UK minister says Northern Ireland protocol
threatens Good Friday agreement
Conor Burns says Brexit deal intended to support peace
accord is undermining cross-community consent
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Julian
Borger in Washington
Wed 1 Jun
2022 07.00 BST
The UK’s special
envoy for the Northern Ireland protocol has said he told US officials that it
has become a threat to the Good Friday agreement.
Conor
Burns, the Northern Ireland minister assigned to make the UK’s case in
Washington, shrugged off a threat earlier this month by the House speaker,
Nancy Pelosi, to block a US-UK free trade deal if the UK took unilateral action
to override the protocol.
The
protocol negotiated between the UK and the EU established customs checks
between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Pelosi said that UK plans to
introduce legislation that would create exemptions to the protocol, if they
could not be agreed with the EU, were “deeply concerning”.
She warned:
“If the United Kingdom chooses to undermine the Good Friday accords, the
Congress cannot and will not support a bilateral free trade agreement.”
On a visit
to Washington last week, Burns said there was a “disconnect” between such
threats and the gravity of the issues at stake with the Northern Ireland
protocol.
“This is
too important for us – sorting out the situation in Northern Ireland, doing the
right thing for the UK and for the people in Northern Ireland – to be
interwoven with any foreign policy or trade ambition,” Burns said.
Burns has
visited administration officials and members of Congress with a thick wad of
documentation that he says UK businesses have to fill out in order to transport
goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. The time and cost of such
bureaucracy has stopped producers of foods like shortbread and cheese from
selling into Northern Ireland.
“These are
products that people have enjoyed in Northern Ireland for decades that have
disappeared from the shelves,” he said. “And that is feeding into a sense
within parts of the unionist community that somehow the protocol sets them
apart from the rest of the United Kingdom.
“Their
identity, their belonging, is undermined and that is a legitimate concern
within unionism.”
The UK
government is asking the EU to agree to an exemption to customs checks for
goods destined to be sold and consumed in Northern Ireland, and would not
therefore enter the EU. It has accused Brussels of being inflexible while the
EU vice-president, Maroš Šefčovič, said he had put forward solutions that would
“substantially improve the way the protocol is implemented”.
The
Democratic Unionist party (DUP) has been refusing to enter a new power-sharing
administration with Sinn Féin following elections on 5 May, without significant
changes to the protocol.
Burns
argued that meant that it was the protocol, not the UK’s proposed legislation,
that was the threat to the peace agreement.
“I would
ask the question: how is the Good Friday agreement protected if the
institutions born of the Good Friday agreement don’t exist?” Burns said. “What
I have been trying, gently, delicately to explain, is it is actually the
application of the protocol that is currently undermining the agreements, not
the other way around.”
Asked
whether it was the DUP boycott that was the threat to the power-sharing
institutions at Stormont, rather than the protocol, Burns said: “The whole idea
of the Belfast Good Friday agreement is that you have governance by
cross-community consent, and whatever you think of the position that the
largest unionist party has taken, the fact is that they have taken that position
and they explained why.”
Burns said
it would be a tragedy if the Good Friday institutions were to collapse because
of failure to agree on different customs regimes for shortbread destined for
Northern Ireland and for the Republic of Ireland.
He added:
“I think historians will look back and judge us incredibly harshly if we allow
that to happen.”
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