What the commentators said

“Northern Ireland was always the Achilles’ heel of the Brexit project,” said Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. But the problems in the operation of the Northern Ireland Protocol have been made infinitely worse by petty interpretations of EU rules. To give one example, a digger from Great Britain was recently banned from entering NI in case its mucky tracks brought English soil into the province. The EU also blundered appallingly in trying to block vaccine imports into the UK, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. Never mind that the move – which effectively risked imposing a hard border on the island of Ireland – was swiftly reversed. “A man can drop his trousers in a pub for only a few seconds, but he will always afterwards be the man who dropped his trousers.” It’s no surprise that the EU is doing its best to make Brexit a painful experience for the UK, said Lindy McDowell in the Belfast Telegraph. “But it has ended up taking it out on the one small part of the UK where [...] it was vital to tread carefully.”

Warnings that Brexit would lead to delays at borders and hefty costs to exporters were once dismissed as “Project Fear”, said Andrew Woodcock in The Independent. Yet, for all the talk of “Global Britain”, leaving the customs union and single market was always going to lead to trading barriers. And the consequences are being felt most acutely in trade across the Irish Sea, said Walter Ellis on Reaction.life. Manufacturers’ supply chains are in “disarray”; and some British firms have given up sending products to NI altogether. Meanwhile, Northern Irish businesses – which can still trade with the EU as before if they go via the Republic – have started bypassing ports like Liverpool in favour of Dublin and Rosslare, so as to avoid onerous paperwork when crossing the Irish Sea. Northern Ireland is especially exposed to Brexit’s harsh realities, said David Phinnemore in The Guardian. But the Protocol is the only viable way of managing the disruption. The UK and EU must now focus on making it work.