Protocol blues: Sinn Fein joins the DUP in scuppering progress with Brussels
Peace, Yeats observed, comes dropping slow in Ireland, not least in the six counties hived off from the nascent Republic in 1922. Today, a hundred years later and a quarter of a century on from the Good Friday Agreement that brought the Troubles to an end, the bickering shows no sign of reaching a conclusion.
Consider the strange case of a meeting in Belfast on Wednesday morning between the province’s political leaders and the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, to announce possible progress on the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Everyone who was anyone was due to be there, including business leaders. But then Sinn Fein announced that it would be boycotting the proceedings because, “in an extraordinary turn of events,” its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, had been excluded from taking part.
According to officials, Cleverly couldn’t allow McDonald, Leader of the Opposition in Dublin, access to his briefing because – ironically, in keeping with a separate intergovernmental protocol – he was scheduled to meet Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar the following day (Thursday) and was duty-bound to brief him first, not his number one political rival.
It was at this point that everyone else piled in. Sinn Fein walked out because McDonald, a member of the Dail, not the Stormont Assembly, was their leader, central to the debate. The moderate SDLP, increasingly in Sinn Fein’s shadow, took the same line, meaning that only Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the hardline DUP, Doug Beattie of the minority UUP, and Naomi Long of the non-sectarian Alliance Party, were able to hear what Cleverly had to say.
Given that the point of the exercise was to bring all parties together with a view to restoring the stalled Stormont Executive, the nationalist boycott was an unexpected spanner in the works. But it was only the latest episode in a narrative that is going nowhere fast.
The DUP is refusing to join the Executive or to nominate Donaldson to the position of Deputy First Minister unless the Protocol is either abandoned or so watered down as to be unrecognisable. Sinn Fein, meanwhile, is holding fast to the position that its deputy leader, Michelle O’Neill (elected from a NI constituency), as First Minister-elect, considers the Protocol essential to any future democratic settlement – the line also taken by the SDLP. The UUP opposes the Protocol but could live with it; the Alliance Party just wants to get on with the business of government. In the meantime, there has been no Executive and no functioning Assembly since the Stormont elections held last May that confirmed Sinn Fein as the largest party, two seats ahead of the DUP.
As foreign secretary, James Cleverly has a lot on his plate, not least the war in Ukraine and relations with France, Germany and the US. He must have hoped he could come up with a solution to the Protocol that would allow it to go forward in amended form, thus averting the prospect of a trade war with Brussels and allowing him to push the reset button on relations with his European and American counterparts.
Instead, he has waded into the quagmire that is Ulster politics, incurring the wrath of Sinn Fein while still not convincing the DUP that the Protocol is not stage one in a process that will turn Northern Ireland into a provincial outpost of the EU.
Just to remind those who can bear it, the Protocol – a successor to the much-reviled “Backstop” – was negotiated between Boris Johnson and Varadkar as a means of avoiding the restoration of a hard border between North and South in Ireland that would otherwise have emerged as a consequence of Brexit. It provides for checks on goods entering NI from the rest of the UK that could in theory (and no doubt in practice) stray into the Republic and thus into the sacred space that is the EU Single Market.
But, this being Northern Ireland, the issue quickly became bound up with the workings of the Good Friday (or Belfast) Agreement, the ground-breaking deal signed in 1998 that brought an end, more or less, to the violence that had convulsed the province for the previous 30 years. The DUP, which at the time rejected the GFA as a betrayal of Unionism but now regards it as Holy Writ, sees the Protocol as the first step in a process that would take NI out of the UK in abrogation of what was set in stone 25 years ago. Sinn Fein, which secretly takes the same view, argues that the Protocol is not only a logical consequence of Brexit (which the DUP demanded as a means of reinforcing NI’s British identity), but is entirely consistent with the dual identity, both British and Irish, that underpins the GFA.
Johnson, who had previously assured the DUP that he wouldn’t sanction any deal that established a customs border down the Irish Sea, hailed the agreement as a historic compromise, only subsequently to denounce it as an outrage. Liz Truss vowed that she would get rid of it and introduced a Bill in Parliament that would annul its provisions. Rishi Sunak, with no history of support for the NI version of Unionism, dialled down the rhetoric, leaving it to his foreign secretary to come up with a least-worst solution to which all sides could append their names.
This week, after months of to-ing and fro-ing, it was announced that Brussels had finally convinced the UK to give it access to a database that itemises in detail the trade in goods from GB to NI. With this serving as an all-embracing manifest, the Commission would have clear insight into what was being sold and to whom and at what location, meaning that physical checks at the ports of Belfast and Larne could be reduced to a minimum.
While not a solution in itself – the DUP’s central objection to the Protocol is that it diminishes NI’s status as an equal part of the UK – the database approach is undeniably a step forward, and it was this advance that Cleverly intended to put across as proof the government means business.
But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In a tweet posted on Wednesday afternoon next to a photograph of a half-empty conference table, he tweeted: “It is essential that we find a solution to the Protocol that protects the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. Important and timely talks in Belfast this morning to hear how any negotiated settlement can deliver for the people of Northern Ireland.”
He later told reporters: “Optimism is great. Having a spirit of optimism is important. But there are still genuine differences and they can’t just be wished away. They need to be resolved and sometimes that does take some time.”
The poisoned chalice now passes from Cleverly back to his Cabinet colleague Chris Heaton-Harris, who as Northern Ireland Secretary is technically bound to call fresh elections to the Assembly in April if no Executive has been formed. The belief is that he will do no such thing, but will instead maintain what is in effect direct rule from London while continuing to press the DUP and Sinn Fein to work together with or without a functioning Protocol.
He has his work cut out. The 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement falls on April 10 and is due to be celebrated with a guest list that includes Rishi Sunak, Leo Varadkar, Commission President Ursula van der Leyen and, crucially, Joe Biden, President of the United States. But Biden, an Irish-American to his fingertips, has made clear that he, too, can play the boycott game and will stay away from the knees-up unless Britain agrees to implement in full whatever agreement is reached on the Prococol between now and the spring.
A Biden boycott could quickly escalate into a deeper refusal by Washington to enter into talks with Britain on a post-Brexit free trade agreement, meaning not only a trade war with Europe but the further isolation of the UK from its natural allies in NATO. Can Mary Lou McDonald bring herself to defuse the latest Protocol bombshell? Can Jeffrey Donaldson – a distant scion of the same Celtic clan – agree to at least consider the possibility of compromise? Can Joe Biden’s newly arrived Ulster envoy, Joseph Patrick Kennedy III – great nephew of JFK – broker some kind of last-minute deal with Cleverly and Varadkar? Who knows? As Michel Barnier used to say, the clock is ticking. But I will do my best to keep you posted.
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