BELFAST — Northern Ireland lawmakers have voted to maintain the U.K. region’s special post-Brexit trade rules with Britain following a polarized and bitter debate.
Tuesday night’s verdict on a 48-36 vote was never in doubt given the rigid sectarian arithmetic at play inside the Stormont chamber. Indeed, POLITICO called the outcome back in 2022 within hours of the most recent Northern Ireland Assembly election.
Nonetheless, lawmakers from the minority British unionist benches decried their defeat as undemocratic — because Britain hadn’t given their side of the house a veto.
“Today’s vote is an illusion of democracy. A rigged vote,” the Democratic Unionists’ Jonathan Buckley argued in a 67-minute speech which proved so long that, at the end, a relieved chamber burst out in laughter as the speaker declared: “Thank God!”
Tuesday’s outcome, indeed, was preordained given how Boris Johnson’s U.K. government and the European Commission decided to manage the risk of unionist opposition to the Northern Ireland plank of the Withdrawal Agreement they agreed in 2019. It specified that Stormont could vote in 2024 on whether to maintain Northern Ireland’s enforcement of EU trade rules, and passage would require only a bare majority.
Touching a nerve
Tuesday’s result, for unionists, touches a nerve with roots as old as Northern Ireland itself — their fear, now reality, of being outnumbered and outvoted in their own land.
They carved out Northern Ireland as a Protestant-majority state in 1921 months before the rest of Ireland, predominantly Catholic, negotiated its exit from the U.K. They then successfully resisted decades of Irish Republican Army violence aimed at breaking their ties to Britain and ending partition of the island.
That brutal era was consigned to history thanks to the 1998 Good Friday peace accord. It forged a high-wire Stormont administration involving former IRA and unionist combatants that required careful balance not to fall.
This coalition of ex-enemies sticks together by observing a core Good Friday concept of “parallel consent.” Votes on the most divisive issues must attract support from both sides to pass. Irish nationalists and British unionists each wield vetoes in such cross-community votes. Decisions are taken by consensus or not at all.
Brexit, and the zero-sum confrontations it reopened in Northern Ireland, have jumped up and down on that tightrope.
DUP powerlessness
A majority of Northern Ireland voters, including most Irish nationalists, voted against Brexit. Most unionists — among them hard-liners hopeful of resurrecting a harder border with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member — voted for it.
The Withdrawal Agreement’s counterintuitive outcome for Northern Ireland has reassured the Irish nationalists and infuriated unionists. Its trade protocol kept Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the U.K., within the EU single market for goods (but, confusingly, not for services).
The main goal was to keep Northern Ireland’s goods exports, particularly its agricultural output to the Republic of Ireland, barrier-free. But as a result it has become simpler to import goods from Ireland than from Britain, raising unionist fears of an economically united Ireland.
That’s because, since 2021, while the Irish land border remains wide open, EU-required checks have been rolled out at Northern Ireland’s ports and airports on goods arriving from the rest of the United Kingdom. Unionists tried to block this work and collapsed Stormont in protest, leaving the region politically rudderless for two years until finally relenting at the start of this year.
Stormont’s revival meant the promised 2024 “consent” vote on keeping the trade rules intact came back on the political radar.
But it was telling that the Democratic Unionist Party declined to call this vote by this month’s legal deadline, knowing it would showcase their own powerlessness on the matter.
Instead, Tuesday’s vote was sought by Stormont’s three main anti-Brexit voices: Irish republican Sinn Féin, center-ground Alliance, and the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party.
All three voted to keep the trade rules in place. And all three repeated their call for the Labour government now in place in London to remove a key driver of post-Brexit trade tensions — by negotiating an agreement with the EU on common veterinary and sanitary standards. That would eliminate Northern Ireland’s legal need to check most goods arriving from Britain.
Alliance leader Naomi Long, who is also justice minister in Northern Ireland’s four-party government, called on the Democratic Unionists to stop complaining forever about how Brexit has played out here — and to accept that the rules have been overwhelmingly backed by MPs in London, where sovereignty on the matter lies.
“Are we to be forever defined by uncertainty, chaos and instability? Allowing Brexit to be a constantly open wound poisoning our economy and our body politic?” she asked of the DUP benches across the chamber. “This attritional war around Brexit has done enough damage.”
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