Proposes reducing controls and bureaucracy in trade with Ulster
The British Government has presented in Parliament a bill that, if approved, could lead to radical changes in the rules that allow Northern Ireland to remain in the British market and in the Community at the same time. Boris Johnson’s unilateral proposal modifies the European Union Withdrawal Agreement, which sealed the ‘Brexit’.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, promoter of the bill, states that “it fixes parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol, making the necessary changes to restore stability and ensure that the delicate balance of the Belfast Agreement or Good Friday is protected” . Johnson has described the changes as “a trivial adjustment”.
The bill contemplates the establishment of a system of channels, red and green, that allow directing the traffic of products from Great Britain, depending on whether their destination is the same region or the common market in Southern Ireland. It will also allow the coexistence of a dual system of regulations, in such a way that products subject to British or community rules circulate through the region.
What the British Government presents as “The Solution” also includes unilateral changes in the application of the VAT regime and in the rules of public aid to companies. And it removes the role of the European Court of Justice in dispute resolution, transferring it to British courts or an international panel.
The state of necessity invoked by the promoters of the project is recognized in international law as a reason to justify the actions of a State, and in its first article the authors of the Protocol define it as a legal construction that cannot alter the constitutional arrangements of 1998 or the integrity of the United Kingdom. London uses these arguments against those who accuse him, and there are many in the Conservative Party itself, of delving into illegality.
The need for these unilateral measures is justified because the European Commission would not have listened to the complaints of Northern Irish businessmen about the excessive paperwork required of them, and its cost. There are also damages to citizens of the region, who suffer delays in receiving packages, for example. In some cases, they are damages that ‘Brexit’ has also caused in other places in the United Kingdom.
The largest association of British businessmen, CBI, has been against the unilateralism of the Government. Associations of the food sector, important in the regional economy, expressed to the BBC this weekend the majority’s satisfaction with the benefits of having access to both markets. The dairy sector worries that the divergence of regulations – the only thing that justifies pushing for a dual system – will break down the integration of the Northern and Southern Irish industry.
contexts
Johnson’s need would also be political. The second party in the last elections, the radical unionist DUP, invokes ghostly economic ruins to reject the Protocol. He passionately resents that the always unionist Northern Ireland has customs barriers with the rest of the United Kingdom in the ‘post-Brexit’, and has to submit to directives in whose drafting it does not participate. The party’s leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, says he feels like “a second-class citizen” in his country.
A majority of the autonomous deputies elected in the May elections, 52 out of 90, wrote to the Government rejecting its bill and unilateralism. But the Northern Ireland created in the 1998 Agreement is based on consensus. The DUP does not agree to rebuild the regional Executive while the Protocol operates. A partially repealing law is the solution that Johnson offers him. The DUP has not guaranteed when it will join the consensus after this gesture.
In Belfast, meanwhile, there is a gleeful debate over whether solicitor John Larkin, former regional head of the Crown Prosecution Service, has found a truly fatal error in the drafting of the community regulations that oblige the local administration to establish customs controls on products From great britain. A case in the High Court of Northern Ireland will have to decide whether, as Larkin says, this big mess is based on a misunderstanding.
A 46-year-old man, Winkie Irvine, who is described by the media as a community group worker and at the same time as the head of Company B of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a criminal and sectarian group, has been interned in prison because the Police saw how he loaded a bag with weapons in the trunk of his car that the driver of a van who was also arrested gave him.
Police were following him for his possible involvement, in March, in an attempt to plant a bomb at a site where Irish Foreign Secretary Simon Coveney was giving a speech. Irvine worked in organizations of transition towards peace, often financed by the EU; But it is now believed that his strange arrest could be a sign that the group, which carried out the first murders of the Northern Ireland conflict in 1966, is arming itself to return to violence.
On the same day that the Government of London presents a bill that follows the demands of radical unionism, the Ministry of Defense reached a compensation agreement with nine of the eleven families of innocent victims, riddled with bullets by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment in the Ballymurphy neighborhood, a Catholic ghetto area of West Belfast, in 1971.
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