Tensions around the Brexit withdrawal agreement in the north of Ireland have escalated. Port staff were withdrawn from work for one week from 2 February after a rise in terror threats from Loyalist paramilitaries who labelled the staff as legitimate targets. The staff are administering customs checks as part of post-Brexit arrangements under the Northern Ireland protocol. The protocol has angered a stratum of Unionists who see it as undermining the Statelet’s alliance with Britain, and therefore weakening their position.
The protocol includes stipulation that the north of Ireland will remain in the EU’s single market for an unspecified amount of time. To avoid breaking the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA), and trying to avoid enflaming calls for Irish reunification, Britain and the EU agreed that customs checks would take place along the Irish sea to get around having a ‘hard border’ along the partition lines. But for hardline Unionists, this economic partitioning undermines their ideological union with Britain. This most reactionary layer organise themselves through the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
For the DUP, ’embracing the xenophobic racism of the Leave campaign required no rightward shift – their supremacist ideology was already in perfect harmony with the politics of Brexit’ (see Loyalism is Racism – and these racists have guns, FRFI 252). But Brexit has deepened splits in Unionism, with a layer of Unionists now seeing their best interests being secured through EU membership.
According to data from the Northern Ireland Assembly, 63% of people in the north of Ireland who consider themselves British voted to leave the EU, compared to just 13% of those who consider themselves Irish. Almost 80% of ‘professionals’, both Nationalist and Unionist, voted to remain.
Over €1.5bn in EU ‘peace-grants’ has been pumped into the north of Ireland between 1994 and 2020, including €270m rolled out between 2014 and 2020. This funding has created or safeguarded 10,000 jobs, particularly in business development and tourism, seen over 100,000 people gaining qualifications through training programmes and assisted thousands of small to medium enterprises.
As well as buying the support of middle-class Protestants, the funds have been key to developing and maintaining a Catholic middle-class and tying them to the so-called peace process. Since the GFA, the deep inequalities between Nationalists and Unionists in housing and employment have levelled out. 49.49% of university places are now occupied by Catholics while Protestants make up only 31.2%. The Catholic middle-class see themselves benefitting from EU membership. This has resulted in a surge in support for a reunited Ireland. The negative impacts of Brexit already on show – backlogs of cargo from being held up at checkpoints and empty supermarket shelves – will only solidify their support for the EU.
For the Unionists organised through the DUP and even further to the right of it, these impacts prove why the protocol has to be opposed. On 2 February the DUP issued a call to ‘free’ the north of Ireland from the Brexit withdrawal agreement. They have also launched an e-petition to trigger Article 16 – an emergency clause that allows the suspension of the protocol if the EU or Britain thinks there are significant ‘economic, societal or environmental difficulties’ associated with it. The DUP were emboldened to make this move after the EU triggered Article 16 on 30 January, before quickly retracting it, in a row with Britain over vaccine accessibility.
Unionists then began issuing threats against port staff. On 2 March Britain announced its intent to unilaterally extend the three-month grace period given by the EU on certain food goods moving from Britain to the north of Ireland by six months. In response, the EU has launched legal action which could see Britain being brought in front of the European Court of Justice. Britain must maintain its relationship with Unionism in order to sustain its occupation of the Six Counties. Back in September, again following threats from Loyalist paramilitary groups, Boris Johnson announced intentions to break international law and change the terms agreed with the EU on the protocol. This was scrapped after backlash from across the political spectrum, threats from the US on the future of a trade deal with Britain and the EU putting Britain on a formal notice.
On 3 March the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC), a coalition founded in 2015 encompassing terrorist paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Volunteer Force, Ulster Defence Association and Red Hand Commando, renounced the GFA until the protocol is amended to allow for unfettered movement of goods and people across the United Kingdom. While the centrist Alliance Party insists the breaking of the GFA is just a symbolic gesture from the Loyalists, LCC’s chairman David Campbell announced Loyalists would ‘fight physically’ to uphold ‘freedoms’.
As we argued at the time of the referendum, the nationalist working class had nothing to gain from voting either leave or remain. This remains true today. The majority of the top ten most deprived areas in the Six Counties are predominantly nationalist areas. Racist attacks and PSNI discrimination against the nationalist population continue. 100 years after British imperialism partitioned Ireland, polls indicate that a majority of people in the north support a 32-county Ireland. The British ruling class will never voluntarily grant such a demand.
Ria Aibhilin
