How Brexit is Destablising Northern Ireland / Sunday Times
The three gruff, burly representatives of Northern Ireland’s infamous loyalist paramilitary organisations — the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Defence Association and the Red Hand Commando — met The Sunday Times last Wednesday in a locked-down office in the heart of Protestant east Belfast, where tattered Union Jacks hang from lamp-posts and gable-end murals still glorify the gunmen of the Troubles.
All three fought their IRA counterparts in the bloody sectarian conflict. All doubtless have blood on their hands — one was in the Maze prison for five years, another for 14 months, and the organisations they represent were responsible for more than 500 deaths between them. But they are converts to the cause of peace and reconciliation, determined that their children and grandchildren should be spared what they experienced, and for a full hour they raged against the iniquities of Brexit’s Northern Ireland protocol, which has created a border between Britain and the province in the Irish Sea.
Loyalists were “boiling” and “seething”, they said. They felt “disenfranchised, disaffected, angry and frustrated”. They had been “absolutely betrayed” by the British government, and the peace process was “in serious danger of unravelling”.
They were doing their best to restrain their people, they said, but they were “haemorrhaging support for the Good Friday Agreement”, which they had backed in 1998 despite being labelled traitors. They faced “an increasingly difficult job of holding people back from taking things into their own hands”. They had “run out of ideas of how to stop them”, and “once the genie is out of the bottle there will be no control of it ... anything is possible.”
Within hours of that meeting, events were indeed spiralling out of control. The paramilitary groups announced they were suspending their support for the agreement. The British government enraged the EU by unilaterally abrogating parts of the protocol. Brussels accused it of breaching international law and threatened legal action, while the European parliament delayed ratification of December’s UK–EU trade deal.
As relations between London and Brussels hit rock bottom, tensions were escalating in Northern Ireland too. Graffiti appeared in the port of Larne proclaiming that “All border staff are targets” alongside a painting of a sniper’s sight (dockyard officials begged a Sunday Times photographer not to take pictures of employees’ faces). Graffiti in Belfast revealed the London address of Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister until recently responsible for implementing the protocol, and warned: “We don’t forget. We don’t forgive.”
Paramilitaries threatening a return to violence is a well-rehearsed negotiating ploy in Northern Ireland, but in this instance the loyalists’ grievances are widely regarded as legitimate. The protocol unquestionably undermines Northern Ireland’s position in the United Kingdom and the democratic rights of its citizens. The entire Unionist community shares the loyalists’ fury, with its political parties all joining a legal challenge to the protocol.
Arlene Foster, the first minister, says it had “driven a coach and horses” through the peace agreement. Lord Trimble, a leading architect of the deal, says it “shatter[s] Northern Ireland’s constitutional relationship with the UK”, is an “indefensible attack on the rights and livelihood of Northern Ireland citizens”, and raises “real potential for those who have engaged in past violence to take action again”.
The protocol resulted from the imperative to avoid the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland after Britain left the EU. As prime minister, Theresa May tried but failed to avoid such a border by proposing that the whole of the UK remain a member of the EU’s single market and customs union. Johnson, her successor, instead agreed a less visible border in the Irish Sea, with Northern Ireland alone remaining in the single market, in effect, and subject to thousands of EU regulations enforceable by the European Court of Justice.
The real-life consequences have only now become apparent, as a huge range of imports from Britain to Northern Ireland face a daunting array of checks, duties and bureaucratic barriers that the EU is enforcing with what the British government and Unionists regard as a punitive zeal.
The shortages in Northern Ireland’s supermarkets after the Brexit transition period expired on December 31 were merely a foretaste of what to expect when the grace period for animal and plant products eventually expires (on Wednesday, the government unilaterally extended it beyond March 31). Britain sends roughly 500 food lorries a week to Northern Ireland. Each carries up to 1,000 product lines, of which as many as 300 are agri-foods requiring export health certificates. Sainsbury’s, Tesco and other British supermarket chains have warned that the system is “unworkable” and will cause “inevitable disruption”.
The province’s farmers are struggling to get oat, wheat and barley seeds from Britain for their spring crops because they must all be tested. Imported tractors and farm machinery must be steam-washed to remove any trace of British soil, though the government unilaterally lifted that requirement on Friday. Malachy Mallon, regional director of the National Federation of Fish Friers, expects the price of chips to rise 20p a bag to offset the costly new red tape involved in importing Cambridgeshire potatoes used by Northern Ireland’s 750 fish-and-chip shops.
Under EU regulations, garden centres can no longer import roses, camellias and numerous other plants grown in British soil (another requirement the government unilaterally set aside last week). Honeysuckles, oaks and silver birches are banned outright by EU regulations. Even wooden-handled trowels and wooden delivery pallets face checks. “On December 31 you could bring in whatever you wanted. On January 1 you couldn’t. What changed overnight?” asked Robin Mercer, owner of Belfast’s Hillmount garden centres.
The Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Co-operative can no longer sell 50 tons of eels worth £500,000 to Britain each year, or import four million elvers from the River Severn for restocking. It flies most of its catch to Belgium each evening, but is desperately looking for a new route because its usual cargo plane stops at East Midlands airport, so can no longer be used. “It’s a very frustrating and stressful situation,” said Pat Close, the co-operative’s chairman.
Delis, plumbers, health shops, removal companies, woodland conservationists, pet owners — all are encountering what Daniel Donnelly of Northern Ireland’s 6,000-strong Federation of Small Businesses called “exploding bombs we didn’t realise existed until we unravelled the protocol”. A recent survey showed two-thirds of British retailers intend to stop supplying Northern Ireland altogether. John Martin of Northern Ireland’s Road Haulage Association said his hauliers were losing £600 per lorry per week because of delays, bureaucracy and trucks taking goods to Britain returning empty. “It’s a matter of time before some go out of business.”
Nobody expected this level of disruption. During the 2019 general election campaign, Boris Johnson promised there would be “unfettered” trade across the Irish Sea with “no forms, no checks, no barriers of any kind”. Last August he said there would be an Irish Sea border “over my dead body”. As recently as January 1, Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, tweeted that “there is no ‘Irish Sea border’”.
The new trade barriers will raise prices and reduce consumer choice in one of the UK’s poorest regions, but the Unionists’ much bigger complaint is that the protocol leaves them in what Alex Kane, a Unionist commentator, calls a “constitutional granny flat” — caught between the UK and EU while fully belonging to neither. “Extended ‘grace periods’, derogations and easements will do nothing to ameliorate the protocol’s fundamental assault on our constitutional position,” said Jim Allister, leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party.
Unionists argue that the government imposed the protocol on Northern Ireland without any consultation or Stormont vote, breaching the principle of cross-community consent enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement; that they are being treated differently from all other UK citizens, violating the 1800 Act of Union, which guaranteed free trade throughout the UK; and that they are now subject to EU legislation over which they have no democratic say.
They also fear that trade barriers with Britain, and the absence of any with Ireland, will drive Northern Ireland into the Republic’s economic orbit and what Allister calls “a waiting room for Irish unity”.
There is no obvious solution. Unionists want Johnson to ditch the protocol, but that would trigger a huge breach with the EU and President Joe Biden and wreck Britain’s stature as a law-abiding nation. They and Brexit-supporting Conservative MPs favour a “mutual enforcement” system whereby the UK and EU recognise and enforce each other’s standards in goods and services; but the requisite trust and goodwill is no longer there. The technology required to replace physical border checks does not exist.
Meanwhile, the danger of unrest in Northern Ireland grows, as the protocol pulls apart the very peace agreement that it was supposed to protect.
Signs denouncing the Irish Sea border, and graffiti declaring “Ulster sold out”, proliferate in loyalist estates across the province. The governing Democratic Unionist Party, fearful of being outflanked by Allister’s hardline TUV, has stepped up its attacks on the protocol and halted work on new border control posts at Northern Ireland’s ports. Talk of Irish reunification is rife, with a recent Sunday Times poll showing 51 per cent want a referendum within five years. The end of the Covid-19 lockdown looms, as does the inflammatory loyalist marching season and May’s centenary of Northern Ireland’s creation in the bitter partition of Ireland.
During their hour-long tirade, the three former paramilitary leaders said young loyalists had seen how the threat of Republican violence had averted a land border, and were now arguing that violence pays.
“We have been through it,” said one of the three. “We fought Republicans. We did our best because our country was under threat. Now our young people are seeing the same thing happening here. They’ve seen all the photographs of their fathers, uncles, grandfathers or maybe someone who was a loyalist prisoner. They’ve heard all the stories. They’ve seen all the film footage, and they think they’ve missed out on something. They think it’s their turn now, that the challenge is on them because we’ve had our day.”
Another warned: “We’re majorly concerned that there’s a perfect storm brewing. We saw the consequences of violence. We saw it being prosecuted on us and by us, and it’s not somewhere we want to go back to.”