The Northern Ireland protocol, the open wound between London and Brussels

MADRID/BRUSSELS, 21 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Northern Ireland protocol was incorporated into the divorce settlements between the UK and the European Union as a key safeguard to avoid one of the main fears of Brexit: the imposition of a 'hard border' in Ulster. The tool, however, has ended up becoming the great stumbling block of some mandatory texts for all parties.

Contrary to what happened in the United Kingdom as a whole, the Northern Irish people said 'no' to Brexit in the June 2016 referendum. Once they accepted that they had to abide by what they did not want, fears turned to practical issues, such as the situation in which the only land border of the United Kingdom with an EU member country would be.

On the one hand, the parties wanted to protect the Good Friday Agreements that laid the foundations for peace in Ulster in 1998, guaranteeing exchanges between communities on the island of Ireland with some formula, and on the other, they were also obliged to guarantee the integrity of the single European market, from which the United Kingdom wanted to break away.

This is how the so-called Protocol was born, attached to the Brexit agreements and in which the geographical and historical specificities of Northern Ireland are taken into account. The territory would continue to be linked to a battery of EU regulations ranging from fiscal issues to phytosanitary standards, including marketing issues.

The consideration agreed at the time by the United Kingdom and the European Union was the establishment of a system of controls in the ports of Northern Ireland, in such a way that merchandise from Great Britain -England, Wales and Scotland- could not end up entering community territory as they had been doing before Brexit.

The protocol, applicable from January 1, 2021, also included a mechanism for the Northern Irish Assembly to have the last word when it comes to continuing to apply EU legislation in the long term. The regional deputies had to pronounce themselves after four years –in principle in December 2024, according to the initial plan-.

As the texts stated, the commitment to Northern Ireland implied certain collateral effects in commercial relations with the rest of the United Kingdom, something that the unionists questioned to the extent that they saw in the Protocol an economic and political distancing towards London, with all that that entails.

This critical sector, with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) at its head, has come to block the configuration of government in Northern Ireland, which has lacked a fully functioning government since the May 2022 elections, in which for the first time Republican Sinn Féin, defender of Irish reunification, prevailed.

The unionists were echoed by the British elite who had most openly advocated breaking ties with the EU at all costs, led by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. With him in Downing Street, the Government put on the table a law to unilaterally challenge the signed agreements, despite the fact that technically they were already part of International Law for all purposes.

The European Union ruled out from the outset reopening the melon of the Protocol, alleging that it had already been agreed and that, therefore, it was only possible to comply with the provisions included in it.

The European Commission maintains up to five disciplinary proceedings against the United Kingdom for non-compliance with the provisions of a protocol that has the status of an international Treaty and that could end up before the Court of Justice of the EU, although Brussels has slowed down this judicial process in order to facilitate the agreement.

The tension became palpable in the open talks between London and Brussels, although the British position has been turning from the initial harshness of the Johnson period towards the greater willingness to agree that the team of the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has seemed to show. , as the European side has publicly acknowledged.

In January of this year, in fact, the two parties closed an agreement to exchange data related to commercial issues that already made a rapprochement clear. Also in recent weeks there have been contacts -- face-to-face and online -- and good words, in anticipation of a possible agreement.

If London and Brussels finally manage these days to settle their differences on how to enforce the protocol, this could also pave the way for an agreement on another pending issue since Brexit; the scope of the relationship that the EU wants with Gibraltar.

Although Brussels and London have wanted to separate both processes and defend that their negotiations take different paths, the truth is that in practice the loss of confidence of Europeans in the British Government has made it difficult for this protocol to make tangible progress as well.

With the normalization of relations between Brussels and the new government of Sunak, the talks on Gibraltar have also become more dynamic and, although an agreement is still pending, the confidence regained between negotiators is one less obstacle