Panic over Protocol is blown out of the water by the facts
JEFFREY DONALDSON is what happens when partisan politics trumps reason. His tribal, politically inspired rejection of the Northern Ireland Protocol and his unbridled determination to look a gift horse in the mouth will, if successful, inflict serious damage on business, manufacturing and, inevitably, job creation in the North.
The DUP leader is a stunning example of outrageous ingratitude, proving once more, that no good deed goes unpunished.
The Protocol was designed to ensure there wouldn’t be a hard customs border in Ireland, along the line that separates North and South, to protect the EU’s Single Market after Brexit.
It carries huge business advantages for Northern exporters and manufacturers by guaranteeing duty-free access to both British and EU markets. To prevent any leakage into the EU market through the Irish back door, the EU, quite reasonably, insisted that goods coming into the North from Britain needed to be checked.
THIS week, again, Stephen Kelly, chief executive of Manufacturing NI, burst Donaldson’s antiProtocol bubble by restating for slow learners that the Protocol, which requires what is, in effect, a light-touch customs border on the Irish Sea, is a major boost for business.
He said that trade with the Republic was up 60% in 2021 as a direct consequence of the Protocol and while the checking of items coming from Britain presents challenges, blaming the Protocol for the current cost-of-living crisis and inflation was ‘wrong’. In fact, since the middle of last year grocery prices in the North were 8% cheaper than in Britain and inflation there had reversed from being above the UK average to below it.
He explicitly said that while North/ South trade is up, it’s not at the expense of trade with Britain – because of what he called ‘unfettered access to the GB marketplace’.
All this, of course, won’t deter Jeffrey Donaldson and his DUP colleagues from pressing Boris Johnson to ditch the Protocol unilaterally, even if that leads to a trade war with the EU and threatens a UK/US trade deal, as signposted this week by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
INGRATITUDE of a different kind was also on display in the Republic with hoteliers ripping off their paying guests through pricegouging, as the Covid crisis evaporates and people resume their real lives. In early May, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe announced that the low 9% VAT rate – which had been introduced in 2020 as a targeted aid for the hospitality sector because of Covid-19 – will continue until next February, six months longer than originally planned.
This largesse, which also benefits restaurants, cinemas, theatres and museums amounts to a cheque in the sum of €250m, with our signatures on it. That’s about a quarter of the entire cost of the new National Maternity Hospital.
Despite this extraordinary generosity in the face of so many other even more urgent demands – such as caring for a million people on lengthening healthcare lists generally and, more particularly, the provision of adequate mental health services, including to children – the gougers are unrelenting.
Those wishing to stay the night in a Dublin hotel after taking in one of the Garth Brooks concerts in September can expect to fork out over €300 for a room.
However, if you go on any of the popular booking sites, you’ll pick up a high-standard hotel room in Berlin for between €100 and €150, and three nights for two people in the-five-star Berlin Marriot would cost about €650.
Fianna Fáil Senator Timmy Dooley says that before the pandemic the average price of a hotel room in Dublin was about €150 – now a double room in a four-star hotel is about €400.
Arguably, the price-gouging ingratitude shown by hoteliers is less forgivable than the anti-Protocol posturing in the North – Donaldson has constitutional concerns to blame for it, hoteliers have only their greed.