Border skirmishes
Who wanted the NI protocol?
UP UNTIL THE BREXIT VOTE, the European Union operated an office on Belfast’s Dublin Road. After the UK voted to leave in 2016, the premises closed down, although Brussels and their Irish allies kept pressing to establish a new mission. In 2020, the British Government rebuffed those demands, which is just as well given the original location of the EU’s Belfast outpost. No player has done more to recklessly, but indifferently, endanger the political health of Northern Ireland than the European Commission.
The old EU building sat between the Donegall Pass, a redoubt of the Ulster Volunteer Force, and, Sandy Row, an Ulster Defence Association stronghold. The EU’s behaviour since Brexit would not have earned them much popularity if they were still there. Whatever local Europhiles such as the Alliance Party might claim, all shades of unionism are firmly opposed to the protocol. They regard it as de-coupling Northern Ireland economically from the rest of the UK. They see it as taking them down another Dublin Road, only this time in the terminal direction of a 32-county Irish Republic.
At the Ulster Unionists’ annual conference in Belfast last month, their new leader Doug Beattie struck an insistently liberal pose. Party members were treated to traditional Irish dancing and an LGBT group, Cara Friend, had a stall on the Conference fringe of the gathering.
