Perhaps someone could help us out here about the Good Friday Agreement

It’s a standard claim currently in British politics that the Good Friday Agreement commits to free trade on the island of Ireland. See Simon Jenkins :

Such a border would not just be near impossible to erect and unpopular across Ireland, it would be a gross breach of the 1998 Good Friday agreement, which pledged open trade.

We entirely agree that open trade is a very good thing, so much so that we spend a considerable portion of our time recommending the idea to all and sundry. It’s just that we’re wondering where that Good Friday Agreement insists upon anything quite so wondrous. The more formal name is the Belfast Agreement. The text of which is here.

Agreed, this result might be due to our age related inability to use anything complicated like the “search in this document function” but we find the one single use of the world “trade” in said document. It’s in Clause 34 and is part of the phrase “trade union” which we don’t think is really related to a gloriously free trade island of Ireland.

Could someone help us out here? Exactly where is this commitment to be found therefore?

Of course, if it is there is some form we cannot find then the solution is simple. We really do believe in open trade to the point that we continually recommend unilateral free trade. So, if it has been committed to then that’s what we do - declare unilateral free trade. This would mean that we would need to do so to all and sundry but then so should we do that anyway.

That is, we can’t see where the problem lies and if it is indeed there then the solution is win/win anyway.

Our assumption is that the difficulty being mentioned is something to do with politics rather than reality but then that is so often true, isn’t it?