As a “mind blowing” mistake it created a dangerous Brexit confrontation

Photographer: Paul Faith / Bloomberg

Thirty years ago, during the long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, gunmen attempted to assassinate a young academic in Belfast.

Adrian Guelke survived, still lives in the city, and last week watched in surprise as the European Union shook the tensions that nearly cost him his life by threatening the part of the Brexit deal that seeks to protect the fragile peace of the city. region.

Now a professor emeritus of politics at Queen’s University in Belfast, Guelke described the block’s threat to control the flow of coronavirus vaccines in Northern Ireland as a “mind-boggling” mistake.

“The Pandora’s box was opened,” he said in a phone interview.

The EU may have backed down, but it has inadvertently allowed the unionists of Northern Ireland, who want to remain part of the UK, to revive a separate and much bigger controversy that Brexit was supposed to have finally resolved: the state of the border with mainland Britain. .

The row threatens not only to attack the EU’s fragile post-Brexit relationship with the UK, but also to become a flashpoint for the slow discontent among unionists over the deal Boris Johnson signed despite the his opposition.

Biden warning

While there is little evidence that the crisis will immediately rekindle the full conflict between Protestant unionists in Northern Ireland, minority Catholic nationalists, who want it to be united with the Republic of Ireland and British troops, history demonstrates how events in the province can spiral quickly out of control.

As Johnson responds, the EU and Northern Ireland unionists in the coming days and months could tip the scales. U.S. President Joe Biden has already warned that the peace process in Northern Ireland needs to be protected.

“There are certainly people running around seeing the opportunity to do some paramilitary activity again,” said Reg Empey, a former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. “You just need a lunatic.”

Read more: How Brexit tries to solve the problem of the Irish border: QuickTake

Unlike the rest of the UK, Northern Ireland effectively remained in the customs union and the EU single market after Brexit, a crucial concession Johnson made to the bloc to ensure Britain’s orderly exit.

By keeping the land border with Ireland free of checkpoints, both sides hoped to prevent a return to the Age of Trouble. But it had a price: goods arriving from the rest of the UK would be subject to additional checks and formalities when they crossed the Irish Sea from mainland Britain.

Delays at the border

The Democratic Unionist Party, the largest political party in Northern Ireland, opposed the so-called Protocol because it treats the province differently from the rest of the UK. But he has had to deal with the consequences: delays and interruptions at the border, resulting in unpopular voters.

Retailers like John Lewis have stopped sales in the region. Marks & Spencer Group Plc withdrew nearly 300 of its products from its stores in Northern Ireland and images of empty food shelves have flooded social media.

Under growing pressure from even tougher loyalists, the DUP had already been pressuring the British Prime Minister to undo the Protocol. Initially, Johnson avoided the DUP, ruling out delays and shortages as teething problems.

Blinded

Everything changed late on 29 January, when Northern Ireland was caught in the EU vaccine crisis. Suddenly, the block raised, however weak, the possibility of the controls returning to the 500-kilometer border that ran from near Derry in the north to Dundalk in the south.

“They removed the carpet from the defenders of the Protocol,” said Guelke, who was shot by loyal paramilitaries who mistakenly believed he had ties to the Irish Republican movement.

London officials were blinded. One person who knew the situation said she was horrified that the EU had not appreciated the sensitivities surrounding the Protocol and the peace it was designed to protect.

The next day, ministers, including Michael Gove, from the cabinet, and Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis held crisis talks with Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney. During the video call, they agreed that they needed an emergency meeting with the EU to avoid the dangers of the Commission’s actions. Meanwhile, ministers downplayed the gravity of the situation in public.

Johnson’s threat

On Wednesday, Johnson confronted Parliament for a DUP member who demanded that he demonstrate his commitment to the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister threatened to suspend parts of the Brexit deal in the same way that the EU had done, if that was what would be needed to end controls on goods crossing the Irish Sea.

That night, Gove, Lewis and DUP leaders, as well as their Sinn Fein political opponents, presented their cases directly to Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic.

Another person familiar with the matter described the conversation in another call Zoom. Gove demanded that the EU delay the implementation of full controls on food, medicine and packages until 2023 to help alleviate border delays, but Sefcovic was recruited.

According to this meeting, British officials say they doubt whether the Commission really understands the extent to which it is playing with fire in Northern Ireland.

“Dangerous place”

Privately, EU officials, who freely grant the block, were wrong, suspecting that Johnson is using the vaccine crisis as an opportunity to win concessions on how the Protocol works. Few expect him to try to put the deal aside.

There are also tensions on the British side. Although the Unionists want the whole protocol to be discarded, Johnson and his team have not given the EU any deadline to meet the UK’s demands. They just want the blog to take seriously the need to address protocol issues and hope the row over vaccines will serve as a wake-up call to Brussels. This may disappoint the DUP.

“We are in a dangerous place right now,” said Edward Burke, an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Nottingham, who is investigating the effect of Brexit on the British-Irish security relationship.

“Unionists and loyalists do not feel as if London or Dublin were listening to their concerns, ”he said. “And the workforce in Northern Ireland in recent decades is, unfortunately, that violence or the threat of violence is gaining the attention and money of both governments.”

“Threatening Behavior”

Days after the EU’s wrong move, local and European authorities withdrew their inspectors from the ports of Larne and Belfast after what the local municipality said was “an increase in sinister and threatening behavior”.

However, police stress that there is no evidence to show that there are loyalist paramilitary groups organized behind these threats and they are not convinced of the seriousness.

The risk is that events in Northern Ireland have a habit of escalating. In 2013, for example, the decision of Belfast City Council to stop hoisting the British flag fueled the unrest that later spread with the annual marches of Protestant groups. This led to the worst sectarian violence since the 1990s, paralyzing Belfast for much of this summer.

“If it weren’t for the pandemic, I think we would see big demonstrations here,” Empey said. “The Brussels movement last week: I couldn’t tell you how wrong it was.”

– With the assistance of Kitty Donaldson and Ian Wishart