![]() But the difficulties with the protocol are real, and the EU will have to adjust expectations for its implementation in light of the actual risk posed to the single market. Bully-boy tacticsĪ danger for Northern Ireland now is that the EU, wary of seeming moved by bully-boy tactics, refuses to show flexibility at all. Minimising such differences is an objective that should be shared by the EU as well as the UK, with both being prepared to make compromises to do so. It is also partially outside the UK’s internal market, and there are new east-west differences too. It is outside the EU, and therefore there are new North-South differences. Nevertheless, Northern Ireland has evidently been placed in a very difficult and problematic situation. Blaming the protocol for damage to the 1998 agreement is like blaming the referee for an own goal. The protocol does not threaten peace in the same way. Peace can be threatened not only by violence but by eroding the conditions which foster it.īrexit risked doing so because it fundamentally changes the means and norms of co-operation across all three strands of the agreement. It was not a potential return of violence that people feared most, but the threat to the peace. I conducted surveys and focus groups in the central Border region throughout the Brexit withdrawal process. Such threats were identified, but they were not the only reason for avoiding a hard border. They claim that the Irish Government played up this risk and that it swung the EU (and Boris Johnson in a moment of feeble-mindedness) to draw the border down the Irish Sea instead. Some anti-protocol unionists argue that the threat of loyalist violence is no different to the purported threat of republican violence against customs infrastructure and officers on a post-Brexit hard Irish land border. This amounts to breaking one international agreement to appease those who are in the course of breaking another international agreement – under the auspices of protecting the integrity and objectives of both.īlaming the protocol for damage to the 1998 agreement is like blaming the referee for an own goal The "urgency" of the situation, she said, compelled the government to introduce legislation to "make changes to the protocol". In her statement to parliament on May 17th, foreign secretary Liz Truss claimed the government, as "co-signatory and co-guarantor of the Belfast Good Friday agreement",will "take the necessary decisions to preserve peace and stability".
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