Anger in Northern Ireland's unionist community over the Brexit divorce deal is serious and could undermine stability unless properly addressed, the UK has told the European Union.
Graffiti in a loyalist area of south Belfast against an Irish sea border. Photo: AFP
Northern Ireland has been a tough issue in the Brexit divorce. Just a month after the UK exited the EU, the European Commission briefly threatened to impose emergency controls on vaccines crossing the Irish land border.
Though the EU swiftly stepped back from that, tensions have been rising in Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK.
The Brexit deal included an agreement for Northern Ireland to effectively stay within the EU's single market and customs union, and avoid a hard border with other EU countries. But last month the UK unilaterally extended a grace period for checks on food going from the rest of the UK to Northern Ireland.
The EU has started legal action over that move.
A senior pro-UK loyalist said on Friday that Northern Ireland's 1998 peace agreement is under threat and a "Pandora's box" of protest and political crisis will be opened unless the EU agrees to significant changes to the Brexit deal.
The peace accord, known as the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement, ended three decades of violence between mostly Catholic nationalists fighting for a united Ireland and mostly Protestant unionists, or loyalists, who want Northern Ireland to remain an integral part of the United Kingdom.
The deal guaranteed an open Irish land border to help safeguard peace, free trade and travel on the island.
"If the unionist community feel that the Protocol is breaching the Good Friday agreement and moving away from the spirit of it, then we're in quite a dangerous place in terms of stability of not just the executive but the north-south institutions," British Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis told reporters.
Officials check freight arriving into Northern Ireland by ferry from Scotland at the Port of Larne on 1 January 2021, as a new trade border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK began operating. Photo: AFP
Loyalist paramilitary groups told British Prime Minister Boris Johnson earlier this month that they were temporarily withdrawing support for the peace agreement due to concerns over the Brexit deal.
Lewis mentioned that warning.
"I don't agree with that, I think it would be a mistake, but it does underline the sense of tension ... We have to recognise there is that tension there," he said.
Lewis said the UK had to take unilateral action to extend grace periods, otherwise shops would have run out of goods in Northern Ireland.
"If we hadn't, if we'd have had another set of empty shelves this week ... the fallout from that in the unionist community means the Protocol would, I think, have been fatally flawed."
Irish nationalists Sinn Fein accused Lewis of hypocrisy and said his comments demonstrated a failure of the "rigorous impartiality" required by the Good Friday Agreement.
"This is the same British government who have signed up to the Protocol with the EU and have committed to its implementation," Sinn Fein Member of Parliament Chris Hazzard said in a statement.
The European Commission briefly threatened in January to impose emergency controls on vaccines crossing the open Ireland-Northern Ireland border, a step that Lewis said had ratcheted up tensions in the unionist community.
"We're still dealing with the fallout from that."
-Reuters