The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has been squinting at the polls for months. They announce that it will lose its position as the first party in Northern Ireland in the next regional elections in May, in favor of the Republicans of Sinn Féin (former political arm of the IRA, and supporters of the reunification of the island). And the DUP has long since pointed to the scapegoat that it blames for all its ills: the Irish Protocol, signed by London and Brussels to definitively close an agreement on Brexit. In a concerted action to deal a blow to the hornet’s nest, the main minister of the autonomous government (position equivalent to prime minister), Paul Givan, announced his resignation on Thursday. And the Minister of Agriculture, Edwin Poots, has unilaterally decided to suspend the sanitary controls of livestock and agricultural products from Great Britain, something that is mandatory according to what was agreed between the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Both politicians are unionists of the DUP. Both belong to the party’s hardliners, who want to get rid of the Ireland Protocol before the May elections come around. In front of them is the president of the formation, Jeffrey Donaldson, who would like to give one last chance to the ongoing negotiations between London and Brussels. After the resignation in mid-December of David Frost as British negotiator with the EU, a certain margin of hope opened up. He took the reins of that deal Liz Truss, the British Foreign Secretary. And although he maintained the harsh tone of his predecessor in his statements, his willingness to return to the negotiating table with a different attitude relaxed a relationship that had been about to lead to a trade war between the two banks of the canal. of the stain.
A spokesman for the Johnson Government has assured this Thursday that Downing Street was unaware of the intention of the Northern Irish Executive to suspend health controls, and that the Prime Minister would like a solution as soon as possible in the face of this new inconvenience.
Truss and his negotiating counterpart, the vice president of the European Commission, Maros Sefcovic, resumed their talks on Thursday under the shadow of the surprising decision of the Irish autonomous government. “We see the order from the Northern Irish Minister for Agriculture to cease sanitary and phytosanitary controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland as unhelpful. It creates uncertainty and lack of foresight for Northern Irish citizens and businesses”, said Sefcovic at the end of a meeting that sought to solve in a practical way the problems created by the protocol.
Poots has taken refuge in supposed legal advice that would allow him to suspend health controls in the face of the problems they cause, but the rest of the Northern Irish parties have accused him of violating the obligations of an international treaty with legal force. And as of late Thursday it was not even clear that his order had been carried out at the various Northern Irish ports, because senior officials tasked with passing on the directive had expressed doubts about his legality.
The EU does not enter into the internal political maneuvers of the Northern Irish Government, but it does respond to a decision that legally collides with an international treaty such as the Irish Protocol. Signed as an annex to the EU Withdrawal Agreement, the protocol was a complex and long-negotiated solution to the Brexit logjam. The UK’s withdrawal meant that Ireland was the EU’s only land border with that country. Brussels wanted to protect its precious Internal Market at all costs, but not at the price of splitting the island of Ireland in two again and endangering the peace reached in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. That pact established the convenient fiction that Ireland it was a single island, and its internal border became invisible. Any new sign of control between the parties, even customs, could revive sectarian violence. The solution, signed by Boris Johnson, was to keep Northern Ireland within the EU customs area and move the customs barrier to the Irish Sea.
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Since then, everything has been problems. The bureaucracy and increased costs and customs and health controls for shipping products from Great Britain to Northern Ireland sparked protests from companies and citizens. It was the so-called “sausage war”, when this product disappeared from the shelves of British supermarkets with establishments in the region. Despite the willingness of Brussels to seek practical solutions – it reduced the number of customs obligations by up to 80% – London and Belfast aligned themselves in an extreme position. The Johnson government has kept on the table at all times the threat of invoking article 16 of the protocol, which allows the unilateral suspension of its provisions “in the face of serious economic, social or environmental difficulties.” The increase in vandalism in the streets of Belfast and Londonderry in recent months, especially by unionist youth gangs, has been the justification used by the Johnson Government to reconsider a treaty that, above all, irritated the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party and left the unionists of the DUP to the horse’s feet, because their electorate saw the protocol as a betrayal that further alienated them from the rest of the United Kingdom.
Givan’s resignation
Unionists and republicans are obliged to share power in the autonomous institutions of Northern Ireland, but the post of chief minister is reserved for the party with the most votes. So far it has been the DUP. Paul Givan’s resignation announcement automatically implies the dismissal of Sinn Féin’s deputy chief minister, Michelle O’Neill. Within a week, the two parties must agree on a new distribution of positions, or the British minister for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, will be authorized to advance the regional elections, scheduled for May. The surprise movement of the DUP, in theory, would not have to accelerate the deadline to call the polls, but its leadership had been warning for months that it would destroy the stability of the autonomous political institutions —by abandoning them— if the Irish Protocol did not disappear. The negotiating will expressed by London and Brussels threatened to keep the problem alive by the time May arrived, and force the DUP to compete with that ballast. “Our institutions are once again being tested… and their delicate balance has been affected by the agreement between the UK and the EU that launched the Ireland Protocol,” Givan said at a hotel appearance. Belfast, on the verge of tears.
The president of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, has demanded the immediate call for elections, “in the absence of a functioning Executive. It must be made clear that the maneuvers of the DUP have their consequences”, she has said.
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