On Boris Johnson's Brexit deal, the Democratic Unionist Party is right. As they say, the deal does violate one of the fundamental principles of the Good Friday Agreement (which they call the Belfast Agreement). That agreement brought about power-sharing between the two rival communities in Northern Ireland. In place of simple majority rule, which meant that Protestant-supported parties would always be in power as they were the largest, the Catholic supporting parties were to be made equal participants. The basic mechanism was a veto, which each side could use against the other if a policy was proposed it didn't like. So henceforth, the government of Northern Ireland had to be by the consent of both communities.
Contrary to this principle, the deal agreed in the small hours of Thursday morning, October 17, replaced that safety lock with a requirement for a simple majority in the Stormont assembly, on any decision whether Northern Ireland should continue to participate in the exceptional border arrangements that the Johnson deal proposes.
At one point the DUP thought it would be given a veto, in accordance with the Good Friday Agreement. That would allow it to block the implementation of the deal if they did not like it. Given that the deal proposes a border in the Irish Sea, which they have always said was anathema, there was the very real prospect that the DUP could veto the whole thing. And they expected to be able to exercise the veto from the very beginning of the deal, that is to say, in the next few weeks, notwithstanding that Stormont is suspended. Under the package that was agreed with the EU, however, that was no longer the case.
So they have a valid grievance. But they are also guilty of the rankest hypocrisy. The DUP were previously known as the Paisleyites after their founder, the firebrand Protestant preacher and hate-monger the Rev Ian Paisley, who fought tooth and nail against the Good Friday Agreement. He defended "a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people" at Stormont, automatically confining Catholics to second-class citizenship. Politically oppressed, they were also economically downtrodden and discriminated against on an industrial scale. It was Paisley who whipped up the fury of the Loyalist working class against the Catholic-led Northern Ireland civil rights movement, alleging that it was a front for the IRA (which it was not). If any single person was to blame for the Troubles, it was he.
So when they bitterly complain that the deal Mr Johnson has just struck with the EU "drives a coach and horses through the Good Friday Agreement", we can spare our tears. The real reason they object to it has nothing to do with the Good Friday Agreement, but the fear that, over the coming decades, a customs border in the Irish Sea will see the economies of the north and south gradually converge to the point where unification becomes logically necessary.
Catholicism is still detested with a bigotry that most English people would find unbelievable. Unification is their ultimate dread, because in their eyes, the Republic of Ireland is still a Catholic creation, whereas Britain, at least in principle, is a Protestant entity. This may look absurd from the vantage point of secular London, but it contains the core idea of Northern Irish unionism. That is what they mean when they say they are holding on to their "British identity". It is a British Protestant identity they are clinging to, a British anti-Catholic identity.
But it means nothing to the mainland British themselves, for whom Protestantism (in this sense of anti-Catholicism) is nothing more than an historical anachronism, which is why Boris Johnson has felt free to dump them. He may say how much he "values the union" between the four parts of the United Kingdom, but these are empty words. In any event, British Government policy since the Good Friday Agreement has been that the issue of unification is one for the Irish people, north and south, to decide. The English have no say in it. That is the law. If the north decided to join the south, no amount of political blather from the Tory Party about "the value of the union" would make any difference.
Indeed, the Johnson deal's indifference to the DUP's interests is only matched by his indifference to Scotland. The deal places Scotland in a poor position economically, and the way it was treated during the negotiations – ignored would be a better word – can only have fuelled the fires of Scottish nationalism.
What the Johnson deal has driven a coach and horses through is the United Kingdom itself. And that damage has been done already, whatever the fate of the deal itself.
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