One obstacle to Brexit removed

With news in the last few days being dominated by a clutch of opinion polls suggesting that the result of the General Election may not be the foregone conclusion many assumed, one positive Brexit development may have slipped under the radar.

On Monday, a legal challenge to Brexit in the Irish High Court was dropped. The campaign was led by a British barrister, Jolyon Maugham QC, who managed to raise some £70,000 in the space of 48 hours last December. He was aided and abetted by Green Party members Jonathan Bartley, Keith Taylor and Steven Agnew.

The objective was to establish that Article 50 can be revoked and the campaigners were hoping that their case would be referred from Ireland to the European Court of Justice. The case was opposed, however, by the Irish government, and yesterday Mr Justice Peter Kelly, president of the Irish High Court, struck out the case at the request of both Ireland and the plaintiffs.

In addition, the sheer length of time required for this procedure ever to reach the ECJ, along with the substantial extra costs involved were factors in their decision to give up. “The advice we have received only this week from the senior member of our counsel team is that we would be very unlikely to obtain a reference to the Court of Justice from the High Court,” said Mr Maugham.

We still have a long way to go before we are finally out of the EU, but here is one small mercy for which we can be thankful.