UK tactics on Brexit alarm Irish government
Ireland’s Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said his government fears Westminster is looking to “dismantle” the Northern Ireland protocol, the part of the Brexit agreement relating to Northern Ireland, just half a year after signing it.
Speaking to Irish state broadcaster RTE, Coveney said recent remarks by David Frost, UK Brexit minister, published in the Irish Times newspaper, made him pessimistic about relations between the British government and the European Union.
Under the terms agreed by British and EU negotiators just before Christmas last year, Northern Ireland has remained inside the EU single market for goods, although the rest of the United Kingdom has left. This means goods traveling from the British mainland to Northern Ireland now face customs and border checks, although a grace period before this comes into force was recently extended.
“Many in the EU are interpreting the UK’s response as essentially saying: ‘Look, concessions don’t matter. What is required now is to dismantle elements of the protocol piece by piece,’” Coveney continued, adding that this would “cause huge problems”.
Stumbling block
Northern Ireland was a permanent stumbling block throughout the Brexit negotiations, as it has the UK’s only land border with an EU member state, the Republic of Ireland. Any introduction of a so-called hard border, with frontier posts and barriers, is an unwelcome reminder of the decades of violent unrest known as the Troubles, which were brought to a halt by the Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998.
Northern Ireland’s geographical and political situation being so different to the rest of the UK has made it a special case throughout the process, but any suggestion that it will be treated in any way differently to England, Scotland or Wales may provoke outrage among the Unionist community, who owe their political allegiance to the UK and identify themselves as British, rather than Irish.
To make the situation even more volatile, July is known as the marching season, when a series of parades commemorating historical battles take place, which are seen as provocative by the Republican community, and are always a major security flashpoint.