The United Kingdom and European Union are close to settling the NI Protocol, but nothing is guaranteed. PAUL FAITH/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Monday February 20th 2023, The Times.
No prize is more elusive in Northern Irish politics than a negotiated settlement. Nearly 25 years on from the Good Friday agreement, a people divided by history but united in exasperation deserve to know that good government in their corner of these islands is not dead, nor the hope of compromise for the common good. In the coming days Rishi Sunak will present to parliament the deal on the NI protocol many thought impossible: proof, as if it were still needed, of the redemptive power of dialogue over dogma.
Yet as the shape of an accord between the United Kingdom and European Union emerges from Westminster, Belfast and Brussels, familiar suspects ready themselves to wreck it. Motivated by cynicism and the certainties of old, they ignore what negotiations have achieved. Unfashionable though it may be to admit the Democratic Unionist Party has a point, Mr Sunak was right to listen to concerns that were dismissed even as devolution buckled. So, if only belatedly, were the European Commission, whose intransigence on doctrine even Ian Paisley might have admired.
That the transportation of sandwiches and prescription medicines from Liverpool to Larne was ever considered an existential threat to the sanctity of the European single market is absurd. That Brussels would ever admit as much, however, was not inevitable. Nor were recent significant EU reconcessions: the abolition of checks on goods travelling within the United Kingdom alone, the sharing of data to prevent cross-border smuggling, and the recognition that the European Court of Justice may rule on the operation of the protocol only in rare cases referred by Belfast judges.
Disagreements remain. But the fundamentals of Mr Sunak’s deal will free the North from EU interference while recognising, as every constitutional bargain since the days of Edward Carson has, its singularity. The attention of Westminster now turns once more to the DUP and its leader, Jeffrey Donaldson MP. For over a year his party has withdrawn from government in Stormont. Mr Sunak is set to give them much of what they asked for. They should respond in kind.
Sir Jeffrey may find this difficult. He is assailed by Paisleyite hardliners with whom he has little in common and Conservative opportunists who ought to know better. Having already earned a place in history as the man whose opposition to the Good Friday agreement hastened the demise of his old party, David Trimble’s Ulster Unionists, his DUP may yet face the same fate. Then, however, the price of compromise was the early release of murderers into the communities they had ruled by terror. Now it is the remote prospect of judges in Strasbourg adjudicating on the contents of a lorry bound from Belfast to Cork.
Does Sir Jeffrey really think that reason enough to deny NI a government? To Ulster’s impatient young such dogmatism seems baffling. He knows this. Grandstanding opposition may spare him the ire of East Belfast’s hard men but cannot save Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. Nor, for that matter, will Boris Johnson, whose friends warn that Mr Sunak’s compromise unlikely to pass muster. His briefing is not, as the ambitious cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt suggested yesterday, a constructive intervention. Like Randolph Churchill, Mr Johnson has concluded that the “Orange card” of unionist discontent trumps all else in pursuit of power. Yet having agreed the 2019 deal that cut the North of Ireland adrift, Mr Johnson alone bears responsibility for the constitutional crisis Mr Sunak may soon resolve. He is the last person to whom anyone, especially Sir Jeffrey, should be listening.
As the endgame approaches, Downing Street must now hold its nerve. Mr Johnson should keep his counsel. And Sir Jeffrey and the DUP, as his constituents would put it, should wise up.
With many thanks to: The Times for the original story.
Follow these links to find out more on this story: If you want to understand mainstream unionism, have a listen to Jim Allister, the DUP & loyalist paramilitary groups’ ally in the war on reality.
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