LONDON (Reuters) – Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi on Friday warned Britain that if the Northern Ireland peace deal were to suffer from Brexit, there would be no trade deal with the United States.
The United States has expressed deep concern over the risk that tensions between London and Brussels over the implementation of the 2020 Brexit Treaty could undermine the peace agreement.
Concluded in April 1998 with the mediation of Bill Clinton, the so-called “Good Friday” agreement brought an end to three decades of violence in Northern Ireland, during which clashes between Catholic nationalists and Protestant loyalists left some 3,600 dead.
“If there is a breakdown of the Good Friday deal, it is very unlikely that there will be a bilateral deal between the UK and the US,” Pelosi said at an event. by Chatham House.
Since the completion of Brexit, relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union have deteriorated, with one side accusing the other of bad faith in the application of the Northern Irish Protocol, which provides for checks on certain goods in transit between Great Britain and Northern Ireland in order to avoid the reestablishment of a physical border with the Republic of Ireland.
After the UK left the bloc on January 1, 2020, Boris Johnson unilaterally delayed the implementation of certain provisions of the protocol and his main negotiator said it was unsustainable.
The region administered by the British remains deeply divided, 23 years after the peace agreement negotiated with the United States: many Catholic nationalists aspire to unification with Ireland, while the Protestant unionists want to continue to be part of UK.
The Protocol on Northern Ireland aims to keep the province, which borders the Republic of Ireland, a member of the EU, both in the customs territory of the United Kingdom and in the EU’s single market.
(Report by Costas Pitas and Guy Faulconbridge, French version Federica Mileo)
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