Comment by rsynnott
13 days ago
Which is... quite weird, really, because the former opt-outs were mostly fairly minor. I assume they'd be allowed stay out of Schengen in practice; Ireland's not in it and they have an essentially un-closeable border with Ireland (this is, incidentally, the main reason Ireland's not in Schengen in the first place). And realistically the EU has shown no appetite for dragging countries who don't want it into the eurozone; see Poland.
> Which is... quite weird, really, because the former opt-outs were mostly fairly minor.
Schengen and the Euro were hardly minor:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_opt-outs_from_E...
There were only four (now three) countries in the EU that got any opt-outs at all, and the UK the most opted-out items (4):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt-outs_in_the_European_Union
What I'm getting at is that _in practice_ they would not be subject to Schengen or the euro anyway. For Schengen, see the Northern Ireland situation post-Brexit; exactly the same problem would emerge. For the Euro, see Poland.