Northern Ireland: the Protocol dilemma
Boris Johnson’s attempts to tear up the Northern Ireland Protocol have already met with strong resistance from Brussels and Dublin, said The Independent. Now Washington too has made its disapproval clear. The Foreign Secretary Liz Truss last week threatened unilaterally to suspend parts of the Protocol (which establishes a customs border in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in order to ensure frictionless trade between the North and the Republic). But the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has warned that such a move could destroy any chance of a free trade deal with the US. A US delegation to Ireland and the UK, led by the congressman and Biden ally Richard Neal, drove home the same point. A US trade pact was meant to be one of Brexit’s great rewards. Thanks to the “dangerous crisis” over Northern Ireland, there’s little chance of that.
US politicians often view Ireland with “a misty-eyed sentimentality”, said the Daily Mail. Biden and Pelosi are displaying “a wilful ignorance of the situation today”. They believe that ditching the Protocol could prompt a return to violence. “Yet it is so flawed and so hated by unionists that the real risk of violence lies in keeping it.” Neither side can win this argument outright, said Tom McTague in The Atlantic. The view in “polite society” is that Britain is responsible for the current mess. And Johnson was indeed “reckless” to agree to the Protocol, and to think that the border problem could be erased by technology and political will. But the EU was “equally delusional” to believe that the Protocol could be fixed in place without the consent of unionists, whose largest party, the DUP, is boycotting power-sharing government until there’s “decisive action” on the issue. The truth is the Protocol has never been fully implemented because it would be “politically intolerable”: Brexit created “a problem that can’t be solved, only managed”.
Even so, “behind the outrage, everyone is saying roughly the same thing”, said Newton Emerson in The Irish News. In essence, all sides favour some version of the “red and green channel model”: UK goods destined for NI would go through a green channel – or what the EU calls an “express lane” – with reduced checks, while those for the EU single market would face tighter scrutiny. The situation remains difficult “when nobody trusts the UK, relationships are fraught and there is a bewildering range of power-plays at work”. But a consensus is not only possible – it’s “almost absurdly obvious”.