Why the Brexit-inspired violence in Northern Ireland is so difficult to resolve

It is something of a tribute to the Irish peace process that people can look at the television pictures of unrest in Northern Ireland and ask “why are they rioting?” Well within living memory, a few petrol bombs and bricks being lobbed around the streets of the province wouldn’t have even made the news: people would have wondered why things were so quiet.

The short answer to why they’re playing up in Ulster is “Brexit”. Brexit, as done, means a regulatory, economic border down the Irish Sea, with controls on imports on goods into Northern Ireland from Great Britain, ie from one part of the UK to another. This was in preference to putting the UK-EU border in the obvious place, along the border with Ireland, because it would have violated the letter of an international treaty, the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, and also the spirit of the peace process, which was to pretend the political border didn’t exist. The new UK-EU western border had to go somewhere, and the most convenient spot was Northern Ireland.

In practical terms, it has greatly inconvenienced businesses and consumers. All sorts of additional costs are involved in moving anything that’s been connected to a dead animal, or indeed a live one. Innocuous items such as a rose bush cultivated in Yorkshire and headed to a garden centre in Armagh are virtually banned because they contain potentially hazardous “third country” soil, as if it was straight from Chernobyl. No one minds, in political terms, if there are inconvenient and costly checks on British shellfish or rose bushes or chicken sandwiches moving from the UK to France or the Netherlands, because the borders at the ports don’t have 800 years of sectarian strife behind them.

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It is simply a matter of trade and money. The “border” between Great Britain and Northern Ireland is offensive to Unionists for obvious reasons. Notwithstanding devolution, they regard Northern Ireland as no less an integral part of the UK than, say, Somerset, a point echoed by traditional Tory Unionists such as Jacob Rees-Mogg. The UK Internal Market Act is supposed to suggest it still is. Plainly it is not. Hence the anger and the Molotov cocktails all round.

The anger is especially dangerous because there is no easy way of appeasing it. The British government has decided to relax some controls unilaterally, for which the EU is taking it to an international tribunal, and the riots and death threats to border-post staff in the port of Larne were issued in any case. The inconvenient fact is that the economic border that now exists at the Northern Irish ports was solemnly entered into by the UK and the European Union, through international treaty lodged at the UN, and its consequences were well foreseen and warned about long in advance. One of those siren voices, indeed, was Boris Johnson who resigned from Theresa May’s cabinet over this issue and told the Democratic Unionist Party at its 2018 conference of the danger in Belfast, he said, “the Titanic springs to mind, and now is the time to point out the iceberg ahead”. He said then, from the back benches, that any of the “backstops” being suggested to deal with the question of the Irish border were unacceptable, a Hobson’s choice of unthinkable options. He was prescient:

“If we wanted to do free trade deals, if we wanted to cut tariffs or vary our regulation, then we would have to leave Northern Ireland behind as an economic semi-colony of the EU, and we would be damaging the fabric of our Union.”

“With regulatory checks and even customs controls between GB and NI on top of those extra regulatory checks down the Irish Sea that are already envisaged in the Withdrawal Agreement.

“No British Conservative government could or should sign up to anything of the sort, and so our answer at the omens is rather desperately to make sure the whole UK stays in the backstop, with the EU having the power to decide whether or not we can leave, and why should they?”

A year on, Johnson has fessed up to a border down the Irish Sea, a key ingredient of the “oven ready” dish he placed before the British people at the 2019 general election.

The economic border is real, in legal and political terms. The EU could certainly be less officious in policing it, and accept that the UK is not some festering mass of genetically modified creatures being raised under intense cruelty and unsafe sanitary conditions. But sooner or later, UK (or rather GB) rules will diverge, and we might well be importing just such crops and foodstuffs from the US. In which case the EU officials in Larne are rightly there to protect the integrity of their single market. Sooner or later the economic border issue won’t be a petty act of post-Brexit spite but necessary on any reasonable understanding of (EU) sovereignty. The GB-NI border, then, cannot be just ignored or wished away.

The rioters, apparently egged on by paramilitary elements, know this, and are doing what they have traditionally done in Northern Ireland, which is to change the facts on the ground. Through intimidation and, before long, small scale acts of sabotage and terrorism they will try to make the GB-NI border unworkable. People are already getting hurt and put into a state of fear.

They, presumably, would seek to move the economic border back over to the political border with Ireland, and dare the EU to try and introduce checks there – which would rapidly attract the parallel resistance of dissident Republicans, if not the rebirth of the IRA.

Maybe they, and some British ministers, calculate that a return of the Troubles would be so momentous that the IRA and Sinn Fein wouldn’t permit it, and would just put up with the vets looking over the sheep on the move and checking the milk tankers in return for a continuing peace.

After more than two decades of calm, it seems hard to think that these islands will be back to car bombs, burnt out shops, pub massacres, assassinations, drug running, bank raids, knee cappings, kidnappings, troops on the streets, helicopter patrols and all the rest of the paraphernalia of sectarian war. Are phyto-sanitary controls between Ireland and Northern Ireland really worth murdering men, women and children for?