Brexit, funeral and Corona: peace in Northern Ireland is in acute danger

Friday, April 9th, 2021

Brexit, funeral and Corona
The peace in Northern Ireland is in grave danger

By Pauline Stahl, Dublin

The Northern Ireland Protocol should not only regulate traffic and trade between Great Britain and Ireland after Brexit. It should also prevent old conflicts from flaring up again on the island. It’s no surprise that this didn’t work.

Terrifyingly familiar scenes have played out in Belfast and Derry over the past few nights. Gasoline attacks, road blockades, attacks on police officers – all of these are reminiscent of conflicts from the past forty years ago. Uncertainties from both Brexit and the Corona policy are causing the violence in the north of the island to boil again.

Throughout the past week, nationalist and loyalist youth clashed in western Belfast. There were repeated attacks on the police and riots.

A bus was hijacked and set on fire on Wednesday evening. A press photographer was attacked. Some of the violent offenders are not older than twelve years. “It is particularly worrying that children are being used to orchestrate this violence,” said Irish Minister for European Affairs Thomas Byrne.

“It is the responsibility of all political and community decision-makers to calm the situation down before anyone is seriously injured or killed,” said Byrne. Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney also condemned the violence. He told RTÉ that the images of violence on the streets were “shocking” and those that he thought would go down in history.

Because the photos that are currently appearing in the Irish and British newspapers could also be a look back at the years 1968 to 1998 in Northern Ireland. For thirty years there was a civil war-like identity and power struggle on the island between Protestants who want to remain part of the United Kingdom as unionists or loyalists, and Catholics who campaign for a unified Ireland as republicans or nationalists.

The trigger was a funeral march

The conflict took the lives of around 3,000 people and did not end until the end of the 1990s with the Good Friday Agreement. But now it becomes clear how fragile this agreement actually is.

In the past few weeks and months there have been repeated reports from Northern Ireland about threats by paramilitaries against politicians and journalists. The trigger for the outbreak of violence is, on the one hand, the way the Northern Irish police dealt with violations of the corona measures by the Sinn Féin party, which functioned as the political arm of the terrorist organization IRA during the unrest and is now part of the Northern Irish all-party government. At the funeral of former IRA member Bobby Storey in June 2020, 24 members of the party, including Vice Prime Minister Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin, violated the then applicable Covid-19 regulations. However, the prosecution recently decided not to prosecute the politicians.

This was justified by the head of the prosecution, Stephen Herron, with the fact that there was no reasonable prospect of a conviction, as each of the people present could point out a lack of clarity regarding contradicting and constantly changing Covid regulations that are currently in place the funeral were in effect. In addition, there was an agreement with the police in the run-up to the event.

At least the Protestant part of the population feels mocked by these approaches and statements and not taken seriously. Then there is the probably more serious destabilizer of peace in Northern Ireland: Brexit. The UK-Ireland relationship was one of the main issues that needed to be resolved before the UK could leave the EU.

Brexit is disturbing the calm in the north

For a long time it looked as if Brexit would lead to a “hard limit”. Then an almost 500 kilometer long external EU border would have been created between the EU member Ireland and the British Northern Ireland. That would not only have complicated trade and traffic, but above all would have greatly increased the risk of returning tensions and unrest on the island of Ireland. Because since the Good Friday Agreement, the once secured border on the Irish island has barely been felt in people’s lives.

In order to keep the potential for conflict as small as possible, a compromise was finally found. The Northern Ireland Protocol, which is now in force, is intended to regulate the smooth exchange of goods between the countries and enable an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

But it didn’t go as smoothly as planned. Shortly after Brexit in early January, there were reports of empty supermarket shelves in Northern Ireland. A few weeks later, at the end of January, the EU Commission threatened to control the export of vaccines at the EU’s external border.

Shortly afterwards, the first threats against Irish politicians and journalists came – painted with graffiti on walls in Belfast. Now the situation is getting worse and reminds more and more of the Northern Ireland conflict. This is exactly what had been feared before Brexit and should actually be avoided by the Northern Ireland Protocol, even if Brexit supporters such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had always denied this danger.

Unstable peace

With a strong police presence, water cannons and police dogs, an attempt is now being made to suppress the nocturnal unrest. On Thursday evening, Johnson and Irish Prime Minister Michaél Martin also discussed the “worrying developments”.

Subsequently, the Irish government issued a statement saying that both politicians “called for calm” and stressed that violence was unacceptable. “The way forward leads through dialogue and work in the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement,” said the joint statement.

The agreement, however, apparently did not resolve the Northern Ireland conflict, it only helped to find a solution that both sides can reasonably live with. Current developments show how unstable peace is. The Northern Irish regional parliament was called back early from the Easter break to discuss how to deal with the street battles.