Minister was taken to a dairy farm on the border near Middletown in Co. Armagh on the Monaghan to Armagh road. The owner Seán Hughes has farmland on both sides of the border and supplies milk to LacPatrick Dairies in Monaghan town. Mr Verhofstadt is leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe and was accompanied by Marian Harkin MEP, who is a member…