The Barnacles on the Relationship: Roaming, Qualifications, and Capital

We live in a deeply interconnected geography. The Common Travel Area (CTA) guarantees the citizens of Britain and Ireland the right to live, work, vote, and access public services on either side of the Irish Sea. Cross from Rosslare to Pembroke and you are legally at home.

Yet institutionally, we are increasingly acting like two neighbors who have decided to let the garden fence overgrow out of sheer administrative inertia.

Nobody designed the friction that has crept into our daily lives before and after Brexit. These are just the bureaucratic barnacles that accumulate when macro-political shifts occur without anyone stopping to ask: "And what about the actual people?"

If the Kindred Isles are to thrive in the modern era, we need to start scraping these barnacles off the hull of our shared civic and commercial ship. Here are three practical places to start.

1. The Mobile Phone Trap

Step off the ferry or plane on either side of the Irish Sea and your phone immediately assumes you are on a package holiday. Roaming charges apply. Post-Brexit, the EU's 'Roam Like at Home' laws no longer legally apply to the UK. While a few networks still voluntarily offer it, others (like Three, Vodafone, and EE) have already reintroduced daily charges for UK/EU crossing. Two governments that explicitly guarantee each other’s citizens the right of indefinite residence have somehow failed to secure a basic, permanent telecoms agreement. It is a small, pointless, self-inflicted tax on families, tourists, and logistics workers that serves no civic purpose whatsoever. A unified all-islands roaming zone should be a basic baseline of the Common Travel Area.

2. The Professional Qualification Standoff

Consider the nurse: an Irish woman who trains at a perfectly good British university and achieves a high-quality British nursing qualification. If she decides to move home, she can no longer practice automatically. Since mutual recognition of professional qualifications lapsed, she must navigate a cumbersome, standalone accreditation process.

Meanwhile, outside the EU London has quietly signed mutual recognition deals with Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein. Two islands that have shared medicine, law, and language for generations—and share roughly four million family members—should easily match the arrangements sorted out with Reykjavik. We need immediate, bilateral agreements to restore automatic recognition for healthcare, legal, and engineering professionals.

3. A Fragmented Tech & Capital Ecosystem

London represents the third most valuable tech startup ecosystem on earth. Ireland hosts a phenomenal concentration of global tech infrastructure and massive European venture capital networks. Together, these islands produce world-class founders. We provide a scary amount of software engineers to the tech giants, but we never manage to scale up our own startups far beyond incubation.

Because we operate under diverging regulatory systems and fragment our talent pools, we frequently watch our best startups get acquired by American firms before they can scale. This is an archipelago-wide problem with a clear solution: a unified space for scale-up capital, talent mobility, and shared innovation research. Uniting our collective tech footprint would create an English-language tech ecosystem second only to the United States.

Small Steps, Big Impacts

None of this requires grand constitutional arguments, new treaties, or shifting borders. It simply requires a coordinated push from civil society, businesses, and grassroots networks to demand that our administrations fix the plumbing.

By removing these artificial barriers, we don't just fix minor inconveniences—we unlock the true social, economic, and industrial synergy of the Kindred Isles.