Northern Ireland Peace Deal is falling apart, but Boris Johnson doesn’t seem to care

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Northern Ireland is becoming a failed state in permanent crisis, something Boris Johnson is ignoring as he and his ministers strut through Europe’s capitals giving speeches on how to defuse the crisis in Ukraine.

However, when Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), removed him from devolved government in Northern Ireland last week, collapsing the power-sharing administration, Johnson made no comment. That should not have taken anyone by surprise, as the British government’s actions and omissions over the last two years had already downgraded the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement that ended the violence.

With Sinn Féin likely to emerge as the biggest party in the May Assembly elections, and with the DUP opposed to the Northern Ireland Protocol, a power-sharing executive in Belfast may never be resurrected. The delicate compromise between unionists and nationalists, Protestants and Catholics, which was one of the historic success stories of British diplomacy, is unraveling and the British government shows little sign of paying attention.

Alan Whysall, a former Northern Ireland Office official now at the Constitution Unit, a blog on Northern Ireland politics, writes that the “Westminster government, over the last two years, has seemed to many to be willing to see division develop over the Protocol for its own reasons. It seemed to move away from the traditional role of successive British governments in working to foster constructive policies in Northern Ireland, working closely with Dublin.”

Whysall says that if the British government “does not markedly change its approach, it is difficult to have great confidence that power-sharing government can be restored, and once it is gone, given the current polarizing conditions, it will be much more difficult.” return. […] The foundations of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement are in grave danger of crumbling.”

By choosing to make the Protocol the main bone of contention with the EU, Johnson destabilized Northern Ireland politics. The DUP once reluctantly accepted the Protocol, but found it lost political support among unionists, not least because Johnson and Lord Frost, then the chief negotiator with the EU, said it could and should be changed because it put up a trade barrier. between Northern Ireland and the rest of Great Britain.

“The British government weaponized unionist opposition to the Protocol early last year,” Brian Feeney, a historian and commentator in Belfast, told me. “At the same time, he stopped talking to the Irish government.” Although the key partner in the Good Friday Agreement, many Conservative MPs do not like the idea of ​​Dublin playing a role due to “its fetishism about national sovereignty”.

In June of last year, the situation had gotten so bad that President Joe Biden told the US chargé d’affaires in London to deliver an extraordinary rebuke to the British government, telling it to stop “stoking” tensions over the protocol. However, Johnson was back in business earlier this month, stating that he could lift post-Brexit customs checks between Northern Ireland and the mainland.

In fact, it won’t do anything of the sort because France and the EU have said they will suspend the entire Brexit trade deal in retaliation. But his threat to do so further poisons the political waters of Northern Ireland. If a British Prime Minister says that the Protocol really threatens the unity of the UK, then they will believe him.

Unionist fear that the Protestant community in Northern Ireland is under threat is high, and not just because they feel the link with Britain is weakening. They know that when the next census is released later this year, it may show that they are no longer the majority of the population or that the two communities are now equal in number. Most schoolchildren and students are already Catholic.

This demographic transformation will increasingly determine the outcome of elections. Protestants are already moving house in large numbers from places with growing Catholic populations. This is concentrating more Protestants in counties Antrim and North Down, while Belfast is now a very nationalistic city.

Nationalist-controlled councils offer to display the symbols of both communities, but when routinely refused by Unionists, neither symbol is displayed. However, Protestants feel that this absence reflects the loss of “a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State”, as the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland at the time, Sir James Craig, once described the Protestant monopoly of power.

The mistake of the Unionists/Protestants was not to embrace the power-sharing status created by the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement which fixed the status of their community whose real power is in decline. Had that new state succeeded, it would be more difficult for Sinn Féin to demand unity with the Republic of Ireland.

The DUP, whatever they say in public, never liked the deal and thought they could effectively neutralize it by backing Brexit, which they believed would mean a revived hard border with the Republic of Ireland.

Congratulating themselves on their hard-headedness, DUP leaders naively believed Boris Johnson’s promise that he would never agree to a trade border in the Irish Sea, something he did immediately after winning the 2019 general election.

By supporting Brexit, the DUP inflicted on themselves a bit of classic political self-harm. For a century, Irish governments periodically tried and failed to interest the world in the issue of Irish partition, but now the DUP had turned Ireland’s 310-mile-long border into an international issue with which every government in Europe and US are familiar with. .

The DUP found out late in the day that the Conservative Party didn’t care much about them. Earlier this month, DUP MP Ian Paisley Jr. lamented to a nearly empty House of Commons that the Conservatives were actually “an English nationalist party”. He noted that Johnson had not said a word about the collapse of the Northern Ireland administration, which had occurred days earlier.

“Does this mean that there can be a return to violence?”, people often ask with fear. The answer is probably no, or at least not yet, but in Northern Ireland you never know where a couple of sectarian murders could change the entire political atmosphere overnight.

What can be said at this stage is that one of the great achievements of British government since 1945 has been let slip, mainly by the government of Boris Johnson, although his predecessors also played a role. The power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland was once presented to the world as a shining example of British statecraft that other countries should follow. But not anymore: The ignorance and prejudice of Johnson and his lieutenants have helped spark fears that might have gradually dissipated.

I was sitting in a cafe in strongly nationalist West Belfast three years ago when a local radio reporter came in looking for residents to interview about the effect of Brexit on Northern Ireland. She said the shock was already massive, adding: “Stupid, stupid English for getting us into this mess. We were doing well and then they outdid themselves. [in stupidity].” The pickle is about to get a lot worse.

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