Looking after his cattle on picturesque land about 20 miles north of the Irish border, Charlie Weir expressed regret at voting Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Deeply worried that a no-deal Brexit on October 31 could decimate his dairy farm in Northern Ireland, Mr Weir said he had made the wrong decision. “I should never have voted to go,” he added. “It was the wrong thing to do. We were trying to reinvent the wheel here and the wheel was working all right.”
Mr Weir, whose family has farmed near Banbridge town in County Down for generations, is desperate for UK prime minister Boris Johnson to strike a deal with the EU.
His comments about the need for a withdrawal agreement echo those of many business people in Northern Ireland, as well as the broader population, which voted by 56 to 44 per cent to Remain in the Brexit referendum.
Recent opinion polls suggest Northern Irish people would favour the region being more closely aligned with EU rules after Brexit than mainland Britain if that is necessary to avoid a hard Irish border.
These findings highlight how the Democratic Unionist party, the largest unionist group in Northern Ireland, is coming under increasing pressure from sections of the public as well as business to drop its opposition to a Brexit deal that treats the region differently to the rest of the UK.
The biggest single barrier to a deal is Mr Johnson’s demand that his predecessor Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement with the EU be overhauled to remove a so-called backstop provision that is supposed to prevent a return to border checks on trade between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
The backstop is meant to support the Good Friday peace agreement that ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. However, Mr Johnson objects to how it would create a customs union between the UK and the EU that could lock Britain into close ties with the bloc.
Since he entered Downing Street in July, Mr Johnson has insisted the UK must leave the EU on the scheduled departure date of October 31 — with or without an agreement — although since parliament passed a law aimed at preventing a no-deal Brexit, he has expressed optimism he can reach an accord.
In a softening of his Brexit stance, Mr Johnson last week told Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, he would be willing to see agriculture and food treated as part of an “all-Ireland economy” based on EU single market rules, so as to avoid health checks on produce passing over the border.
Downing Street insisted he was not backing a different version of the backstop, previously proposed by Brussels, under which only Northern Ireland and the EU would be in a customs union. Arlene Foster, DUP leader, repeated her objections to a “Northern Ireland-only” backstop, saying it would create an “unacceptable” tariff border between the region and mainland Britain.
But Mr Weir, a unionist who knows Mrs Foster, sees big advantages in the backstop because it would provide frictionless trade over the border for an agriculture sector that is heavily integrated with the Irish Republic.
He said the backstop would give Northern Ireland “best-of-both-worlds” access to UK and EU markets.
“The DUP want Northern Ireland to be successful but they’d really need to step up to the mark in the negotiations here to get agriculture to a fairer place,” he added.
Ahead of a meeting between Mr Johnson and Northern Irish business people in Downing Street last week, trade bodies covering manufacturing and retail said there was merit in looking at a Northern Ireland-only backstop.
The Ulster Farmers’ Union said it was open to considering options beyond Mrs May’s withdrawal agreement. “Farmers need certainty for the future of their businesses and the clock is ticking,” said Ivor Ferguson, union president.
The Northern Ireland Food and Drink Association, a trade body, said 40,000 of the 100,000 jobs in the sector could be lost in a no-deal Brexit.
“While both the [all-UK] backstop currently in the withdrawal agreement and the Northern Ireland-only backstop are not perfect, they are infinitely preferable to crashing out without a deal,” said Michael Bell, executive director of the association.
Northern Ireland’s economy is already strained. Analysts at Ulster Bank said they believed the region “has entered or is entering recession” after months of reducing business output, declining exports and falling employment.
Polls suggest a majority of Northern Irish people would accept a backstop focused on the region rather than the entire UK. A survey last month by LucidTalk, a polling organisation, found 58 per cent would support a Northern Ireland-only backstop involving a closer relationship with the EU than mainland Britain.
A separate survey for Michael Ashcroft, the Conservative party peer, found last week that 60 per cent would back this backstop if the alternative was leaving without an agreement.
On the streets of Banbridge — a mixed community of unionists and nationalists — shoppers expressed anxiety about the government’s document published last week about the worst-case impact of a no-deal Brexit.
Heather Larkin, a mother of five young children, was alarmed to hear medical supplies could be threatened. “We have a child that’s on long-term medication,” she said.
Gary McGrath, a tiler who works in the building industry, said the outlook was bleak without a Brexit deal. “Nobody wants a no-deal, especially in tiling. People bring supplies in from Spain and Italy. If that all goes, then the price of everything goes up.”
But in the staunchly unionist town of Portadown, some 12 miles from Banbridge, people said Mrs Foster was right to hold out against a Brexit deal that treated Northern Ireland differently to mainland Britain.
Mark Harrison, a mortgage and insurance broker, said: “It basically should be that everybody has [the backstop] or nobody has it.”
According to Lord Ashcroft’s poll, only 21 per cent of unionists were prepared to accept a Northern Ireland-only backstop, with 77 per cent saying they would rather have a no-deal Brexit.
