With the Conservative’s landslide election victory, the UK is leaving the EU on January 31 - something that had perhaps not been fully believed until now.
Northern Ireland is getting a sea border and there is nothing the DUP can do at Westminster to prevent it. The talks on a trade deal that will shortly commence can partially mitigate it, after what will doubtless be an extended transition period. Northern Ireland’s voice can be heard, hopefully from Stormont as well as from the business community. However, the negotiation process puts the DUP in an even more awkward position. The Irish government will be crucial in arguing for mitigation measures, some of which will be in its interests, by persuading other EU members to accept the potential leaks in the EU’s frontier. So unionists will have to appeal to Dublin to minimise the trade barrier within the UK. They are likely to find a willing ear - but only if they can resist shouting in it.
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Plans being drawn up for lorry parks and inspection facilities in Stranraer and Liverpool appear to contradict prime minister Boris Johnson’s insistence there will be no checks on intra-UK trade.
Johnson has a challenging relationship with the truth and some of his assertions on a sea border simply cannot be correct. But he has never promised frictionless trade from east to west, only from west to east. Facilities are being planned in Britain partly because that is the practical place to check goods leaving Britain, in case they have to be impounded or sent back.
The implication is that west to east friction can be judged by whatever is planned for Belfast, Larne and Warrenpoint. In that respect, we will have two sea borders - and what if Scotland likes the look of our mitigated deal and wants a version of its own, as the SNP has previously suggested? One of our sea borders could end up on England’s land border.
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The headline story of the election in Northern Ireland is the defeat of DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds by Sinn Féin’s John Finucane. The most significant development is the continuation of the Alliance surge, despite the blunt choice presented to voters under first-past-the-post. The centrist bloc is now unquestionably a proper third player (the term ‘third force’ is unfortunately taken) in a political system set up for two blocs. This has major implications for the restoration of Stormont. How can it be legitimate to have a veto mechanism, the petition of concern, based solely on unionist and nationalist votes? Is it even still legitimate to have first ministers who must be only unionist and nationalist?
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Arlene Foster has told Radio Ulster it would have made no difference if she had stood down as first minister over the RHI scandal, as Sinn Féin was determined to bring down Stormont anyway.
Even if this is true of Sinn Féin, which is far from clear-cut, the DUP leader could have stalled the collapse using the six-week step-aside procedure, a trick Peter Robinson used to manage previous crises. She could also have avoided giving Sinn Féin the perfect excuse for walking out, by not making a first ministerial statement on RHI without the required permission of her republican partners and despite their express warning.
If Stormont is about to be restored, it would be useful to recall the details of how it fell.
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As unique Brexit arrangement looms for Northern Ireland, fighting has resumed between Sinn Féin and the SDLP over who invented the concept of ‘special status’.
Sinn Féin is claiming ownership of the idea because it produced a “plan for special status” in February 2017, three months before the SDLP. However, that was four months after the SDLP first raised it in the assembly, where it was dismissed by Sinn Féin because “people did not vote for special status, they voted to remain in the European Union.”
Unionists can only wonder how much better-placed they would be if they had owned the concept from outset. After all, some form of special status was always inevitable.
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Two months ago, Belfast City Council backed a People Before Profit motion declaring a “climate emergency”.
This week, the Belfast Harbour Estate, which has DUP, UUP and Sinn Féin councillors on its board, applied to build a new road in Titanic Quarter, for approval by the council’s planning committee. The four-lane link is intended to deal with occasional rush-hour congestion on on an otherwise empty parallel road served by the Glider. It will destroy Belfast’s best segregated cycle route, has no proper cycleway of its own and pays no regard to the Titanic Quarter plan for a tree-lined street grid, let alone for sustainable living and working.
There have recently been calls for Belfast’s councillors to stop grandstanding over things they cannot control. First, they would need to stop grandstanding over things they can control.
