The UK’s special envoy for the Northern Ireland protocol has said he told US officials that it has become a threat to the Good Friday agreement.
Conor Burns, the Northern Ireland minister assigned to make the UK’s case in Washington, shrugged off a threat earlier this month by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to block a US-UK free trade deal if the UK took unilateral action to override the protocol.
The protocol negotiated between the UK and the EU established customs checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Pelosi said that UK plans to introduce legislation that would create exemptions to the protocol, if they could not be agreed with the EU, were “deeply concerning”.
She warned: “If the United Kingdom chooses to undermine the Good Friday accords, the Congress cannot and will not support a bilateral free trade agreement.”
On a visit to Washington last week, Burns said there was a “disconnect” between such threats and the gravity of the issues at stake with the Northern Ireland protocol.
“This is too important for us – sorting out the situation in Northern Ireland, doing the right thing for the UK and for the people in Northern Ireland – to be interwoven with any foreign policy or trade ambition,” Burns said.
Burns has visited administration officials and members of Congress with a thick wad of documentation that he says UK businesses have to fill out in order to transport goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. The time and cost of such bureaucracy has stopped producers of foods like shortbread and cheese from selling into Northern Ireland.
“These are products that people have enjoyed in Northern Ireland for decades that have disappeared from the shelves,” he said. “And that is feeding into a sense within parts of the unionist community that somehow the protocol sets them apart from the rest of the United Kingdom.
“Their identity, their belonging, is undermined and that is a legitimate concern within unionism.”
The UK government is asking the EU to agree to an exemption to customs checks for goods destined to be sold and consumed in Northern Ireland, and would not therefore enter the EU. It has accused Brussels of being inflexible while the EU vice-president, Maroš Šefčovič, said he had put forward solutions that would “substantially improve the way the protocol is implemented”.
The Democratic Unionist party (DUP) has been refusing to enter a new power-sharing administration with Sinn Féin following elections on 5 May, without significant changes to the protocol.
Burns argued that meant that it was the protocol, not the UK’s proposed legislation, that was the threat to the peace agreement.
“I would ask the question: how is the Good Friday agreement protected if the institutions born of the Good Friday agreement don’t exist?” Burns said. “What I have been trying, gently, delicately to explain, is it is actually the application of the protocol that is currently undermining the agreements, not the other way around.”
Asked whether it was the DUP boycott that was the threat to the power-sharing institutions at Stormont, rather than the protocol, Burns said: “The whole idea of the Belfast Good Friday agreement is that you have governance by cross-community consent, and whatever you think of the position that the largest unionist party has taken, the fact is that they have taken that position and they explained why.”
Burns said it would be a tragedy if the Good Friday institutions were to collapse because of failure to agree on different customs regimes for shortbread destined for Northern Ireland and for the Republic of Ireland.
He added: “I think historians will look back and judge us incredibly harshly if we allow that to happen.”
