In 1921 the British government partitioned Ireland under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act. It did so against the will of the Irish people, who had overwhelmingly voted for Irish sovereignty in the 1919 elections and then fought for their right to self-determination in the Irish War of Independence. Britain split the 32 Counties of Ireland into a 26 County ‘Free State’ Irish Republic in the south and a Six County statelet in the northeast. The statelet was to remain under British control as part of the United Kingdom (UK). The Six Counties has always been maintained through violence, division and segregation. Today Brexit deepens the divisions. RIA AIBHILIN reports.
In the first years of partition, Loyalist paramilitaries – backed by the British state – organised pogroms against the nationalist population in the Six Counties. Hundreds of Catholics were murdered and more than one fifth were made homeless. For years the Loyalists had openly imported arms and ammunition, unchallenged by Britain. The nationalist resistance organised in the Republican movement fought back against their oppression, facing internment, torture and assassination at the hands of the official and unofficial ‘security forces’.
The Loyalist paramilitaries act as an auxiliary to the British army to uphold British rule in Ireland by whatever means necessary. Occasionally they spiral beyond Britain’s control. Today the Loyalists are lashing out in opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol under the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement which they see as threatening their place in the United Kingdom.
The Protocol
Sections of the British ruling class are pushing the fantasy of an independent ‘global Britain’. These sections achieved their goal when Britain left the European Union (EU) on 1 January. Under the Protocol, the Six Counties was kept in the EU single market and customs union to ensure there was no hard border with the 26 Counties, which remains within the EU. This required customs checks on goods travelling between Britain and the north of Ireland to take place at the Irish Sea border – in reality at ports in the Six Counties.
The British government had the choice between maintaining the unity of the United Kingdom and keeping the entire UK aligned with EU trading regulations, or of separating customs arrangements for the Six Counties from the rest of Britain so Britain could detach itself from EU regulations. Boris Johnson and his government have effectively chosen the latter course, despite his proclamations now about doing ‘whatever it takes to protect the territorial integrity of the UK’.
Trade disruptions
As soon as Brexit came into force, queues of trucks transporting mainly food items were held up at the checkpoints in the Six Counties due to severe staff shortages and lack of infrastructure. The British government maintains that 20% of all EU external border checks are taking place at the Irish Sea border.
The required checks have caused problems for British supermarket chains operating in the Six Counties. On 17 July 2021, M&S, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Co-op and Iceland sent a letter to the British government and European Commission warning that costs associated with the Protocol could ‘force’ them to raise prices on some items and pull other items from shelves. These six supermarkets account for over 75% of the Six Counties’ grocery market.
On 7 July 2021 the north of Ireland’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, representing 1,200 businesses employing over 100,000 people, found that 50% of member businesses had experienced difficulty trading with Britain since Brexit. 24% of these reported experiencing major difficulty. In trading with the 26 Counties, 28% said they were impacted negatively while 10% reported benefits. Cross-border Irish trade has increased substantially since Brexit.
Figures from the Republic of Ireland’s Central Statistics Office show a 44% increase in the value of goods being imported from the Six Counties to the 26 Counties in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period last year – from €519m to €784m. Exports from the 26 Counties to the Six Counties were up by 22%. These figures will in part be due to the pandemic but are fundamentally an impact of Brexit. For both Irish entities it is easier to trade with each other than with the British mainland. Statistics on trade between Britain and the Six Counties are produced annually and won’t be available until later this year, but the value of goods exported from Britain to the 26 Counties fell by 65% (over €2.6bn) in January compared to a year earlier.
Another stalemate
After mounting pressure from British businesses operating in the Six Counties, on 21 July 2021 the British government published its paper ‘Northern Ireland Protocol: the way forward.’ The paper is a bid to blackmail the EU into rewriting key aspects of the Protocol, which less than two years ago Johnson bragged was ‘a fantastic deal’.
Britain’s demands include:
- Removing all custom checks on goods entering the Six Counties from Britain where the goods are intended to be consumed in the Six Counties.
- Introducing a ‘full dual regulatory system’ that would allow manufactured goods to circulate in the north of Ireland ‘if they meet either UK or EU rules, as determined by UK or EU regulators’ [p23]. As the Financial Times (21 July 2021) reported, this is Britain ‘effectively [asking] the EU to “subcontract” the border of its single market and customs union to the UK.’ Britain has refused to align its own animal and plant health regulations to EU regulations in a ‘Swiss-style’ deal which would avoid needing export health certificates on the import and export of ‘sanitary and phytosanitary’ goods.
- Removing Article 12, which gives EU institutions such as the European Court of Justice the right to enforce provisions agreed in the Protocol.
The EU rejected any possibility of renegotiating the Protocol. Britain continues to threaten to enact Article 16, which allows both the EU and Britain to suspend elements of the Protocol if they are causing serious disturbance. Doing so would escalate the dispute and further isolate Britain.
The increase in cross-border Irish trade, and decrease in Irish trade with Britain, is listed as the number one reason for this ‘new approach’. The paper, written by Brexit Secretary Lord Frost and Britain’s Minister to Northern Ireland Brandon Lewis, claims that the Protocol has ‘exacerbated the perceptions of separation and threat to identity within the unionist community.’ [p18]
Loyalists in revolt
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) was the lone parliamentary party in the Six Counties backing Brexit. It insisted that the pro-Leave majority across the United Kingdom outweighed the pro-Remain majority in the north of Ireland. So, Le Monde Diplomatique (June 2021) asks, ‘if the population of the UK could decide to leave the EU against the wishes of a Northern Ireland majority, why could they not also decide to impose special arrangements on Northern Ireland setting it apart from Great Britain?’ Unionists hadn’t thought through the implications of Brexit on the preservation of their union with Britain. Economically, a border now separates them from Britain. Politically, unionism is deeply divided.
Loyalist paramilitary groups have threatened sustained violence since January. In April they organised two weeks of terror and disorder that included torching vehicles, throwing petrol bombs and charging at police.
In May the ‘moderate’ Arlene Foster was forced out as leader of the DUP and First Minister in Stormont. She was replaced as Party leader by the reactionary creationist Edwin Poots, who lasted only 21 days in the post before being pushed out in a dispute over the implementation of the Irish Language Act.
For Poots, as for a section of Loyalists, the Irish Language Act is a distraction from the real enemy – the Protocol. And the Protocol, says Poots, can be better opposed from within Stormont. Still, Poots had to go and has been replaced as leader of the DUP by the former Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) politician and die-hard Brexiteer Jeffrey Donaldson. Donaldson became the fifth leader in the DUP’s 50-year history, and its third leader in five weeks.
Unionism divided
Frost and Lewis’ paper states that ‘the hard-won gains of the peace process have transformed the political and economic life of Northern Ireland since 1998’ [p11]. The current chaos within the DUP and Loyalism is a consequence of that.
Loyalists have always formed a privileged layer of the working class in the Six Counties, their basis the material privileges afforded to them by British imperialism at the expense of the nationalist population. In 1975 a Loyalist worker was six times more likely to be employed than a nationalist worker. Infant mortality was consistently higher for nationalist areas than for Loyalist areas. The UUP was in power from the inception of the state up until 1972.
The Irish liberation struggle in the 1970s and 1980s showed British imperialism that it needed to adapt in order to maintain its occupation of Ireland. Britain began to cultivate a new privileged stratum of predominantly home-owning and state sector employed workers from the nationalist population. This layer supported the ending of the armed struggle against British occupation and were in favour of the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998.
Since the Good Friday Agreement, the proportion of the population working in ‘professional’ sectors has quadrupled from 5.3% to 21.4%. Tens of thousands of these workers are from the nationalist population, many of them teachers and healthcare workers paid from Britain’s £10.2bn annual subsidy to the Six Counties. These sections of the nationalist population today form the electoral basis of Sinn Fein.
While the creation of this stratum was necessary for the continuation of the union, it has eroded the privileged position of the Loyalist working class. Nationalists now make up the majority of university placements, while 13 out of the 15 areas with the worst academic results in the Six Counties are in unionist areas. Brexit has merely made matters worse.
At the same time, a more privileged stratum of unionists depend on the European Union for their wages. Between 2015-16 and 2019-20 alone there were 70 new EU foreign direct investment projects into the Six Counties, creating 3,532 new jobs. A total of 10,000 jobs have been created or safeguarded through European capital investment since 2014. Almost 80% of ‘professionals’, both nationalist and unionist, voted to remain in the EU.
In the years following the Good Friday Agreement, the DUP outmanoeuvred the UUP to become the party of unionism. Brexit has torn the DUP apart. For the first time ever, Sinn Fein leads in election polls in both states of Ireland. The Loyalist Communities Council said on 23 July it had not ruled out ‘any resumption and escalation of protest action’ if the EU did not agree to renegotiating the Protocol. The EU will not renegotiate, and the British government is adamant it will make no concessions to the EU. That leaves the north of Ireland as a ticking time bomb.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 283, August/September 2021
