UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is due to visit Belfast on May 16 amid the ongoing political impasse over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
As the months-long dispute over the Brexit-related protocol led to the collapse of Northern Ireland’s Executive and the paralysis of its legislature, Downing Street said Johnson will hold a series of private meetings with the local parties and urge lawmakers to “get back to work to deal with the bread-and-butter issues.”
The spokesperson also said the UK government would “play its part to ensure political stability.”
The Northern Ireland Protocol is part of the UK’s Brexit deal that leaves Northern Ireland in the EU’s single market and customs union. It was created to avoid a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, because a visible border would risk angering Irish nationalists and resurrecting sectarian violence.
But the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) refused to accept the protocol, arguing that the checks of goods in the Irish Sea have created an economic and political barrier between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
In protesting against the protocol, the DUP in February pulled out of the Executive. The move effectively collapsed the institution as the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement dictated that the largest unionist and nationalist parties can’t form a government without one another.
The DUP also refused to nominate a speaker on May 13, rendering the newly elected Northern Ireland Assembly—the region’s legislature—nonfunctional.
Justifying the move, DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said he was sending “a very clear message” to the EU and the UK government that they need to have the protocol “sorted out,” insisting that the trading arrangements have undermined the terms of the Good Friday agreement.
Johnson said on May 12 that the UK government has “got to fix” the protocol, as it has led to a “real, real problem” in Northern Ireland.
Johnson’s comment came amid mounting speculation that he may override aspects of the protocol by way of domestic legislation—a tactic the EU has warned against.
Mary Lou McDonald, leader of the nationalist Sinn Féin party, accused the UK government of being “in cahoots with the DUP to stall and to hold back progress, to frustrate the will of the people as expressed in the election.”
Sinn Féin, a democratic socialist party that said its “core political objective” is to have a united Ireland, supplanted the DUP to become the largest party in Stormont by two seats in the May 5 election.
“And the British government have assisted the DUP in these blocking tactics and they need to desist and certainly when we meet Boris Johnson on Monday we will be making that very clear to him,” McDonald told reporters on May 14.
The republican leader said the protocol is “a necessary outworking of Brexit for which the Tory party and the DUP campaigned” and “is going nowhere.”
But Suella Braverman, attorney general for England and Wales and advocate general for Northern Ireland, said on May 12 that it has become “painfully, apparently necessary” that the UK take action over the protocol because the EU has been carrying out a disproportionate number of checks in the Irish Sea.
There are also warnings of the risk of a trade war with the EU if the UK alters the agreement, as EU leaders have warned of retaliatory measures.
Speaking to Sky News on May 15, Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the UK government’s “No. 1 priority” is political stability in Northern Ireland and that it would take “a very long time” for any new EU tariffs to be approved.
He said that article 16 of the Brexit deal is “enshrined” and “does allow people to act unilaterally” to suspend parts of the agreement and that the UK has “got ultimately to be prepared to invoke it.”
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