Katy Hayward, Professor of Political Sociology at QUB, had a good piece on the Protocol and the supposed controversy around it in the IT last week. She noted:
The prime minister, the foreign secretary, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and the attorney general all claim that the protocol is "fundamentally undermining" the Belfast Agreement. In so doing, they are not prioritising peace over the protocol – they are doing quite the opposite. They are giving succour to those who want to destroy the agreement in principle, and they are rewarding and reinforcing behaviour which undermines it in practice.
It is not possible for the British government to condemn loyalist violence and the DUP's obstruction of Strand 1 and 2 institutions on the one hand while at the same time depending on such unlawful actions as the legal justification of its chosen strategy on the protocol.
One could go further and note the effectiveness disengagement by the British government across the last decade from various aspects of the Agreement, which sent its own message to those Hayward references above.
She notes that some on the anti-Protocol side have argued that there were some threat to peace about a hard border but she notes:
Such threats were identified, but they were not the only reason for avoiding a hard border. I conducted surveys and focus groups in the central Border region throughout the Brexit withdrawal process. It was not a potential return of violence that people feared most, but the threat to the peace. The two are not one and the same. Peace can be threatened not only by violence but by eroding the conditions which foster it.
Brexit risked doing so because it fundamentally changes the means and norms of co-operation across all three strands of the agreement. The protocol does not threaten peace in the same way. Blaming the protocol for damage to the 1998 agreement is like blaming the referee for an own goal.
And again one could go further. The complaint that the Protocol is illegitimate due to the supposed lack of cross community consensus is in no way persuasive given that Brexit was clearly lacking cross community consensus. And yet it happened, and here we all are. And she notes a further angle, that the threats around the Protocol are immeasurably greater than those around Brexit or the border (the land border).
Such acts of aggression are not motivated by the protocol. They are motivated by a refusal to let Northern Ireland prosper and grow
In the meantime, what about the genuine dangers to the Belfast Agreement? Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney is not the only one who has been targeted by recent acts of loyalist intimidation. The leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, independent female journalists, loyalist women calling for a functioning Assembly, human rights lawyers, female candidates canvassing in unionist areas... All have been targets. Such acts of aggression are not motivated by the protocol. They are motivated by a refusal to let Northern Ireland prosper and grow.
Efforts to silence others by force or fear are sinister and anti-democratic, no matter what form they take or by whom. Equally dangerous is the amplification of those who have nothing to offer but force and fear.
It's an abysmal situation and one where the one actor in the situation which needs to engage with Dublin is absent without interest. Difficult not to be pessimistic at the way things are going now.
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