(Belfast) Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar expressed his hope on Thursday that negotiations will succeed between London and Brussels on post-Brexit controls in Northern Ireland, to allow the unblocking of political paralysis in the British province.
For almost a year, the Unionists of the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party), who see controls on goods from Great Britain as a threat to the place of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, boycott local institutions.
They require at least profound modifications to the Northern Irish protocol, the treaty which introduces these controls.
“I hope that it will be possible to reach an agreement on the protocol […] which I hope becomes more widely acceptable here to then allow the institutions to be restored,” said the head of the Irish government after meeting the main Northern Irish parties in Belfast.
The application of the text was “too strict and too rigid”, he estimated, acknowledging again that “mistakes” had been made. But “we can work together to make the necessary changes”, so that only a “very small number” of controls on the goods remain.
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson meanwhile recalled that a return of local institutions was conditional on “a protocol outcome that unionists can support”.
After meeting the Irish leader, he felt that he now had a “better understanding of the difficulties that the protocol creates in Northern Ireland”.
Tempering the latest advances on technical points which, combined with a change of tone between the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU), suggest a positive outcome, the unionist official estimated that an agreement “is still a long way off “.
“There remain major political issues in these negotiations which have not been addressed,” he told the BBC on Thursday morning.
Risk of new elections
After what she called a “constructive” meeting with Leo Varadkar, Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald expressed her “absolute determination” to get local institutions back on track.
As for the negotiations on the protocol, she considered that an “agreement is possible”. “The window we have now must be grasped with both hands,” she said.
The visit of the Irish Prime Minister comes the day after that of the British Minister for Foreign Affairs, James Cleverly.
On Monday, London and Brussels reached progress on the issue of EU access to UK IT systems.
Negotiated at the same time as the Brexit treaty, the Northern Irish protocol effectively keeps Northern Ireland, which has the only British land border with the EU, in the single European market.
The text aims both to preserve the 1998 peace agreement, which ended three decades of bloody conflict, by avoiding the return of a hard border, and to protect the integrity of the single European market.
After speaking with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday, the Irish Prime Minister welcomed the “positive engagement” in the talks between London and Brussels.
British opposition leader Keir Starmer also visited the British province, and insisted that a “negotiated solution” was the only way out.
This succession of displacements comes at the approach of the deadline set for January 19 for the restart of the Northern Irish institutions, without which new elections risk being called.