Brexit deadlock in Northern Ireland risks rekindling violence, experts warn

 

Brexit deadlock in Northern Ireland risks rekindling violence, experts warn

 

The failure of Stormont power-sharing undermines peacemakers’ vision of ‘a Northern Ireland free of paramilitarism,’ reviewers tell London and Dublin.

Northern Ireland’s main pro-Brexit party has blocked formation of a new governing coalition in protest against the trade protocol |

 

BY SHAWN POGATCHNIK

DECEMBER 7, 2022 3:38 PM CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-deadlock-trade-northern-ireland-protocol-rekindling-violence-expert/

 

DUBLIN — The diplomatic deadlock over Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit trade protocol is undermining local efforts to suppress paramilitary outlaws and fanning fears of a potential spike in violence, according to a commission of international experts.

 

Their report, published jointly by the British and Irish parliaments Wednesday, documents the shifting patterns of paramilitary activity across Northern Ireland, where rival Irish republican and British “loyalist” gangs remain entrenched in working-class communities despite a 1998 peace agreement designed to consign them to history.

 

Overall, the Independent Reporting Commission found that paramilitary activity — including bombings, shootings, beatings and acts of intimidation — fell in most categories during the most recent 12-month period under review.

 

For example, they identified only five bombings and 20 paramilitary-linked shootings from April 2021 to March 2022, less than half the level recorded in the previous 12 months. A total of 142 households were intimidated from their homes, down from 236.

 

They credited, in part, increased arrests and firearms seizures by two specialist law enforcement units: the police’s Terrorism Investigations Unit and the inter-agency Paramilitary Crime Task Force.

 

But the panel cited the collapse of Northern Ireland’s cross-community government at Stormont as creating a dangerous leadership vacuum that, as has happened so often in the past, could be filled by street militants.

 

Northern Ireland’s main pro-Brexit party, the Democratic Unionists, has blocked formation of a new governing coalition in protest against the trade protocol, the part of the U.K.’s 2019 Withdrawal Agreement that kept Northern Ireland subject to EU rules on goods unlike the rest of the U.K. This arrangement means Northern Irish firms can keep trading barrier-free with the neighboring Republic of Ireland, an EU member, but at the cost of new EU customs and sanitary checks on goods shipped from Britain.

 

This “new instability at the political level,” the commissioners wrote, has “fed speculation about the potential for a resurgence of paramilitary activity.” The failure of cross-community government produces an “inhibiting factor in terms of efforts to end paramilitarism in Northern Ireland,” they said.

 

While loyalist hard-liners have mounted a few high-profile actions linked to anti-protocol sentiment — including a bomb threat targeting Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney during a Belfast speech — they have yet to repeat the kind of riotous mayhem experienced following the 2021 rollout of EU checks at Northern Ireland’s ports.

 

The commissioners said Stormont needed to come back together to pursue the 1998 peace deal’s core vision of “a Northern Ireland free of paramilitarism and based entirely on the principles of peace and democracy.”

 

To achieve this, they recommended that the next Northern Ireland Executive — presuming the DUP ever drops its veto — should agree with London and Dublin on a new “formal process of engagement” with leaders of today’s paramilitary camps: the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force on the loyalist side, and Irish Republican Army splinter groups on the other.

 

This approach could include the appointment of “an independent person who would be authorized to speak to the various interested parties, including the paramilitary groups themselves,” they recommended.

 

The Independent Reporting Commission was created as part of a wider 2015 Anglo-Irish treaty, the Fresh Start Agreement, which sought to support power-sharing at Stormont. It has four members: a former U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland, Mitchell Reiss; a retired Irish civil servant involved in the 1998 peace negotiations, Tim O’Connor; the founder of a women’s rights party involved in those talks, Monica McWilliams; and a Belfast lawyer with expertise in victims compensation and paramilitary disbandment, John McBurney.