Threat to Irish stability

SIR – Your Leading Article (“Excuses for disorder”, April 7) reminded me vividly of my one meeting with Michel Barnier, then the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator, while supporting the then Northern Ireland Secretary on a visit to Brussels in June 2018.

In the course of the discussions, I had to interject and politely explain to Mr Barnier that the 1998 Belfast Agreement did not make Northern Ireland a hybrid state, and that under the consent principle it is either fully part of the United Kingdom or of a united Ireland. The Agreement sets out no other option.

I concluded by telling him that ignoring the views of a majority of the population in Northern Ireland risked undermining the very political stability established by the Agreement that he was purporting to uphold. His bizarre response was to accuse me, a Remain voter, of wanting no deal.

What the episode underlined was the extent to which throughout the Brexit process the EU, America, and others have viewed the Agreement almost entirely through the prism of Strand Two – that is, relations Northsouth – rather than with regard to the Agreement’s interlocking and interdependent three strands, including the East-west dimension.

As we near the 23rd anniversary of the Agreement (tomorrow), and have just passed 30 years since Peter Brooke first set out the three-stranded approach to Parliament (March 26 1991), this one-sided and dangerous nationalist-leaning approach by the EU needs more than ever to be corrected. Lord Caine (Con)

Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland 1991-5 and 2010-19 London SW1