DUBLIN — Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney says Northern Ireland unionists’ demand to dump the Irish protocol from the Brexit trade deal is unrealistic and won’t happen.
His blunt assessment in interviews Thursday reflected the rising tensions between Irish nationalists and Northern Ireland’s British Protestant community, who want to tear up the protocol barely weeks into its ill-managed launch.
“The protocol is not going to be scrapped,” said Coveney, who described unionist leaders as committed to “outlining problems but not solutions.”
The showdown is laying bare the divisions in Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, a cornerstone of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord. The Catholic-Protestant coalition brings together former enemies from a conflict that claimed 3,700 lives. It has collapsed in finger-pointing acrimony several times before – and could be headed in that direction again.
Crucially, the protocol represents a negotiating “win” for Irish nationalists and something of a humiliation for Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster, whose Democratic Unionists were the only major local party to back Brexit.
The protocol imposes new EU customs and hygiene checks on goods arriving in Northern Ireland from Britain, even though together they form the United Kingdom, the union that unionists seek to preserve.
The protocol’s core goal – to maintain free movement of goods and people with the Republic of Ireland, the EU’s only land border with the U.K. — has proved bureaucratic, confusing and costly for British suppliers and hauliers, leading to delayed orders and bare shelves for myriad Northern Ireland firms.
While these supply chain snarls hit both sides of Northern Ireland society, the imposition of a so-called “sea border” at the behest of EU member Ireland touches a fundamental nerve in Brexit-backing Protestant quarters.
Their grassroots anger is not entirely directed at the port workers tasked with enforcing the new EU requirements on arriving British goods. Agriculture inspectors and EU officials were hastily withdrawn this week from the ports of Belfast and Larne amid claims of threats and intimidation.
It’s also aimed at Foster’s DUP, which has been branded as Brexit bumblers who initially backed the Conservative government in Westminster that went on to deliver a U.K.-splitting protocol. It may be no coincidence that the Democratic Unionists this week launched their anti-protocol campaign immediately after being hit by their worst opinion poll in two decades, with the Belfast Telegraph finding that only 19 percent of voters backed the party. The DUP is hemorrhaging support in one direction to the centrist Alliance party, and in the other to the Protestant diehard Jim Allister, whose Traditional Unionist Voice rejects any compromise with Irish nationalists and Europe.
Democratic Unionist sources confirm that an inner core of party executives are canvassing to oust Foster, who has rarely enjoyed full-blooded internal support since she succeeded Peter Robinson as party leader and Northern Ireland’s first minister in 2016. She often has clashed with her erstwhile partners in government, Sinn Féin, contributing to the coalition’s most recent three-year shutdown that ended barely 12 months ago.
“If Arlene wants to stay in power, she has to demonstrate that she actually knows how to use her power. She has to lead the way in getting rid of the protocol, or we’ll get rid of her and find someone who’ll get the job done,” one of those internal DUP critics said on condition he not be identified.
The U.K. government, seeking to soothe unionist anger, says it will press the EU to postpone the introduction of further customs requirements at Northern Ireland ports until January 2023. That is seen, in part, as an effort to relieve political pressure on Foster, with the next Northern Ireland Assembly elections scheduled for May 2022.
But Foster insists her sudden ratcheting up of pressure to dismantle the protocol reflects only the reality that Northern Ireland’s ability to import goods from Britain is hobbled. She says the EU’s own willingness to override the protocol has “lowered the bar” for Britain to do the same.
Foster, responding to Coveney’s defense of the protocol, accused the Irish government in Dublin of being “tone-deaf to the concerns of unionism.”
“People need to get their heads out of the sand and get their fingers out of their ears and actually listen to what people in Northern Ireland are having to deal with,” she said.
“All of unionism is against the protocol. If the Irish government, the EU and indeed the U.K. government believe the way forward is to ignore the majority of people in Northern Ireland, they need to say that.”
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