The Stormont parties now have no excuse for failing to govern Northern Ireland

Picture; The Irish Sea 

So what next? The coming few days will give us clues. All parties now have no  excuse for failing to work together. Nationalists have the historic gains in human rights and  the  distinction of the  title First Minister.  Compared to the careful neutrality of the GFA,  Unionists can point to a powerful boost to pro Union sentiment  in a document which is  entitled “Safeguarding the Union”. Most trading between GB and NI is not quite the same as trading between Glasgow and Birmingham as the FT  points out:

80 per cent of goods travelling from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will require minimal paperwork.  This means that companies wanting to send goods to Belfast will still need more paperwork than when sending them to, say, Birmingham, because they will still be required to join the UK trusted trade scheme.    

The red lane survives  for  goods that need processing or manufacturing in NI for onward trading.

Important niggles produced by a bureaucratic algorithm in Brussels will crop up.

But let’s not quibble.

The DUP  have secured a political victory they can sell, good enough to appeal to the masses of unionists  who are fed up  with the  boycott and like most people on all sides  desperately want results from a  restored Assembly.

Judging by the usual criteria of the zero sum game, is it  unionist  victory  at nationalist expense? In the Commons yesterday support for the Union was as evident from Labour as  Conservative. Removal of “due regard” for the “ so-called all-island economy” passed without notice. In Hillsborough later we had the amazing sight of  the secretary of state  holding a mutually admiring  news conference  with  the leader of a single highly partisan party leader Jeffrey Donaldson.

True, in the Commons Colum Eastwood had been  able to wring from Heaton Harris an acknowledgment that other parties and the other GFA institutions exist. The Sinn Fein leaders appeared in the Stormont Great Hall  to celebrate the imminence of their Historic First, after proclaiming that a united Ireland was  “now  within touching distance.”

But yesterday and today  this sounds a little strained. At the very least, if NI’s place in the Union has no longer been weakened by the impact of Brexit, Sinn Fein’s raison d’etre has not been strengthened.  It was not nationalism’s day.  But Unionism has surely reached the  peak of reassurance from Great Britain. The pro- Union triumph if that’s what it was will melt like snow in the desert if they  make another mess of the Assembly. Nationalism’s room for manoeuvre is greater than unionism’s as they have another home to go to. As I write, Dublin has yet to speak out in detail. Some redress of the balance between  the “Safeguarding the Union” document and the other institutions of the GFA  will be necessary.

Does Jeffrey deserve congratulations? Probably but in the manner of heavily armed  nuclear powers who created huge stockpiles in the first place.  In other words,  highly qualified praise.

As  the Times  says:

To describe what was agreed with the European Union in last year’s Windsor framework as window dressing would be unfair. But only just.

What the package amounts to is more reassurance that Westminster will pay greater heed to the interests and concerns of Northern Ireland in the future than altering an agreement that was already on the table. But that doesn’t mean that the proposals are without interest, merit or some practical consequence.

In particular it requires the government to systematically assess the impact of all future laws taking advantage of Britain’s new “Brexit freedoms” on Northern Ireland.

What that means in practice is that future governments might be loath to diverge from the EU in ways that would have negative consequences on the region.

In turn that could result in the whole of the UK remaining within the EU’s regulatory orbit in some areas, such as agriculture and product standards, in a way that Conservative Brexiteers were determined to avoid.

How great  the political risk for Sunak should be revealed as the special legislation whizzes through Parliament  today.

Two questions haunt me. Why did it all take so long? The limitations of the Windsor Framework  were obvious a year ago. Was it about  squaring  mitigation with the EU  or the Tory  right wing on guard against the return of anything like Theresa May’s ill fated backstop that implicated the whole of the UK for the sake of NI?

And surely the substance of this deal, shorn of  pro- union rhetoric, could have won cross community consent in a functioning Assembly ages ago?  It would have cost no party anything and with much to gain for each of them.  Unionist and Nationalist could still have sold it differently without creating a crisis. The fact that they  didn’t is measured by the disastrous failure of the past two years and a solemn warning that they must never let it happen again.  They ought to able to use the  check of the Stormont brake and the  “say” they’ve won in the UK /EU joint committee collectively.  A cross community  view of the operation of the revised Protocol is now feasible  for the Assembly vote due later  this year, now that the fundamental objections to it have  gone.  Brexit as an  excuse for failing to  govern Northern Ireland has been removed.