Northern ireland

Sinn Fein is not a normal party. It sometimes feels impolite to point it out in the era of the Belfast Agreement. But the legal amnesty from criminal charges offered to IRA terrorists as part of the peace process does not oblige individuals to abstain from moral judgement of their political wing. Especially when it continues to venerate those terrorists. The past year offered a grim reminder of this when the party’s leadership turned out in force, in the middle of lockdown, for a show of strength at the funeral of Bobby Storey, a Provisional IRA ‘volunteer’ who spent 20 years in prison for various offences.

Over the past few weeks and months, there has been plenty of focus on the Northern Ireland Brexit Protocol, and the impact it is having on the province. Less attention has been paid, however, to the equally serious problems in Northern Ireland which still need to be solved. It is an uncomfortable truth, but the problem with Northern Ireland is largely in Westminster. The institutionalised neglect over the past few decades has brought the region to where it is now. How do you know Northern Ireland has been neglected? Easy. Look up the time it takes to travel between just about any town in the province to Belfast by public transport. The results will shock you. It is quicker to get to London from Belfast than it is to Londonderry.

The DUP’s departed leader Edwin Poots spoke in his valedictory interview of a 'significant victory' heading unionism’s way regarding its bête noire, the Northern Ireland protocol. The outright, irrevocable removal of the ‘sea border’ imposed by the protocol has become the fundamental objective of all shades of political unionism and loyalism.  Anti-protocol street art garlanded two deeply different citadels of unionism in the past week — the working-class heartland of Belfast’s Shankill Road and the affluent County Down village of Killyleagh. There is a sense of shared purpose.

There will be chaos at the borders. Food will run out at the supermarkets. Travellers will face long queues, and companies yet another round of disruption. As the UK lays the groundwork for breaking with the Northern Ireland Protocol, we will hear plenty of scare stories about how it might mean losing the Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. There is an element of truth in that, of course. The EU may well decide that if we are not sticking to the Protocol then the free trade deal has to go as well. But there is a flaw in that argument, and it is not exactly a minor one. In truth, the FTA is not worth saving – and certainly not worth sacrificing Northern Ireland for.

Boris Johnson's approach to dealing with historical prosecutions in Northern Ireland has achieved that unique political feat in the Province: uniting both sides in revulsion at what is being proposed. Northern Ireland minister Brandon Lewis is expected to announce a statute of limitations ending prosecutions in cases which pre-date the 1998 Belfast Agreement. Reports suggest that this will apply not only to members of the security forces but also republican and loyalist paramilitaries. This was always a likely end point in Northern Ireland’s 'process', indicative of the British political class’ reflex instinct to wish the Province and its troubles away.

There is a lot to unpack in Sir Keir Starmer’s suggestion that he would campaign for the Union in the event of a future border poll in Northern Ireland. It’s a welcome repudiation of decades of Labour policy, which has been to support Irish nationalism. Would-be members in the Province were directed to join the separatist ‘sister party’ the SDLP instead. But just as interesting is the reaction of the many commentators who sallied out to suggest that the Labour leader had somehow breached the Belfast Agreement, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Downing Street Declaration or any other of the peace’s sacred texts.

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the Lagan Valley MP, has triumphed in the one-horse race to replace Edwin Poots as leader of the DUP, getting the top job at the second time of asking. Nobody else came forward to instigate a leadership election, meaning that his appointment will be rubber stamped when the party's electoral college meets this Saturday. Respected at Westminster, Donaldson seems a more plausible fit for high office than the gauche Poots, though both men are remarkably similar; Donaldson, like Poots, is a committed Christian and is a prominent Orangeman. History is never far away from the politics of Northern Ireland. Donaldson’s win coincides with the centenary of the opening of the Northern Ireland parliament.

The end of Edwin Poots’s 21-day spell as leader of the DUP sums up the ordeal of being a unionist leader. Elected as a hard-line replacement for Arlene Foster, he has departed now after being seen to have given too much away to Sinn Fein over the Irish language. Who will replace him? The early candidate appears to be Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the party’s Westminster leader who was defeated by Poots in last month’s contest. His supporters are championing him as a stabilising influence in a party which has ripped itself apart, with others suggesting that he should be elected without a contest. Poots’s election was a last roll of the dice for his wing of the party, the fundamentalists who didn’t really get over the departure of Ian Paisley in 2008.

Only 20 days after winning the party leadership by one vote, Edwin Poots has resigned as DUP leader. The immediate trigger for his departure is him nominating a First Minister today in spite of the opposition of a majority of both DUP MLAs and MPs. (They were unhappy about the late night Irish Language Act compromise). But him being forced out can only really be understood in the context of bad blood created by his brutal ouster of Arlene Foster and his decision to sack all her ministers bar one, himself, in a reshuffle last week. Poots’s departure is a sign of the chaos engulfing the DUP. It is being squeezed on two sides.

The jibes thrown at Boris Johnson over his unhappiness with the Northern Ireland protocol — based on the obvious observation that he was the one who signed it — have been based on the assumption that he is either a liar or a fool. A liar because he knew full well what he was signing up to, or a fool for not knowing what he was agreeing to. Does anyone think that officials told him that the protocol would prevent Northern Ireland having access to some cancer drugs? Or guide dogs being unable to move between GB and NI? Keir Starmer has repeated the jibe about Johnson. A further version is that Johnson did not care if Northern Ireland paid the price so long as the UK left the EU.

In an at times grouchy press conference, Boris Johnson tried to calm the row over the Northern Ireland protocol. The Prime Minister declined to comment on what Emmanuel Macron is supposed to have said about Northern Ireland’s position in the UK. He said that the whole issue of the protocol had taken up a ‘vestigial’ amount of time at the summit. (Interestingly, Mujtaba Rahman of Eurasia Group, who is particularly well connected in EU capitals, says that he has been told it took up two-thirds of the conversations in the margins of the summit).  Instead, Johnson wanted to emphasise the vaccine commitments that the summit had made and how these would help ‘demonstrate the benefits of democracy and freedom and human rights’ to the rest of the world.

Even a pessimist could be forgiven for being surprised by Joe ‘I’m Irish’ Biden’s ham-fisted intervention in the ongoing row over the Northern Ireland protocol. If Boris Johnson’s remark that the phrase ‘special relationship’ didn’t ring true before, they certainly must after the President opened his visit by quoting Y.B. Yeats on the Easter Rising… while visiting a Royal Air Force base. It will also be a wearisomely familiar routine for Ulster unionists, who have been scorning American pressure to abandon Britain since at least the days of Woodrow Wilson. How will the government respond? There remain many on the right bewitched by yesterday’s Atlanticism.