DUBLIN – Ireland wants the EU to provide an “early warning system” to prevent any repetition of the Article 16 border fiasco.
Irish ministers believe Brussels still doesn’t understand the true damage caused when the European Commission briefly overrode the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit trade deal.
Ireland’s European Affairs Minister Thomas Byrne recalled to lawmakers how he was going for a walk Friday afternoon two weeks ago when his phone lit up with push notifications and journalists’ texts: Did he know the Commission was invoking Article 16, the very protocol-wrecking move that the U.K. government had been threatening to make?
“When I first saw this, I’m sure like all of you … I was like: What the …? I couldn’t believe it,” Byrne told the parliament’s Committee on European Union Affairs.
“What the government wants fundamentally is an early warning system to be put in place,” Byrne said Tuesday. “We cannot afford to have that happen again.”
Even as he spoke, Irish and EU officials were meeting in Brussels and by videolink from Dublin to discuss new safeguards that would prevent the Commission from unwittingly undermining the Northern Ireland protocol again.
The EU, led by chief negotiator Michel Barnier, had spent three years negotiating that agreement with Britain to maintain borderless trade between EU member Ireland and U.K. member Northern Ireland. The compromise, bitterly opposed by British unionists in Northern Ireland, has placed EU customs checks at Northern Ireland’s ports, creating a so-called “sea border” with Britain.
The Irish plan calls for the EU’s Financial Services Commissioner Mairead McGuinness to be included more centrally in any Commission moves that could impose restrictions on Irish cross-border trade.
The Commission on January 29 invoked Article 16 to block the potential for COVID-19 vaccines to be shipped from the EU to Britain via Northern Ireland, which remains within both the U.K. internal market and the EU customs union. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen took responsibility for the misstep but has declined to explain in any detail what went wrong.
Dara Calleary, a lawmaker from the governing party Fianna Fáil, told Byrne that Ireland needs much more from von der Leyen than “vague comfort-blanket assurances that this won’t happen again.”
“We should have something substantial, a formal process,” Calleary said. “We need some sort of a lock mechanism that Article 16 can never be triggered in future without the agreement of the Irish government.”
He said Barnier had expertly shepherded Britain toward a Northern Ireland protocol that Irish nationalists – keen to avoid any return to physical border enforcement – value highly. He said the achievement came because the EU and Ireland had operated “hand in glove.”
“That support and cooperation makes it even more unbelievable and more hard to get our heads around what happened when Article 16 was triggered apparently without our knowledge and without the knowledge of the Irish nominee to the Commission,” he said, referring to McGuinness.
“Have you learned anything as to why it was triggered … and why it was seen fit by the European Commission to trigger it without consulting the Irish government in advance?” Calleary asked Byrne.
The European Affairs minister said no clear explanation had come from Brussels. But he said such errors were possible only because nobody in the decision-making room had a sophisticated understanding of Ireland, north and south.
“We can’t assume prior knowledge. We were lucky with Michel Barnier,” Byrne said.
“He had a long history in his roles as minister of agriculture, then as minister of foreign affairs, then in the Commission when the peace funding was put in place for us,” said Byrne, referring to EU peace and reconciliation aid established in 1995 in the wake of paramilitary cease-fires.
“So that man had a deep knowledge of the situation in Northern Ireland. That may not be the case for everybody else. We have to make sure people know the situation on the ground in Northern Ireland. It’s not simply something that can just be put in writing between Europe and Britain.”
A former attorney general and justice minister, Michael McDowell, said the Commission hadn’t merely made a terrible political decision by seeking to invoke Article 16. It was “a flagrant breach” of the protocol’s own rules, which require consultation with Britain before the EU takes any unilateral action.
“It was legally completely wrong,” McDowell said.
He faulted von der Leyen’s declaration of responsibility as an attempt to shut down scrutiny of the Commission’s handling of the matter.
“It’s effectively saying there’s a veil to be drawn over this. Nobody should ask to pierce the veil and ask for transparency,” he said, insisting that Ireland keep pressing for a clear explanation for the Commission’s Article 16 maneuver.
“Is it the case that whoever made this decision simply did not read and did not understand the extent of the protocol?” McDowell asked. “If that is the case, we are left in a situation where not merely has damage been done, but the operation of the protocol is in the hands of people who do not understand it.”
EU-U.K. talks on ironing out the protocol’s new barriers to goods shipments from Britain to Northern Ireland are due to resume Thursday in London between Commission Vice President Maroš Šefčovič and U.K. Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove.
McDowell said Ireland needed to have “a de facto presence” in those talks and all discussions involving possible amendments to the protocol, “so that we can see for ourselves that what is being negotiated is reasonable and not damaging to us.”